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+Project Gutenberg's Expositions of Holy Scripture, by Alexander Maclaren
+#2 in our series by Alexander Maclaren
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+Title: Expositions of Holy Scripture
+       St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII
+
+Author: Alexander Maclaren
+
+Release Date: January, 2005 [EBook #7351]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on April 19, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Anne Folland, Charles Franks and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE
+
+ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D., Litt. D.
+
+
+ST. MATTHEW
+
+_Chaps. IX to XXVIII_
+
+
+
+
+EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE
+
+ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D., Litt. D.
+
+
+ST. MATTHEW
+
+_Chaps. IX to XVII_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHRIST'S ENCOURAGEMENTS (Matt. ix. 2)
+
+SOUL-HEALING FIRST: BODY-HEALING SECOND (Matt. ix. 6)
+
+THE CALL OF MATTHEW (Matt. ix. 9-17)
+
+THE TOUCH OF FAITH AND THE TOUCH OF CHRIST (Matt. ix. 18-31)
+
+A CHRISTLIKE JUDGMENT OF MEN (MATT. ix. 36)
+
+THE OBSCURE APOSTLES (Matt. x. 5)
+
+CHRIST'S CHARGE TO HIS HERALDS (Matt. x. 5-16)
+
+THE WIDENED MISSION, ITS PERILS AND DEFENCES (Matt. x. 16-31)
+
+LIKE TEACHER, LIKE SCHOLAR (Matt x. 24, 25)
+
+THE KING'S CHARGE TO HIS AMBASSADORS (Matt. x. 32-42)
+
+A LIFE LOST AND FOUND (Matt. x. 39)
+
+THE GREATEST IN THE KINGDOM, AND THEIR REWARD (Matt. x. 41, 42)
+
+JOHN'S DOUBTS OF JESUS, AND JESUS' PRAISE OF JOHN  (Matt. xi. 2-15)
+
+THE FRIEND OF PUBLICANS AND SINNERS (Matt. xi. 19)
+
+SODOM, CAPERNAUM, MANCHESTER (Matt. xi. 20)
+
+CHRIST'S STRANGE THANKSGIVING (Matt. xi. 25)
+
+THE REST GIVER (Matt. xi. 28, 29)
+
+THE PHARISEES' SABBATH AND CHRIST'S (Matt. xii. 1-14)
+
+AN ATTEMPT TO ACCOUNT FOR JESUS (Matt. xii. 24)
+
+'MAKE THE TREE GOOD' (Matt. xii. 33)
+
+'A GREATER THAN JONAS' (Matt. xii. 41)
+
+'A GREATER THAN SOLOMON' (Matt. xii. 42)
+
+FOUR SOWINGS AND ONE RIPENING (Matt. xiii. 1-9)
+
+EARS AND NO EARS (Matt. xiii. 9)
+
+'TO HIM THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN' (Matt. xiii. 12)
+
+SEEING AND BLIND (Matt. xiii. 13)
+
+MINGLED IN GROWTH, SEPARATED IN MATURITY (Matt. xiii. 24-30)
+
+LEAVEN (Matt. xiii. 33)
+
+TREASURE AND PEARL (Matt. xiii. 44-46)
+
+THE MARTYRDOM OF JOHN (Matt. xiv. 1-12)
+
+THE GRAVE OF THE DEAD JOHN AND THE GRAVE OF THE LIVING JESUS (Matt.
+xiv. 12; xxviii. 8)
+
+THE FOOD OF THE WORLD (Matt. xiv. 19, 20)
+
+THE KING'S HIGHWAY (Matt. xiv. 22-36)
+
+PETER ON THE WAVES (Matt. xiv. 28)
+
+THB CRUMBS AND THE BREAD (Matt. xv. 21-31)
+
+THE DIVINE CHRIST CONFESSED, THE SUFFERING CHRIST DENIED (Matt. xvi.
+13-28)
+
+CHRIST FORESEEING THE CROSS (Matt. xvi. 21)
+
+THE KING IN HIS BEAUTY (Matt. xvii, 1-13)
+
+THE SECRET OF POWER. (Matt. xvii. 19, 20)
+
+THE COIN IN THE FISH'S MOUTH (Matt. xvii. 25, 26)
+
+
+
+
+CHRIST'S ENCOURAGEMENTS
+
+
+    'Son, be of good cheer.'--MATT. ix. 2.
+
+This word of encouragement, which exhorts to both cheerfulness and
+courage, is often upon Christ's lips. It is only once employed in
+the Gospels by any other than He. If we throw together the various
+instances in which He thus speaks, we may get a somewhat striking
+view of the hindrances to such a temper of bold, buoyant cheerfulness
+which the world presents, and of the means for securing it which
+Christ provides.
+
+But before I consider these individually, let me point you to this
+thought, that such a disposition, facing the inevitable sorrows,
+evils, and toilsome tasks of life with glad and courageous buoyancy,
+is a Christian duty, and is a temper not merely to be longed for,
+but consciously and definitely to be striven after.
+
+We have a great deal more in our power, in the regulation of moods and
+tempers and dispositions, than we often are willing to acknowledge to
+ourselves. Our 'low' times--when we fret and are dull, and all things
+seem wrapped in gloom, and we are ready to sit down and bewail ourselves,
+like Job on his dunghill--are often quite as much the results of our
+own imperfect Christianity as the response of our feelings to external
+circumstances. It is by no means an unnecessary reminder for us, who
+have heavy tasks set us, which often seem too heavy, and are surrounded,
+as we all are, with crowding temptations to be bitter and melancholy
+and sad, that Christ commands us to be, and therefore we ought to be,
+'of good cheer.'
+
+Another observation may be made as preliminary, and that is that
+Jesus Christ never tells people to cheer up without giving them
+reason to do so. We shall see presently that in all cases where the
+words occur they are immediately followed by words or deeds of His
+which hold forth something on which, if the hearer's faith lay hold,
+darkness and gloom will fly like morning mists before the rising
+sun. The world comes to us and says, in the midst of our sorrows and
+our difficulties, 'Be of good cheer,' and says it in vain, and
+generally only rubs salt into the sore by saying it. Jesus Christ
+never thus vainly preaches the duty of encouraging ourselves without
+giving us ample reasons for the cheerfulness which He enjoins.
+
+With these two remarks to begin with--that we ought to make it a
+part of our Christian discipline of ourselves to seek to cultivate a
+continuous and equable temperament of calm, courageous good cheer;
+and that Jesus Christ never commands such a temper without showing
+cause for our obedience--let us turn for a few moments to the
+various instances in which this expression falls from His lips.
+
+I. Now the first of them is this of my text, and from it we learn
+this truth, that Christ's first contribution to our temper of
+equable, courageous cheerfulness is the assurance that all our sins
+are forgiven.
+
+'Son, be of good cheer,' said He to that poor palsied sufferer lying
+there upon the little light bed in front of Him. He had been brought
+to Christ to be cured of his palsy. Our Lord seems to offer him a
+very irrelevant blessing when, instead of the healing of his limbs,
+He offers him the forgiveness of his sins. That was possibly not
+what he wanted most, certainly it was not what the friends who had
+brought him wanted for him, but Jesus knew better than they what the
+man suffered most from and most needed to have cured. They would
+have said 'Palsy.' He said, 'Yes! but palsy that comes from sin.'
+For, no doubt, the sick man's disease was 'a sin of flesh avenged in
+kind,' and so Christ went to the fountain-head when He said, 'Thy
+sins be forgiven thee.' He therein implied, not only that the man
+was longing for something more than his four kindly but ignorant
+bearers there knew, but also that the root of his disease was
+extirpated when his sins were forgiven.
+
+And so, in like manner, 'thus conscience doth make cowards of us
+all.' There is nothing that so drapes a soul with darkness as either
+the consciousness of unforgiven sin or the want of consciousness of
+forgiven sin. There may be plenty of superficial cheerfulness. I
+know that; and I know what the bitter wise man called it, 'the
+crackling of thorns under the pot,' which, the more they crackle,
+the faster they turn into powdery ash and lose all their warmth. For
+stable, deep, lifelong, reliable courage and cheerfulness, there
+must be thorough work made with the black spot in the heart, and the
+black lines in the history. And unless our comforters can come to us
+and say, 'Thy sins be forgiven thee,' they are only chattering
+nonsense, and singing songs to a heavy heart which will make an
+effervescence 'like vinegar on nitre,' when they say to us, 'Be of
+good cheer.' How can I be glad if there lie coiled in my heart that
+consciousness of alienation and disorder in my relations to God,
+which all men carry with them, though they overlay it and try to
+forget it? There is no basis for a peaceful gladness worthy of a man
+except that which digs deep down into the very secrets of the heart,
+and lays the first course of the building in the consciousness of
+pardoned sin. 'Son, be of good cheer!' Lift up thy head. Face
+smaller evils without discomposure, and with quietly throbbing
+pulses, for the fountain of possible terrors and calamities is
+stanched and stayed with, 'Thy sins are forgiven thee.'
+
+Side by side with this first instance, illustrating the same general
+thought, though from a somewhat different point of view, I may put
+another of the instances in which the same phrase was soothingly on our
+Lord's lips. 'Daughter,' said He to the poor woman with the issue of
+blood, 'be of good cheer. Thy faith hath saved thee.' The consciousness
+of a living union with God through Christ by faith, which results in
+the present possession of a real, though it may be a partial, salvation,
+is indispensable to the temper of equable cheerfulness of which I have
+been speaking. Apart from that consciousness, you may have plenty of
+excitement, but no lasting calm. The contrast between the drugged and
+effervescent potion which the world gives as a cup of gladness, and the
+pure tonic which Jesus Christ administers for the same purpose, is
+infinite. He says to us, 'I forgive thy sins; by thy faith I save thee;
+go in peace.' Then the burdened heart is freed from its oppression, and
+the downcast face is lifted up, and all things around change, as when
+the sunshine comes out on the wintry landscape, and the very snow
+sparkles into diamonds. So much, then, for the first of the instances
+of the use of this phrase.
+
+II. We now take a second. Jesus Christ ministers to us cheerful
+courage because He manifests Himself to us as a Companion in the
+storm (Matt. xiv. 27).
+
+The narrative is very familiar to us, so that I need not enlarge
+upon it. You remember the scene--our Lord alone on the mountain in
+prayer, the darkness coming down upon the little boat, the storm
+rising as the darkness fell, the wind howling down the gorges of the
+mountains round the landlocked lake, the crew 'toiling in rowing,
+for the wind was contrary.' And then, all at once, out of the
+mysterious obscurity beneath the shadow of the hills, Something is
+seen moving, and it comes nearer; and the waves become solid beneath
+that light and noiseless foot, as steadily nearer He comes. Jesus
+Christ uses the billows as the pavement over which He approaches His
+servants, and the storms which beat on us are His occasion for
+drawing very near. Then they think Him a spirit, and cry out with
+voices that were heard amidst the howling of the tempest, and struck
+upon the ear of whomsoever told the Evangelist the story. They cry
+out with a shriek of terror--because Jesus Christ is coming to them
+in so strange a fashion! Have _we_ never shrieked and groaned,
+and passionately wept aloud for the same reason; and mistaken the
+Lord of love and consolation for some grisly spectre? When He comes
+it is with the old word on His lips, 'Be of good cheer.'
+
+'Tell us not to be frightened when we see something stalking across
+the waves in the darkness!' 'It is I'; surely that is enough. The
+Companion in the storm is the Calmer of the terror. He who recognises
+Jesus Christ as drawing near to his heart over wild billows may well
+'be of good cheer,' since the storm but brings his truest treasure
+to him.
+
+  'Well roars the storm to those who hear
+   A deeper Voice across the storm.'
+
+And He who, with unwetted foot, can tread on the wave, and with
+quiet voice heard above the shriek of the blast can say, 'It is I,'
+has the right to say, 'Be of good cheer,' and never says it in vain
+to such as take Him into their lives however tempest-tossed, and
+into their hearts however tremulous.
+
+III. A third instance of the occurrence of this word of cheer
+presents Jesus as ministering cheerful courage to us by reason of
+His being victor in the strife with the world (John xvi. 33).
+
+'In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I
+have overcome the world.'
+
+Of course 'the world' which He overcame is the whole aggregate of
+things and persons considered as separated from God, and as being
+the great Antagonist and counter power to a holy life of obedience
+and filial devotion. At that last moment when, according to all
+outward seeming and the estimate of things which sense would make,
+He was utterly and hopelessly and all but ignominiously beaten, He
+says, 'I have overcome the world.' What! Thou! within four-and-twenty
+hours of Thy Cross? Is that victory? Yes! For he conquers the world
+who uses all its opposition as well as its real good to help him,
+absolutely and utterly, to do the will of God. And he is conquered
+by the world who lets it, by its glozing sweetnesses and flatteries,
+or by its knitted brows and frowning eyes and threatening hand,
+hinder him from the path of perfect consecration and entire conformity
+to the Father's will.
+
+Christ has conquered. What does that matter to us? Why, it matters
+this, that we may have the Spirit of Jesus Christ in our hearts to
+make us also victorious in the same fight. And whosoever will lay
+his weakness on that strong arm, and open his emptiness to receive
+the fulness of that victorious Spirit for the very spirit of his
+life, will be 'more than conqueror through Him that loved us,' and
+can front all the evils, dangers, threatenings, temptations of the
+world, its heaped sweets and its frowning antagonisms, with the calm
+confidence that none of them are able to daunt him; and that the
+Victor Lord will cover his head in the day of battle and deliver him
+from every evil work. 'Be of good cheer, for I have overcome the
+world, and play your parts like men in the good fight of faith; for
+I am at your back, and will help you with Mine own strength.'
+
+IV. The last instance that I point to of the use of this phrase is
+one in which it was spoken by Christ's voice from heaven (Acts
+xxiii. 11). It was the voice which was heard by the Apostle Paul
+after he had been almost torn in pieces by the crowd in the Temple,
+and had been bestowed for security, by the half-contemptuous
+protection of the Roman governor, in the castle, and was looking
+onward into a very doubtful future, not knowing how many hours'
+purchase his life might be worth. That same night the Lord appeared
+to him and said, 'Be of good cheer, Paul, for as thou hast testified
+of Me in Jerusalem, so must thou bear witness also at Rome.' That is
+to say, 'No man can touch you until I let him, and nobody shall touch
+you until you have done your work and spoken out your testimony.
+Jerusalem is a little sphere; Rome is a great one. The tools to the
+hand that can use them. The reward for work is more work, and work
+in a larger sphere. So cheer up! for I have much for you to do yet.'
+
+And the spirit of that encouragement may go with us all, breeding in
+us the quiet confidence that no matter who may thwart or hinder, no
+matter what dangers or evils may seem to ring us round, the Master
+who bids us 'Be of good cheer' will give us a charmed life, and
+nothing shall by any means hurt us until He says to us, 'Be of good
+courage; for you have done your work; and now come and rest.' 'Wait
+on the Lord. Be of good courage, and He shall strengthen thine
+heart; wait, I say, on the Lord.'
+
+
+
+
+SOUL-HEALING FIRST: BODY-HEALING SECOND
+
+
+    'That ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on
+    earth to forgive sins (then saith He to the sick of the
+    palsy), Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine
+    house.'--MATT. ix. 6.
+
+The great example of our Lord's teaching in the Sermon on the Mount is
+followed, in this and the preceding chapter, by a similar collection
+of His works of healing. These are divided into three groups, each
+consisting of three members. This miracle is the last of the second
+triad, of which the other two members are the miraculous stilling
+of the tempest and the casting out of the demons from the men in the
+country of the Gergesenes.
+
+One may discern a certain analogy in these three members of this
+central group. In all of them our Lord appears as the peace-bringer.
+But the spheres are different. The calm which was breathed over the
+stormy lake is peace of a lower kind than that which filled the soul
+of the demoniacs when the power that made discord within had been
+cast out. Even that peace was lower in kind than that which brought
+sweet repose in the assurance of pardon to this poor paralytic.
+Forgiveness speaks of a loftier blessing than even the casting out
+of demons. The manifestation of power and love steadily rises to a
+climax.
+
+The most important part of this story, then, is not the mere healing
+of the disease, but the forgiveness of sins which accompanies it.
+And the large teaching which our Lord gives as to the relation
+between His miracles and His standing work, His ordinary work which
+He has been doing all through the ages, which He is doing to-day,
+which He is ready to do for you and me if we will let Him, towers
+high above the mere miracle, which is honoured by being the signal
+attestation of that work.
+
+Therefore I would turn to this story now, not for the sake of
+dealing with the mere miraculous event, but in order to draw the
+important lessons from it which lie upon its very surface.
+
+I. The first thought that is suggested here is that our deepest need
+is forgiveness.
+
+How strangely irrelevant and beside the mark, at first sight, seems
+the answer which Christ gives to the eager zeal and earnestness of
+the man and his bearers. Christ's word is 'Son,' or as the original
+might more literally and even more tenderly be rendered, 'Child--be
+of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee.' That seemed far away from
+their want. It _was_ far from their wish, but yet it was the
+shortest road to its accomplishment. Christ here goes straight to
+the heart of the necessity, when, passing by the disease for the
+moment, He speaks the great word of pardon. The palsy was probably
+the result of the sufferer's vice, and probably, too, he felt,
+whatever may have been his friends' wishes for him, that he needed
+forgiveness most. Such a conclusion as to his state of mind seems a
+fair inference from our Lord's words to him, for Christ would never
+have offered forgiveness to an impenitent or indifferent heart.
+
+So we may learn that our chief and prime need is forgiveness. Amid
+all our clamours and hungry needs, that is our deepest. Is not a
+man's chief relation in this world his relation to God? Is not that
+the most important thing about all of us? If that be wrong, will not
+everything be wrong? If that be right, will not everything come right?
+And is it not true that for you and me, and for all our fellows,
+whatever be the surface diversities of character, civilisation,
+culture, taste and the like, there is one deep experience common to
+every human spirit, and that is the fact, and in some sense more or
+less acutely the consciousness of the fact, that 'we have sinned,
+and come short of the glory of God'?
+
+There is the fontal source of all sorrow, for even to the most
+superficial observation ninety per cent., at any rate, of man's
+misery comes either from his own or from others' wrongdoing, and for
+the rest, it is regarded in the eye of faith as being sorrow that is
+needful because of sin, in order to discipline and to purify. But
+here stands the fact, that king and clown, philosopher and fool, men
+of culture and men of ignorance, all of us, through all the ages,
+manifest the unity of our nature in this--I was going to say most
+chiefly--that lapses from the path of rectitude, and indulgence in
+habits, thoughts, feelings, and actions, which even our consciences
+tell us are wrong, characterise us all.
+
+Hence the profound wisdom of Christ and of His Gospel in that, when
+it begins the task of healing, it does not peddle and potter on the
+surface, but goes straight to the heart, with true instinct flies at
+the head, like a wise physician pays little heed to secondary and
+unimportant symptoms, but grapples with the disease, makes the tree
+good, and leaves the good tree to make, as it will, the fruit good.
+
+The first thing to do to heal men's misery, is to make them pure; and
+the first step in the great method by which a man can be made pure,
+is to assure him of a divine forgiveness for the past. So the sneers
+that we often hear about Christian 'philanthropists taking tracts to
+people when they want soup,' and the like, are excessively shallow
+sneers, and indicate nothing more than this, that the critic has
+superficially diagnosed the disease, and is wofully wrong about the
+remedy. God forbid that I should say one word that would seem to
+depreciate the value of other forms of beneficence, or to cast doubt
+upon the purity of motives, or even to be lacking in admiration for the
+enthusiasm that fills and guides many an earnest man and woman, working
+amongst the squalid vice of our great cities and of our complex and
+barbarous civilisation to-day. I would recognise all their work as
+good and blessed; but, oh! dear brethren, it deals with the surface,
+and you will have to go a great deal deeper down than asthetic, or
+intellectual, or economical, or political reformation and changes
+reach, before you touch the real reason why men and women are
+miserable in this world. And you will only effectually cure the
+misery, but you certainly then will do it, when you begin where the
+misery begins, and deal first with sin. The true 'saviour of society'
+is the man that can go to his brother, and as a minister declaratory
+of the divine heart can say--'Brother, be of good cheer; thy sins be
+forgiven thee.' And then, after that, the palsy will go out of his
+limbs, and a new nervous energy will come into them, and he will
+rise, take up his bed, and walk.
+
+II. Now, in the next place, notice, as coming out of this incident
+before us, the thought that forgiveness is an exclusively divine
+act.
+
+There was, sitting by, with their jealous and therefore blind eyes,
+a whole crowd of wise men and religious formalists of the first
+water, collected together as a kind of ecclesiastical inquisition
+and board of triers, as one of the other evangelists tells us, out
+of every corner of the land. They had no care for the dewy pity that
+was in Christ's looks, or for the nascent hope that began to swim up
+into the poor, dim eye of the paralytic. But they had keen scent for
+heresy, and so they fastened with true feline instinct upon the one
+thing, 'This man speaketh blasphemies. Who can forgive sins but God
+alone?'
+
+Ah! if you want to get people blind as bats to the radiant beauty of
+some lofty character, and insensible as rocks to the wants of a sad
+humanity, commend me to your religious formalists, whose religion is
+mainly a bundle of red tape tied round men's limbs to keep them from
+getting at things that they would like. These are the people who
+will be as hard as the nether millstones, and utterly blind to all
+enthusiasm and to all goodness.
+
+But yet these Pharisees are right; perfectly right. Forgiveness
+_is_ an exclusively divine act. Of course. For sin has to do
+with God only; vice has to do with the laws of morality; crime has
+to do with the laws of the land. The same act may be vice, crime,
+and sin. In the one aspect it has to do with myself, in the other
+with my fellows, in the last with God. And so evil considered as sin
+comes under God's control only, and only He against whom it has been
+committed can forgive.
+
+What is forgiveness? The sweeping aside of penalties? the shutting
+up of some more or less material hell? By no means: penalties are
+often left; when sins are crimes they are generally left; when sins
+are vices they are always left, thank God! But in so far as sin is
+sin, considered as being the perversion and setting wrong of my
+relation to Him, its consequences, which are its penalties, are
+swept away by forgiveness; for forgiveness, in its essence and
+deepest meaning, is neither more nor less than that the love of the
+person against whom the wrong has been done shall flow out,
+notwithstanding the wrong. Pardon is love rising above the ice-dam
+which we have piled in its course, and pouring into our hearts.
+
+When you fathers and mothers forgive your children, what does it
+mean? Does it not mean that your love is neither deflected nor
+embittered any more, by reason of their wrongdoing, but pours upon
+them as of old? So God's forgiveness is at bottom--'Child! there is
+nothing in my heart to thee, but pure and perfect love.' We fill the
+sky with mists, through which the sun itself has to look like a red
+ball of lurid fire. But it shines on the upper side of the mists all
+the same, and all the time, and thins them away and scatters them
+utterly, and shines forth in its own brightness on the rejoicing
+heart. Pardon is God's love, unchecked and unembittered, granted to
+the wrongdoer. And that is a divine act, and a divine act alone.
+Pharisees and Scribes were perfectly right. No man can forgive sins
+but God only.
+
+And I might add, though it is somewhat aside from my direct purpose,
+God _can_ forgive sin; which some people nowadays say is
+impossible. The apparent impossibility arises only from shallow and
+erroneous notions of what forgiveness is. God does not--it might be
+too bold to say God cannot, if we believe in miracles--but as a
+matter of fact, God does not, usually interfere to hinder men from
+reaping, as regards this life, what they have sown. But as I say,
+that is not forgiveness; and is there any reason conceivable why it
+should be impossible for the divine love to pour down upon a sinful
+man who has forsaken his sin, and is trusting in God's mercy in
+Christ, just as if his sin was non-existent, in so far as it could
+condition or interfere with the flow of the divine mercy?
+
+And I may say, further, we need a definite divine assurance of pardon.
+Ah! if you have ever been down into the cellars of your own hearts,
+and seen the ugly things that coil there, you will know that a vague
+trust in a vague God and a vague mercy is not enough to still the
+conscience that has once been stung into action. My brothers, you
+want neither priests nor ceremonies on the one hand, nor a mere
+peradventure of 'Oh! God is merciful!' on the other, in order to deal
+with that deepest need of your heart. Nothing but the King's own
+sign-manual on the pardon makes it valid; and unless you and I can,
+somehow or other, come to close grips with God, and get into actual
+contact with Him, and hear, somehow, with infallible certitude, as
+from His own lips, the assurance of forgiveness, there is not enough
+for our needs.
+
+III. So I come to say, in the next place, that the incident before
+us teaches us that Jesus Christ claims and exercises this divine
+prerogative of forgiveness.
+
+Mark His answer to these cavillers. He admits their promises absolutely.
+They said, 'No man can forgive sins but God only.' If Christ was only a
+man, like us, standing in the same relation to the divine pardon that
+other teachers, saints, and prophets have stood, and had nothing more
+to do with it than simply, as I might do, to say to a troubled heart,
+'My brother, be quite sure that God has forgiven you'; if Christ's
+relation to the divine forgiveness was nothing more than ministerial
+and declaratory, why, in the name, not of common sense only, but of
+veracity, did He not turn round to these men and say so? He was bound,
+by all the obligations of a religious teacher, to disclaim, as you or
+I would have done under similar circumstances, the misapprehension of
+His words: 'I use blasphemies? No! I am not speaking blasphemies. I
+know that God only can forgive sins, and I am doing no more than
+telling my poor brother here that his sins are forgiven by God.' But
+that is not His answer at all. What He says in effect is--'Yes; you are
+quite right. No man can forgive sins, but God only. _I_ forgive sins.
+Whom think ye, then, that I, the Son of Man am? It is easy to say "Thy
+sins be forgiven thee"--far easier to say that than to say "Take up thy
+bed and walk," because one can verify and check the accomplishment of
+the saying in the one case, and one cannot in the other. The sentences
+are equally easy to pronounce, the things are equally difficult for a
+_man_ to do, but the difference is that one of them can be verified
+and the other of them cannot. I will do the visible impossibility, and
+then I leave you to judge whether I can do the invisible one or not.'
+
+Now, dear brethren, I have only one word to say about that, and it
+is this. We are here brought sharp up to a fork in the road. I know
+that it is not always a satisfactory way of arguing to compel a man
+to take one horn or other of an alternative, but it is quite fair to
+do go in the present case; and I would press it upon some of you
+who, I think, urgently need to consider the dilemma. Either the
+Pharisees were quite right, and Jesus Christ, the meek, the humble,
+the Pattern of all lowly gentleness, the Teacher whom nineteen
+centuries confess that they have not exhausted, was an audacious
+blasphemer, or He was God manifest in the flesh. The whole context
+forbids us to take these words, 'Thy sins be forgiven thee,' as
+anything less than the voice of divine love wiping out the man's
+transgressions; and if Jesus Christ pretended or presumed to do
+that, there is no hypothesis that I know of which can save His
+character for the reverence of man, but that which sees in Him God
+revealed in manhood; the world's Judge, from whom the world may
+receive divine forgiveness.
+
+IV. Jesus Christ here brings visible facts into the witness-box as
+the attesters of His invisible powers.
+
+Of course the miracle was such a witness in a special way, inasmuch as
+it and forgiveness were equally divine prerogatives and acts. I need
+not dwell now upon what I have already observed in my introductory
+remarks, that our Lord here teaches us the relative importance of the
+attesting miracle and the thing attested, and regards the miracle as
+subordinate to the higher and spiritual work of bringing pardon.
+
+But we may widen out this into the thought that the subsidiary
+effects of Christian faith in individuals, and of the less complete
+Christian faith which is diffused over society, do stand as very
+strong evidences of the reality of Christ's professions and claims
+to exercise this invisible power of pardon. Or, to put it into a
+concrete form, and to take an illustration which may need large
+deductions.--Go into a Salvation Army meeting. Admit the extravagance,
+the coarseness, and all the rest which we educated and superfine
+Christians cannot stand. But when you have blown away the froth, is
+there not something left in the cup which looks uncommonly like the
+wine of the Kingdom? Are there not visible results of that, as of
+every earnest effort to carry the message of forgiveness to men,
+which create an immense presumption in favour of its reality and
+divine origin? Men reclaimed, passions tamed, homes that were
+pandemoniums made Bethels, houses of God. Wherever Christ's
+forgiving power really comes into a heart, life is beautified, is
+purified, is ennobled; and secondary and material benefits follow in
+the train.
+
+I claim all the difference between Christendom and Heathendom as
+attestation of the reality of Christ's divine and atoning work. I
+say, and I believe it to be a valid and a good argument as against
+much of the doubt of this day, 'If you seek His monument, look
+around.' His own answer to the question, 'Art thou He that should
+come?' is valid still: 'Go and tell John the things that ye see and
+hear'; the dead are raised, the deaf ears are opened; faculties that
+lie dormant are quickened, and in a thousand ways the swift spirit
+of life flows from Him and vitalises the dead masses of humanity.
+
+Let any system of belief or of no belief do the like if it can. This
+rod has budded at any rate, let the magicians do the same with their
+enchantments.
+
+Now, Christian men and women, 'ye are My witnesses,' saith the Lord.
+The world takes its notions of Christianity, and its belief in the
+power of Christianity, a great deal more from you than it does from
+preachers and apologists. _You_ are the Bibles that most men
+read. See to it that your lives represent worthily the redeeming and
+the ennobling power of your Master.
+
+And as for the rest of you, do not waste your time trying to purify
+the stream twenty miles down from the fountainhead, but go to the
+source. Do not believe, brother, that your palsy, or your fever,
+your paralysis of will towards good, or the unwholesome ardour with
+which you are impelled to wrong, and the consequent misery and
+restlessness, can ever be healed until you go to Christ--the
+forgiving Christ--and let Him lay His hand upon you; and from His
+own sweet and infallible lips hear the word that shall come as a
+charm through all your nature: 'Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.'
+'Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened; then shall the lame man
+leap as an hart';--then limitations, sorrows, miseries, will pass
+away, and forgiveness will bear fruit in joy and power, in holiness,
+health and peace.
+
+
+
+
+THE CALL OF MATTHEW
+
+
+    'And as Jesus passed forth from thence, He saw a man,
+    named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom: and
+    He saith unto him, Follow Me. And he arose, and
+    followed Him. 10. And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at
+    meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners
+    came and sat down with Him and His disciples. 11. And
+    when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto His disciples,
+    Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?
+    12. But when Jesus heard that, He said unto them, They
+    that be whole need not a physician, but they that are
+    sick. 13. But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will
+    have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to
+    call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. 14. Then
+    came to Him the disciples of John, saying, Why do we
+    and the Pharisees fast oft, but Thy disciples fast not?
+    15. And Jesus said unto them, Can the children of the
+    bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with
+    them? but the days will come, when the bridegroom shall
+    be taken from them, and then shall they fast. 16. No
+    man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment,
+    for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the
+    garment, and the rent is made worse. 17. Neither do men
+    put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break,
+    and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but
+    they put new wine into new bottles, and both are
+    preserved.'--MATT. ix. 9-17.
+
+All three evangelists connect the call of Matthew immediately with the
+cure of the paralytic, and follow it with an account of Christ's answers
+to sundry cavils from Pharisees and John's disciples. No doubt, the
+spectacle of this new Teacher taking a publican into His circle of
+disciples, and, not content with such an outrage on all proper patriotic
+feeling, following it up with scandalous companionship with the sort
+of people that a publican could get to accept his hospitality, sharpened
+hatred and made suspicion prick its ears. Mark and Luke call the
+publican Levi, he calls himself Matthew, the former being probably his
+name before his discipleship, the latter, that by which he was known
+thereafter. Possibly Jesus gave it him, as in the cases of Simon, and
+perhaps Bartholomew. But, however acquired, it superseded the old one,
+as the fact that it appears in the lists of the apostles in both the
+other evangelists and in Acts, shows. Its use here may be a trace of
+a touching desire to make sure that readers, who only knew him as
+Matthew, should understand who this publican was. It is like the little
+likenesses of themselves, in some corner of a background, that early
+painters used to slip into a picture of Madonna and angels. There was
+no vanity in the wish, for he says nothing about his sacrifices,
+leaving it to Luke to tell that 'he left all,' but he _does_
+crave that his brethren, who read, should know that it was he whom
+Jesus honoured by His call.
+
+The condensed narrative emphasises three things, (1) his occupation
+with his ordinary business when that wonderful summons thrilled his
+soul; (2) the curt authoritative command, and (3) the swift obedience.
+As to the first, Capernaum was on a great trade route, and the
+custom-house officers there would have their hands full. This one was
+busy at his work, hateful and shameful as it was in Jewish eyes, and
+into that sordid atmosphere, like a flash of light into a mephitic
+cavern full of unclean creatures, came the transcendent mercy of
+Jesus' summons. There is no region of life so foul, so mean, so
+despicable in men's eyes, but that the quickening Voice will enter
+there. We do not need to be in temples or about sacred tasks in order
+to hear it. It summons us in, and sometimes from, our daily work. Well
+for those who know whose Voice it is, and do not mistake it for some
+Eli's!
+
+No doubt this was not the first of Matthew's knowledge of Jesus.
+Living in Capernaum, he would have had many opportunities of hearing
+Him or of Him, and his heart and conscience may have been stirred.
+As he sat in his 'tolbooth,' feeling contempt and hatred poured on
+him, he, no doubt, had had longings to get nearer to the One whose
+voice was gentle, and His looks, love. So the call would come to him
+as the fulfilment of a dim hope, and it would be a joyful surprise
+to know that Jesus wished to have him for a disciple as much as he
+wished to have Jesus for a Teacher. The ring of fire and hate within
+which he had been imprisoned was broken, and there was One who cared
+to have him, and who would not shrink from his touch. In the light
+of that assurance, the call became, not a summons to give anything
+up, but an invitation to receive a better possession than all with
+which he was called to part. And if we saw things as they are, would
+it not always be so to us? 'Follow Me' does mean, Forsake earth and
+self, but it means still more: Take what is more than all. It parts
+from these because it unites to Jesus. Therefore it means gain, not
+deprivation. And it condenses all rules for life into one, for to
+follow Him is the sum of all duty, and yields the perfect pattern of
+conduct and character, while it is also the secret of all blessedness,
+and the talisman that assures a man of continual progress. They who
+follow are near, and will reach, Him. Of course, if His servants
+follow Him, it stands to reason that one day, 'where I am there shall
+also My servants be.' So in that command lie a sufficient guide for
+earth, and a sure guarantee for heaven.
+
+'And he arose and followed Him.' That is the only thing that we are
+told of Matthew. We hear no more of him, except that he made a feast
+in his house on the occasion. No doubt he did his work as an apostle,
+but oblivion has swallowed up all that. A happy fate to be known to all
+the world for all time, only by this one thing, that he unconditionally,
+immediately and joyfully obeyed Christ's call! He might have said: 'How
+can I leave my work? I must make up my accounts, hand over my papers,
+do a hundred things in order to wind up matters, and I must postpone
+following till then.' But he sprang up at once. He would have abundant
+opportunities to settle all details afterwards, but if he let this
+opportunity of taking his place as a disciple pass, he might never
+have another. There are some things that are best done gradually and
+slowly, but obedience to Christ's call is not one of them. Prompt
+obedience is the only safety. The psalmist knew the danger of delay
+when he said: 'I made haste and delayed not, but made haste to keep Thy
+commandments.'
+
+Matthew does not tell us that _he_ made the feast, but Luke
+does. It was the natural expression of his thankfulness and joy for
+the new bond. His knowledge was small, but his love was great. How
+could he honour Jesus enough? But he was a pariah in Capernaum, and
+the only guests he could assemble were, like himself, outcasts from
+'respectable society.' In popular estimation all publicans were
+regarded without any more ado as 'sinners,' but probably that
+designation is here applied to disreputable folks of various kinds
+and degrees of shadiness, who gravitated to Matthew and his class,
+because, like him, they were repulsed by every one else. Even
+outcasts hunger for society, and manage to get a community of their
+own, in which they find some glow of comradeship, and some defence
+from hatred and contempt. Even lepers herd together and have their
+own rules of intercourse.
+
+But what a scandal in the eyes not only of Pharisees, but of all the
+proper people in Capernaum, Jesus' going to such a gathering of
+disreputables would be, we may estimate if we remember that they did
+not know His reason, but thought that He went because He liked the
+atmosphere and the company. 'Like draws to like' was the conclusion
+suggested, in the absence of His own explanation. The Pharisee
+conceived that his duty in regard to publicans and sinners was to keep
+as far from them as he could, and his strait-laced self-righteousness
+had never dreamed of going to them with an open heart, and trying to
+win them to a better life. Many so-called followers of Jesus still
+take that attitude. They gather up their skirts round them daintily,
+and never think that it would be liker their Lord to sweep away the
+mud than to pick their steps through it, caring mainly to keep their
+own shoes clean.
+
+The feast was probably spread in some courtyard or open space, to
+which, as is the Eastern custom, uninvited spectators could have
+access. It is quite in accordance with the usage of the times and
+land that the Pharisees should have been onlookers, and should have
+been able to talk to the disciples. No doubt their colloquy became
+animated, and perhaps loud, so that it could easily attract Christ's
+attention. He answered for Himself, and the tone of His reply is
+friendly and explanatory, as if He recognised that the questioners
+genuinely wished to know 'why' He was sitting in such company.
+
+It discloses His motive, and thereby sweeps away all insinuations
+that He consorted with sinners because their company was congenial.
+It was precisely for the opposite reason, because He was so unlike
+them. He came among these sinners as a physician; and who wonders at
+_his_ being beside the sick? He does not spend his days by
+their bedsides because he likes the atmosphere, but because it is
+his business to make them well. Now, in that comparison, Jesus
+pronounces no opinion on the correctness of the Pharisees' estimate
+of themselves as 'righteous,' or of publicans as sinners, but simply
+takes them on their own ground. But He does make a great claim for
+Himself, and speaks out of His consciousness of power to heal men's
+worst disease, sin. It is a tremendous assertion to make of oneself,
+and its greatness is enhanced by the quiet way in which it is stated
+as a thought familiar to Himself. What right had He to pose as the
+physician for humanity, and how can such a claim be reconciled with
+His being 'meek and lowly in heart'? If He Himself was one of the
+sick and needed healing, how can He be the healer of the rest? If
+being a sinful man, as we all are, He made such a claim, what becomes
+of the reverence which is paid to Him as a great religious Teacher,
+and where has His 'sweet reasonableness' vanished?
+
+Jesus passes from explanation of His personal relation to the
+publicans to adduce the broad principle which should shape the
+Pharisees' relation to them, as it had shaped His. Hosea had said
+long ago that God delighted more in 'mercy' than in 'sacrifice.'
+Kindly helpfulness to men is better worship than exact performance
+of any ritual. Sacrifice propitiates God, but mercy imitates Him,
+and imitation is the perfection of divine service. Jesus here speaks
+as all the prophets had spoken, and smites with a deadly stroke the
+mechanical formalism which in every age stiffens religion into
+ceremonies and neglects love towards God, expressed in mercy to men.
+He lays bare the secret of His own life, and He thereby lays on His
+followers the obligation of making it the moving impulse of theirs.
+
+The great general truth is followed, as it has been preceded, by a
+plain statement of Jesus' own conception of His mission in the
+world. 'I came,' says He, hinting at the fact that He was before He
+was born, and that His Incarnation was His voluntary act. True, He
+was sent, and we speak of His mission, but also He 'came,' and we
+speak of His advent. 'To repentance' is omitted by the best editors
+as being brought over from Luke, where it is genuine. But it is a
+correct gloss on the simple word 'call,' though 'repentance' is but
+a small part of that to which He summons. He calls us to repent; He
+calls us to Himself; He calls us to self-surrender; He calls us to
+Eternal Life; He calls us to a better feast than Matthew had spread.
+But we must recognise that we are sinners, or we shall never realise
+that His invitation is for us, nor ever feel that we need a physician,
+and have in Him, and in Him alone, the Physician whom we need.
+
+The Pharisees objected to Jesus' feasting, and could scarcely in the
+same breath find fault with Him for not fasting, but they put
+forward some of John's disciples to bring that fresh objection.
+Common hatred is a strong cement, and often holds opposites together
+for a while. It was bad for John's followers that they should be
+willing to say, 'We and the Pharisees.' They had travelled far from
+the days when their master had called the same class a 'generation
+of vipers'! Their keen desire to uphold the honour of their teacher,
+whose light they saw paling before the younger Jesus, made them
+hostile to Him, and, as is usually the case, the followers were more
+partisan than the leader. Religious antagonism sometimes stoops to
+very strange alliances. The two questions brought together in this
+context are noticeably alike, and noticeably different. Both ask for
+the reason of conduct which they do not go the length of impugning.
+They seem to be desirous of enlightenment, they are really eager to
+condemn. Both avoid seeming to call in question the acts of the
+persons addressed, for the Pharisees interrogate the _disciples_ as
+to the reason for _Jesus'_ conduct, while John's disciples ask
+from _Jesus_ the reason of His disciples' conduct. In both, mock
+respectfulness covers lively hatred.
+
+Our Lord's first answer is as profound as it is beautiful, and
+veils, while it reveals, a lofty claim for Himself and a solemn
+foresight of His death, and lays down a great and fruitful principle
+as to the relations between spiritual moods and outward acts of
+religion. His speaking of Himself as 'the Bridegroom' would recall
+to some of His questioners, and that with a touch of shame, John's
+nobly humble acceptance of the subordinate place of the bridegroom's
+friend and elevation of Jesus to that of the bridegroom. But it was
+not merely a rebuking quotation from John's witness, but the
+expression of His own unclouded and continual consciousness of what
+He was to humanity, and of what humanity could find in Him, as well
+as a sovereign appropriating to Himself of many prophetic strains.
+What depth of love, what mysterious blending of spirit, what adoring,
+lowly obedience, what perfection of protecting care, what rapture of
+possession, what rest of heart in trust, what dower of riches are
+dimly shadowed in that wonderful emblem, will never be known till
+the hour of the marriage-supper of the Lamb, when 'His bride hath
+made herself ready.' But across the light there flits a shadow. It
+is but for a moment, and it meant little to the hearers, but it meant
+much to Him. For He could not look forward to winning His bride
+without seeing the grim Cross, and even athwart the brightness of
+the days of companionship with His humble friends, came the darkness
+on His soul, though not on theirs, of the violent end when He 'shall
+be taken from them.' The hint fell apparently on deaf ears, but it
+witnesses to the continual presence in the mind of Jesus of His
+sufferings and death. The certainty that He must die was not forced
+on Him by the failure of His efforts as His career unfolded itself.
+It was no disappointment of bright earlier hopes, as is the case
+with many a disillusionised reformer, who thought at the outset
+that he had only to speak and all men would listen. It was the
+clearly discerned goal from the first. 'The Son of Man came ... to
+give His life a ransom.'
+
+But our Lord here lays down a broad principle, which, if applied as it
+was meant to be, would lift a heavy burden of outward observance off
+the Christian consciousness. Fast when you are sad; feast when you are
+glad. Let the disposition, the mood, the moment's circumstance, mould
+your action. There is no virtue or sanctity in observances which do not
+correspond to the inner self. What a charter of liberty is proclaimed
+in these quiet words! What mountains of ceremonial unreality, oppressive
+to the spirit, are cast into the sea by them! How different Christendom
+would have been and would be to-day, if Christians had learned the
+lesson of these words!
+
+The two condensed parables or extended metaphors, which follow the
+vindication of the disciples, carry the matter further, and lay down
+a principle which is intended to cover not only the question in
+hand, their non-observance of Jewish regulations as to fasting, but
+the whole subject of the relations of the new word, which Jesus felt
+that He brought, to the old system. The same consciousness of His
+unique mission which prompted His use of the term 'bridegroom,'
+shines through the two metaphors of the new cloth and the new wine.
+He knows that He is about to bring a new garb to men, and to give
+them new wine to drink, and He knows that what He brings is no mere
+patch on a worn-out system, but a new fermenting force, which
+demands fresh vehicles and modes of expression. The two metaphors
+take up different aspects of one thought. To try to mend an old coat
+with a bit of unshrunk cloth would only make a worse dissolution of
+continuity, for as soon as a shower fell on it the patch would
+shrink, and, in shrinking, pull the thin pieces of the old garment
+adjoining it to itself. Judaism was already 'rent' and worn too thin
+to be capable of repair. The only thing to be done was 'as a
+vesture' to 'fold it up' and shape a new garment out of new cloth.
+What was true as to the supremely new thing which He brought into
+the world remains true, in less eminent degree, of the less acute
+differences between the Old and the New, within Christianity itself.
+There do come times when its externals become antiquated, worn thin
+and torn, and when patching is useless. Christian men, like others,
+constitutionally incline to conservatism or to progress, and the one
+temperament needs to be warned against obstinately preserving old
+clothes, and the other against eagerly insisting that they are past
+mending.
+
+But a patch and a worn garment do not wholly describe the relations
+of the old and the new. Freshly made wine, still fermenting, and
+old, stiff wine-skins which have lost their elasticity suggest
+further thoughts. Now we have to do with containing vessel _versus_
+contents, with a fermenting force _versus_ stiffened forms. To put
+that into these will destroy both. For example, if the struggle of
+the Judaisers in the early Church had succeeded, and Christianity
+had become a Jewish sect, it would have dwindled to nothing, as the
+Jewish-minded Christians did. The wine must have bottles. Every
+great spiritual renovating force must embody itself in institutions.
+Spiritual emotions must express themselves in acts of worship,
+spiritual convictions must speak in a creed. But the containing
+vessel must be congruous with, and still more, it must be created by,
+the contained force, as there are creatures who frame their shells
+to fit the convolutions of their bodies, and build them up from their
+own substance. Forms are good, as long as they can stretch if need be;
+when they are too stiff to expand, they restrict rather than contain
+the wine, and if short-sighted obstinacy insists on keeping _it_ in
+_them_, there will be a great spill and loss of much that is
+precious.
+
+
+
+
+THE TOUCH OF FAITH AND THE TOUCH OF CHRIST
+
+
+    'While He spake these things unto them, behold, there
+    came a certain ruler, and worshipped Him, saying, My
+    daughter is even now dead: but come and lay Thy hand
+    upon her, and she shall live. 19. And Jesus arose,
+    and followed him, and so did His disciples. 20. And,
+    behold, a woman, which was diseased with an issue of
+    blood twelve years, came behind Him, and touched the
+    hem of His garment: 21. For she said within herself,
+    If I may but touch His garment, I shall be whole.
+    22. But Jesus turned Him about, and when He saw her,
+    He said, Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath
+    made thee whole. And the woman was made whole from
+    that hour. 23. And when Jesus came into the ruler's
+    house, and saw the minstrels and the people making a
+    noise. 24. He said unto them, Give place: for the maid
+    is not dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed Him to
+    scorn. 25. But when the people were put forth, He went
+    in, and took her by the hand, and the maid arose.
+    26. And the fame hereof went abroad into all that land.
+    27. And when Jesus departed thence, two blind men
+    followed Him, crying, and saying, Thou Son of David,
+    have mercy on us. 28. And when He was come into the
+    house, the blind men came to Him: and Jesus saith unto
+    them, Believe ye that I am able to do this? They said
+    unto Him, Yea, Lord. 29. Then touched He their eyes,
+    saying, According to your faith be it unto you. 30. And
+    their eyes were opened; and Jesus straitly charged them,
+    saying, See that no man know it. 31. But they, when they
+    were departed, spread abroad His fame in all that
+    country.'--MATT. ix. 18-31.
+
+The three miracles included in the present section belong to the
+last group of this series. Those of the second group were all
+effected by Christ's word. Those now to be considered are all
+effected by touch. The first two are intertwined. The narrative of
+the healing of the woman is embedded in the account of the raising
+of Jairus's daughter.
+
+Mark the impression of calm consciousness of power and leisurely
+dignity produced by Christ's having time to pause, even on such an
+errand, in order to heal, by the way, the other sufferer. The father
+and the disciples would wonder at Him as He stayed His steps, and be
+apt to feel that priceless moments were being lost; but He knows His
+own resources, and can afford to let the child die while He heals
+the woman. The one shall receive no harm by the delay, and the other
+will be blessed. Our Lord is sitting at the feast which Matthew gave
+on the occasion of his call, engaged in vindicating His sharing in
+innocent festivity against the cavils of the Pharisees, when the
+summons to the death-bed comes to Him from the lips of the father,
+who breaks in on the banquet with his imploring cry. Matthew gives
+the story much more summarily than the other evangelists, and does
+not distinguish, as they do, between Jairus's first words, 'at the
+point of death, and the message of her actual decease, which met
+them on the way. The call of sorrow always reaches Christ's ear, and
+the cry for help is never deemed by Him an interruption. So this
+'man, gluttonous and a wine-bibber,' as these Pharisees thought Him,
+willingly and at once leaves the house of feasting for that of
+mourning. How near together, in this awful life of ours, the two
+lie, and how thin the partition walls! Well for those whose feasts
+do not bar them out from hearing the weeping next door.
+
+As the crowd accompanies Jesus, His hasting love is, for a moment,
+diverted by another sufferer. We never go on an errand of mercy but we
+pass a hundred other sorrowing hearts, so close packed lie the griefs
+of men. This woman is a poor shrinking creature, broken down by long
+illness (which had lasted for the same length of time as the joyous
+life of Jairus's child), made more timid by disappointed hopes of
+cure, and depressed by poverty to which her many doctors had brought
+her. She does not venture to stop this new Rabbi-physician, as He
+goes with the church dignitary of the town to heal his daughter, but
+lets Him pass before she can make up her mind to go near Him; and
+then she comes creeping up behind the crowd, puts out her wasted,
+trembling hand to the hem of His garment,--and she is whole.
+
+The other evangelists give us a more extended account, but Matthew
+throws into prominence, in his condensed narrative, the essential
+points.
+
+Notice her real but imperfect faith. There was unquestionable
+confidence in Christ's power, and very genuine desire for healing.
+But it was a very ignorant faith. She believes that her touch of the
+garment will heal without Christ's will or knowledge, much more His
+pitying love, having any part in it. She thinks that she may win her
+desire furtively, and may carry it away, and He be none the wiser nor
+the poorer for the stolen blessing. What utter, blank ignorance of His
+character and way of working! What gross superstition! Yes, and withal
+what a hunger of desire, what absolute assurance of confidence that
+one finger-tip on His robe was enough! Therefore she had her desire,
+and her Healer recognised her faith as true, though blended with much
+ignorance of Him. Her error was very like that which many Christians
+entertain with less excuse. To attach importance to external means of
+grace, rites, ordinances, sacraments, outward connection with Christian
+organisations, is the very same misconception in a slightly different
+form. Such error is always near us; it is especially rife in countries
+where there has long been a visible Church. It has received strange
+new vigour to-day, partly by reaction from extreme rationalism, partly
+by the growing cultivation of the aesthetic faculties. It is threatening
+to corrupt the simplicity and spirituality of Christian worship, and
+needs to be strenuously resisted. But the more we have to fight
+against it, the more do we need to remember that, along with this
+clinging to the hem of the garment instead of to the heart of its
+Wearer, there may be a very real trust, which might shame some of
+those who profess to hold a less sensuous form of faith. Many a poor
+soul clasping a crucifix clings to the Cross. Many a devout heart
+kneeling at mass sees through the incense-smoke the face of Christ.
+
+This woman's faith was selfish. She wanted health; she did not care
+much about the Healer. She would have been quite contented to have
+had no more to do with Him, if she could only have stolen out of the
+crowd cured. She would have had little gratitude to the unconscious
+Giver of a stolen good. So, many a Christian life in its earlier
+stages is more absorbed with its own deep misery and its desire for
+deliverance, than with Him. Love comes after, born of the experience
+of His love. But faith precedes love, and the predominant motive
+impelling to faith at first is distinctly self-regard. That is all as
+it should be. The most purely self-absorbed wish to escape from the
+most rudely pictured hell is often the beginning of a true trust in
+Christ, which, in due time, will be elevated into perfect consecration.
+Some of our modern teachers, who are shocked at Christianity because
+it lays the foundation of the most self-denying morality in such
+'selfishness,' would be none the worse for going to school to this
+story, and learning from it how a desire for nothing more than to
+get rid of a painful disease, started a process which turned a life
+into a peaceful, thankful surrender of the cured self to the love
+and service of the mighty Healer.
+
+Observe, next, how Christ answers the imperfect faith, and, by
+answering, corrects and confirms it. Matthew omits Christ's question
+as to who touched Him, the disciples' reply, and His renewed
+asseveration that He was conscious of power having gone forth from
+Him. All these belong to the loving method by which our Lord sought
+to draw forth an open acknowledgment. Womanly diffidence, enfeebled
+health, her special disease, all made the woman wish to hide herself.
+She wanted to steal away unnoticed, as she hoped that she had come.
+But Christ forces her to stand out before all the crowd, and there,
+with all eyes upon her,--cold, cruel eyes, some of them--to conquer
+her shame, and tell all the truth. Strange kindness that; strangely
+contrasted with His ordinary desire to avoid notoriety, and with His
+ordinary tender consideration for shrinking weakness! He did it for
+her sake, not for His own. She is changed from timidity to courage.
+At one moment she stretches out her wasted finger, a tremulous
+invalid; at the next, she flings herself at His feet, a confessor.
+He would have us testify for Him, because faith unavowed, like a
+plant in the dark, is apt to become pale and sickly; but ere He bids
+us own His name, He pours into our hearts, in answer to our secret
+appeal, the health of His own life, and the blissful consciousness
+of that great gift which makes the tongue of the dumb sing.
+
+His words to her are full of tenderness. She receives the name of
+'daughter.' Gently He encourages her timidity by that 'Be of good
+cheer,' and then He sets right her error: 'Thy faith'--not thy
+finger--'hath made thee whole.' There was no real connection between
+the touch of the robe and healing; but the woman thought that there
+was, and so Christ stooped to her childish thought, and allowed her
+to prescribe the road which His mercy should take. But He would not
+leave her with her error. The true means of contact between us and
+Him is not our outward contact with external means of grace, but the
+touch of our spirits by faith. Faith is nothing in itself, and heals
+only because it brings us into union with His power, which is the
+sole cause of our healing. Faith is the hand which receives the
+blessing. It may be a wasted and tremulous hand, like that which
+this woman laid lightly on His robe. But He feels its touch, though
+a universe presses on Him, and He answers. Not the garment's hem,
+but Christ's love, is the cause of our salvation. Not an outward
+contact with it or with Him, but faith, is the condition on which
+His life, which knows no disease, pours into our souls. The hand of
+my faith lifted to Him will receive into its empty palm and clasping
+fingers the special blessing for my special wants.
+
+The other evangelists tell us that, at the moment of His words to
+the woman, the messengers came bearing tidings of the child's death.
+How Jairus must have grudged the pause! A word from Christ, like the
+pressure of His hand, heartened him. Like a river turned from its
+course for a space, to fill some empty reservoir, His love comes
+back to its original direction. How abundant the power and mercy, to
+which such a work as that just done was but a parenthesis! The
+doleful music and the shrill shrieks of Eastern mourning, which met
+them as they entered Jairus's house, disturbed the sanctity of the
+hour, and were in strong contrast with the majestic calmness of
+Jesus. Not amid venal lamentations and excited cries will He do His
+work. He bids the noisy crowd forth with curt, almost stern, command,
+and therein rebukes all such hollow and tumultuous scenes, in the
+presence of the stillness of death, still more where faith in Him
+has robbed it of its terror, in robbing it of its perpetuity. It is
+strange that believing readers should have thought that our Lord meant
+to say that the little girl was not really dead, but only in a swoon.
+The scornful laughter of the flute-players and hired mourners
+understood Him better. They knew that it was real death, as men
+count death, and, as has often been the case, the laughter of His
+foes has served to establish the truth. That was not worthy to be
+called death from which the child was so soon and easily to be
+awaked. But, besides this special application to the case in hand,
+that great saying of our Lord's carries the blessed truth that,
+since He has come, death is softened into sleep for all who love
+Him. The euphemism is not peculiar to Christianity, but has a deeper
+meaning on Christian lips than when Greeks or Romans spoke of the
+eternal sleep. Others speak of death by any name rather than its
+own, because they fear it so much. The Christian does so, because he
+fears it so little,--and, as a matter of fact, the use of the word
+death as meaning merely the separation of soul and body by the
+physical act is exceptional in the New Testament. This name of
+sleep, sanctioned thus by Christ, is the sweetest of all. It speaks
+of the cessation of connection with the world of sense, and 'long
+disquiet merged in rest.' It does not imply unconsciousness, for we
+are not unconscious when we sleep, but only unaware of externals. It
+holds the promise of waking when the sun comes. So it has driven out
+the ugly old name. Our tears flow less bitterly when we think of our
+dear ones as 'sleeping in Jesus.' Their bodies, like this little
+child's, are dead, but _they_ are not. They rest, conscious of
+their own blessedness and of Him 'in whom they live, and have their
+being,' whether they 'move' or no.
+
+Then comes the great deed. The crowd is shut out. For such a work
+silence is befitting. The father and mother, with His foremost three
+disciples, go with Him into the chamber. There is no effort, repeated
+and gradually successful, as when Elisha raised the dead boy; no
+praying, as when Peter raised Dorcas; only the touch of the hand in
+which life throbbed in fulness, and, as the other narratives record,
+two words, spoken strangely to, and yet more strangely heard by, the
+dull, cold ear of death. Their echo lingered long with Peter, and
+Mark gives us them in the original Aramaic. But Matthew passes them
+by, as he seems here to have desired to emphasise the power of
+Christ's touch. But touch or word, the real cause of the miracle
+was simply His will; and whether He used media to help men's faith,
+or said only 'I will,' mattered little. He varied His methods as the
+circumstances of the recipients required, and in order that they and
+we might learn that He was tied to none. These miracles of raising
+the dead are three in number. Jairus's daughter is raised from her
+bed, just having passed away; the widow's son at Nain from his bier,
+having been for a little longer separated from his body; Lazarus
+from the grave, having been dead four days. A few minutes, or days,
+or four thousand years, are one to His power. These three are in
+some sense the first-fruits of the great harvest; the stars that
+shone out singly before all the heaven is in a blaze. For, though
+they died again, and so left to Him the precedence in resurrection,
+as in all besides, they are still prophetic of His power in the hour
+when they 'that sleep in the dust' shall awake at His voice. Blessed
+they who, like this little maiden, are awakened, not only by His
+voice, but by His touch, and to find, as she did, their hand in His!
+
+The third of these miracles, which Matthew seems to reckon as the
+second in the group, because he treats the two former as so closely
+connected as to be but one in numeration, need not detain us long.
+It is found only in this Gospel. The first point to be observed in it
+is the cry of these two blind men. There is something pathetic and
+exquisitely natural in the two being together, as is also the case in
+the similar miracle, at a later period, on the outskirts of Jericho.
+Equal sorrows drive men together for such poor help and solace as
+they can give each other. They have common experiences which isolate
+them from others, and they creep close for warmth and companionship.
+All the blind men in the Gospels have certain resemblances. One is
+that they are all sturdily persevering, as perhaps was easier for
+them because they could not see the impatience of the listeners, and
+possibly because, in most cases, persistent begging was their trade,
+and they were used to refusals. But a more important trait is their
+recognition of Jesus as 'Son of David.' Blind as they are, they see
+more than do the seeing. Thrown in upon themselves, they may have
+been led to ponder the old words, and by their affliction been made
+more ready to welcome One who, if He were Messiah, was coming with a
+special blessing for them--'to open the blind eyes.' Men who deeply
+desire a good are quick to listen to the promise of its accomplishment.
+So these two followed Him along the road, loudly and perseveringly
+calling out their profession of faith, and their entreaty for sight.
+
+The next point is our Lord's treatment. He let them cry on, apparently
+ unheeding. Had, then, the two miracles just done exhausted His stock
+of power or of pity? Certainly His reason was, as it always was, their
+good. We do not know why it was better for them to have to wait, and
+continue their entreaty; but we may be quite sure that the reason for
+all His delays is the same,--the larger blessing which comes with the
+answer when it comes, and the large blessings which may be gathered
+while we wait its coming. Christ's question to them, when at last
+they have found their way even indoors, holds out more hope than they
+had yet received. By it, Christ established a close relation with them,
+and implied to them that He was willing to answer their cry. One can
+fancy how the poor blind faces would light up with a flush of eager
+expectation, and how swift would be the answer. The question is not
+cold or inquisitorial. It is more than half a promise, and a powerful
+aid to the faith which it requires.
+
+There is something very beautiful and pathetic in the simple brevity
+of the unhesitating answer, 'Yea, Lord.' Sincerity needs few words.
+Faith can put an infinite deal of meaning into a monosyllable. Their
+eagerness to reach the goal made their answer brief. But it was
+enough. Again the hand which had clasped the maiden's palm is put
+out and laid gently on the useless eyes, and the great word spoken,
+'According to your faith be it unto you.' Their blindness made the
+touch peculiarly fitting in their case, as bringing evidence of
+sense to those who could not see the gracious pity of His looks. The
+word spoken was, like that to the centurion, a declaration of the
+power of faith, which determines the measure, and often the manner,
+of His gifts to us. The containing vessel not only settles the
+quantity of, but the shape assumed by, the water which is taken up
+in it from the sea. Faith, which keeps inside of Christ's promises
+(and what goes outside of them is not faith), decides how much of
+Christ we shall have for our very own. He condescends to run the
+molten gold of His mercies into the moulds which our faith prepares.
+
+These two men, who had used their tongues so well in their persistent
+cry for healing, went away to make a worse use of them in telling
+everywhere of their cure. Jesus desired silence. Possibly He did
+not wish His reputation as a mere worker of miracles to be spread
+abroad. In all His earlier ministry He avoided publicity, singularly
+contrasting therein with the evident desire to make Himself the
+centre of observation which marks its close. He dreaded the smoky
+flame of popular excitement. His message was to individuals, not to
+crowds. It was a natural impulse to tell the benefits these two had
+received; but truer gratitude and deeper faith would have made them
+obey His lightest word, and have shut their mouths. We honour Christ
+most, not by taking our way of honouring Him, but by absolute obedience.
+
+The final miracle of the nine (or ten) marshalled in long procession
+in chapters viii. and ix. is told with singular brevity. There is
+nothing individual in our Lord's treatment of the sufferer, as there
+was in the previous healing of the two blind men, and no details are
+given of either the appeal to His pity or the method of His cure.
+The dumb demoniac could lift no cry, nor exercise any faith, and all
+the petitions and hopes of his bearers were expressed in the act of
+bringing the sufferer thither, and silently setting him there before
+these eyes of universal pity. It was enough. With Jesus, to see was
+to compassionate, and to compassionate was to help. In the other
+instances of casting out demons, the method is an authoritative
+command, addressed not to the possessed, but to the alien personality
+that has seized on him, and we conclude that such was the method
+here. Jesus undoubtedly believed in demoniacal possession, if we can
+at all rely on the Gospel narratives; and it may be humbly suggested
+that there are dark depths in humanity, which had need to be fathomed
+more completely, before any one is warranted in dogmatically
+pronouncing that He was wrong in His diagnosis. There are ugly facts
+which should give pause to those who are inclined to say--'There are
+no demons, and if there were, they could not dominate a human
+consciousness.'
+
+But the effects of the miracle are emphasised more than itself. They
+are two, neither of them what might or should have been. The dumb
+man is not said to have used his recovered speech to thank his
+deliverer, nor is there any sign that he clung to Him, either for
+fear of being captured again or in passionate gratitude. It looks as
+if he selfishly bore away his blessing and cared nothing for its
+giver. That is very human, and we all are too often guilty of the
+same sin. Nor was the effect on the multitudes much better, for they
+were only struck with vulgar wonder, which had no moral quality in
+it and led to nothing. They saw 'the miracle,' that is, the
+wonderfulness of the act made some dint even on their minds, but
+these were either too fluid to retain the impression, or too hard to
+let it be deep, and so it soon filled up again. We have to think of
+Christ's deeds as 'signs,' not only as 'wonders,' or they will do
+little to draw us to Him. Wonder is a necessarily evanescent
+emotion, which may indeed set something better stirring in us, but
+is quite as likely to die barren.
+
+The Pharisees did not wonder, and did look into the phenomenon with
+sharp eyes; and in so far, they were in advance of the gaping
+multitudes. They were much too superior persons to be astonished at
+anything, and they had already settled on a formula which was
+delightfully easy of application, and had the further advantage of
+turning the miracles into evidences that the doer of them was a
+child of the Devil. It appears to have been a well-worked formula
+too, for it is found again in chap. xii. 24, and in Luke xi. 15, in
+the account of another cure of a dumb demoniac. It is possible that
+the incident now before us may be the same as this, but there is
+nothing improbable in the occurrence of such a case twice, nor in
+the repetition of what had become the commonplace of the Pharisaic
+polemic. But what a piercing example that explanation is of the
+blinding power of prejudice, determined to hold on to a foregone
+conclusion, and not to see the sun at noon! Jesus in league with
+'the prince of the devils'! And that was gravely said by religious
+authorities! They saw the loveliness of His perfect life, His gentle
+goodness, His self-forgetting love, His swift-springing pity, and
+they set it all down to His commerce with the Evil One. He was so
+good that He must be more than humanly bad.
+
+
+
+
+A CHRISTLIKE JUDGMENT OF MEN
+
+
+    'But when He saw the multitudes, He was moved with
+    compassion on them, because they fainted, and were
+    scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.'
+    --MATT. ix. 36.
+
+In the course of our Lord's wandering life of teaching and healing,
+there had naturally gathered around Him a large number of persons who
+followed Him from place to place, and we have here cast into a symbol
+the impression produced upon Him by their outward condition. That is
+to say, He sees them lying there weary, and footsore, and travel-stained.
+They have flung themselves down by the wayside. There is no leader or
+guide, no Joshua or director to order their march; they are a worn-out,
+tired, unregulated mob, and the sight smites upon His eye, and it
+smites upon His heart. He says to Himself, if I may venture to put
+words into His lips, 'There are a worse weariness, and a worse wandering,
+and a worse anarchy, and a worse disorder afflicting men than that poor
+mob of tired pedestrians shows.' Matthew, who was always fond of showing
+the links and connections between the Old Testament and the New, casts
+our Lord's impression of what He then saw into language borrowed from
+the prophecy of Ezekiel (ch. xxxiv.), which tells of a flock that is
+scattered in a dark and cloudy day, that is broken, and torn, and
+driven away. I venture to see in the text three points: (1) Christ
+teaching us how to look at men; (2) Christ teaching us how to feel at
+such a sight; and (3) Christ teaching us what to do with the feeling.
+'When He saw the multitude, He was moved with compassion, because they
+fainted and were scattered abroad.' 'Then He said unto His disciples,
+the harvest is plenteous, the labourers are few, pray ye the Lord of
+the harvest to send forth labourers unto the harvest.' And then there
+follows, 'And when He had called unto Him His twelve disciples, He gave
+them power against unclean spirits to cast them out.' There are, then,
+these three points;--just a word or two about each of them.
+
+I. Here we have our Lord teaching us how to look at men.
+
+The picture of my text is, of course, in its broad outlines, very
+clear and intelligible, but there may be a little difficulty as to
+the precise force of the language. The obscurity of it is in some
+degree reflected in the margin of our Bibles; so, perhaps, you will
+permit one word of an expository nature. The description of the
+flock, 'Because they fainted and were scattered abroad,' is couched
+in the original in a couple of words, one of which means properly
+'torn' or 'fainting,' according as one or other of two readings of
+the text is adopted, and the other means 'lying down.' Now, the
+former of these gives a very pathetic picture if we apply it to the
+individuals that made up the flock. We have then the image of the
+poor sheep that has lost its way, struggling through briars and
+thorns, getting out of them with its fleece all torn and hanging in
+strips dangling at its heels, or of it as lacerated by the beasts of
+the field to whom it is a prey. If we take the metaphor, as seems
+more probably to be intended, as applying not so much to the
+individuals as to the flock, then it comes to mean 'torn asunder,'
+'thrown apart,' and gives us the notion of anarchic confusion into
+which the flock comes if there be no shepherd to lead it. Then the
+other word, which our Bible translates 'were scattered abroad,'
+seems to mean more properly 'lying down,' and it gives the idea of
+the poor, wearied creature, after all its struggles and wanderings,
+utterly beaten and dejected, having lost its way, at its wits' end
+and resourceless, flinging itself down there in despair, and panting
+its timid life out anywhere where it finds itself. So it comes to be
+a picture of the utter weariness and hopelessness of all men's
+efforts apart from that Guide and Shepherd, who alone can lead them
+in the way. And then both of these miserable states, the laceration
+if you take the one explanation, the disintegration and casting
+apart if you take the other, the weariness and exhaustion, are
+traced to their source, they are 'as sheep having no shepherd.' He
+has gone, and so all this comes. With this explanation we may take
+the points of view that are thus suggested simply as they lie before
+us.
+
+First of all, notice how here, as always to Jesus Christ, the
+outward was nothing, except as a symbol and manifestation of the
+inward; how the thing that He saw in a man was not the external
+accidents of circumstance or position, for His true, clear gaze and
+His loving, wise heart went straight to the essence of the matter,
+and dealt with the man not according to what he might happen to be
+in the categories of earth, but to what he was in the categories of
+heaven. All the same to Him whether it was some poor harlot, or a
+rabbi; all the same to Him whether it was Pilate on the judgment-seat,
+or the penitent thief hanging at His side. These gauds and shows were
+nothing; sheer away He cut them all, and went down to the hidden heart
+of the man, and He allocated and ranged them according to that.
+Christian men and women, do you try to do the same thing, and to get
+rid of all these superficial veils and curtains with which we drape
+ourselves and attitudinise in the world, and to see men as Christ saw
+them, both in regard to your judgment of them, and in regard to your
+judgment of yourselves? 'I am a scholar and a wise man; a great thinker;
+a rich merchant; a man of rising importance and influence.' Very well;
+what does that matter? 'I am ignorant or a pauper'; be it so. Let us
+get below all that. The one question worth asking and worth answering
+is, 'How am I affected towards Him?' There are many temporary and
+local principles of arrangement and order among men; but they will
+all vanish some day, and there will be one regulating and arranging
+principle, and it is this: 'Do I love God in Jesus Christ, or do I
+not?' Oh! for myself, for yourself, and for all our outlook towards
+others, let us not forget that the inmost, deepest, hidden man of the
+heart is the man, and that all else is naught, and that its whole
+character is absolutely determined by its relation to Jesus Christ.
+
+But this is somewhat aside from my main purpose, which is rather
+briefly to expand the various phases which, as I have already
+suggested, are included in such an emblem. The first of them is
+this: Try to think for yourselves of the condition of humanity as
+apart from Christ--shepherdless. That old metaphor of a shepherd
+which comes out of the Old Testament is there sometimes used to
+indicate a prophet, and sometimes to indicate a king. I suppose we
+may put both of these uses together, as far as our present purposes
+are concerned; and this is what I want to insist upon. I dare say
+some people here will think it is very old-fashioned, very narrow in
+these broad and liberal days; but what I would say is this, that
+unless Jesus Christ is both Guide and Teacher, we have neither guide
+nor teacher but are shepherdless without Him. There are plenty of
+rulers. There was no lack of other authority in the days of His
+flesh. There were crowds of rabbis, guides, and directors. The life
+of the nation was throttled by the authorities that had planted
+themselves upon its back, and yet Christ saw that there were none of
+those who were fit for the work, or afforded the adequate guidance.
+And so it is, now and always. There have been hosts of men who have
+sought to impose their authority upon an era. Where is there one
+that has swayed passion, that has ruled hearts, that has impressed
+his own image on the will, that has made obedience an honour, and
+absolute, abject devotion to his command a very patent of nobility?
+Here, and nowhere beside. Besides that Christ there is no ruler
+amongst men who can come to them and say to his servant, 'Go,' and
+he goeth, and to this man, 'Do this,' and he doeth it. Obedience to
+any besides is treason against the dignity of our own nature;
+disobedience to Him is both treason against our nature and blasphemy
+against God. 'Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ, Thou art the
+everlasting Son of the Father.' _There_ is the deepest reason
+for His rule.
+
+And as for 'teacher,' whom are we to put up beside Him? Is it to be
+these dim figures of religious reformers that are gliding,
+ghostlike, to their doom, being wrapped round and round about by
+ever thicker and thicker folds of the inevitable oblivion that
+swallows all that is human? Brethren, by common consent it is Christ
+or nobody. Aaron dies upon Hor; Moses dies upon Pisgah; the
+teachers, the leaders, the guides, the under-shepherds, pass away
+one by one; and if this Christ be but a Man and a Teacher, He too
+will pass away. Shall I be thought very blind to the signs of the
+times if I say that I see no sign of His dominion being exhausted,
+of His influence being diminished, of His guidance being capable of
+being dispensed with? You may say, 'Oh, we do not want any teacher
+or guide; we do not want a shepherd.' I am not going to enter upon
+that question now at all, except just to say this, that the instincts
+of humanity rise up in contradiction, as it seems to me, of that cold
+and cheerless creed, and that we have this fact staring us in the
+face, that men are made capable of a devotion and submission the
+most passionate, the most absolute, the most mighty force in their
+lives, to human guides and ensamples, and that it is all wasted unless
+there be somewhere a Man, our Brother, who shall come to us and say,
+'All that ever went before Me are thieves and robbers; I am the Good
+Shepherd; follow Me, and ye shall not walk in darkness,' 'He saw the
+multitudes as sheep having no shepherd.'
+
+Still further, take that other phase of the metaphor which, as I
+suggested, the text includes, namely, the idea of disintegration,
+the rending apart of social ties and union, unless there be the
+centre of unity in the shepherd of the flock. 'I will smite the
+shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered,' says the old prophecy.
+Of course, for what is there to hold them together unless it be
+their guide and their director? So we are brought face to face with
+this plain prosaic rendering of the metaphor--that but for the centre
+of unity provided for mankind in the person and work of Jesus Christ,
+there is no satisfaction of the deep hunger for unity and society
+with which in that case God would have cursed mankind. For whilst
+there are many other bonds most true, most blessed, God-given, and
+mighty, such as that of the sacred unity of the family, and that of
+the nation and many others of which we need not speak, yet all these
+are constantly being disintegrated by the unresting waves of that
+gnawing sea of selfishness, if I may so say, which, like the waters
+upon our eastern coasts, eats and eats for ever at the base of the
+cliffs, so that society in all its forms, whether it be built upon
+identity of opinion, which is perhaps the shabbiest bond of all, or
+whether it be built upon purposes of mutual action, which is a great
+deal better, or whether it be built upon hatred of other people,
+which is the modern form of patriotism, or whether it be built upon
+the domestic affections, which are the purest and highest of all--all
+the other bonds of society, such as creeds, schools, nations,
+associations, leagues, families, denominations, all go sooner or
+later. The base is eaten out of them, because every man that belongs
+to them has in him that tyrannous, dominant self, which is ever
+seeking to assert its own supremacy. Here is Babel, with its
+half-finished tower, built on slime; and there is Pentecost, with
+its great Spirit; here is the confusion, there is the unifying; here
+the disintegration, there the power that draws them all together.
+'They were scattered abroad as sheep having no shepherd,' and one
+looks out over the world and sees great tracts of country and long
+dismal generations of time, in which the very thought of unity and
+charity and human bonds knitting men together has faded from the
+consciousness of the race, and then one turns to blessed, sweet,
+simple words that say, 'there shall be one flock and one shepherd,'
+and 'I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.'
+Drawing thus, He will draw them into the eternal, mighty bond of
+union that shall never be broken, and is all the more precious and
+all the more true because it is not a unity like the vulgar unities
+that express themselves in external associations. You know, of
+course or if you do not know it will be a good thing that you should
+know, that that verse in John's Gospel which I have quoted has been
+terribly mangled by a little slip of our translators. Christ said,
+'Other sheep I must bring which are not of this fold,' the fold
+being the external unity of the Jewish church--an enclosure made of
+hurdles that you can stick in the ground. 'I shall bring them,' says
+He, 'and there shall be one'--(not, as our Bible says, 'fold,'--but
+something far better)--'there shall be one flock'; which becomes a
+unity not by wattling round about it on the outside, but by a
+shepherd standing in the middle. 'There shall be one flock and one
+shepherd'--a unity which is neither the destruction of the variety of
+the churches, nor the crushing of men, nationalities, and types of
+character all down into one dead level beneath the heel of a conqueror,
+but the unity which subsists in the many operations of the one Spirit,
+and is expressed by all the forms of the one inspired grace.
+
+Then passing by altogether the other idea which I said was only
+doubtfully suggested by the words--namely, that of laceration and
+wounding--let me say a word about the last of the aspects of
+humanity when Christless, which is set forth in this text, and that
+is, the dejected weariness arising from the fruitless wanderings
+wherewith men are cursed. As a verse in the Book of Proverbs puts
+it, 'The labour of the foolish wearieth every one of them, because
+they know not how to go to the city.' Putting aside the metaphor,
+the plain truth which it embodies is just this, that there is in all
+men's souls a deep longing after peace and rest, after goodness and
+beauty and truth, and that all the strenuous efforts to satisfy
+these longings, either by social reforms or by individual culture
+and discipline, are pathetically vain and profitless, because there
+is none to guide them. The sheep go wandering in any direction, and
+with no goal; and wherever one has jumped, a dozen others will go
+after him, and so they are wearied out long before the day's journey
+is ended, and they never reach the goal. Put that into less vivid,
+and, therefore, as people generally suppose, more accurate,
+language, and it is a statement of the universal law of human
+history that, after any epoch of great aspirations and strong
+excitement of the noblest parts of human nature, there has always
+come a reaction of corruption and a collapse from weariness. What
+did 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' end in? A guillotine. What do
+all similar epochs end in, when they do not take the Christ to march
+ahead of them? An utter disgust and disillusion, and a despair of
+all progress. That is why wild revolutionists in their youth are
+always obstinate Conservatives in their old age. The wandering sheep
+are footsore, and they fling themselves down by the wayside. That is
+why heathenism presents to us the aspect that it does. There is
+nothing about it that seems to me more tragical than the weary
+languor that besets it. Do you ever think of the depth of pathetic,
+tragic meaning that there is in that verse in one of the Psalms,
+'Such as sit in darkness and in the shadow of death'? There they
+sit, because there is no hope in rising and moving. They would have
+to grope if they arose, and so with folded hands they sit like the
+Buddha, which one great section of heathenism has taken as being the
+true emblem and ideal of the noblest life. Absolute passivity lays
+hold upon them all--torpor, stagnation, no dream of advance or
+progress. The sheep are dejected, despairing, anarchic, disintegrated,
+lacerated, guideless, and shepherdless--away from Christ. So He
+thought them. God give you and me grace, dear brethren, to see, as
+Christ saw, the condition of humanity and our own apart from Him.
+
+II. And now let me say a word in the next place as to the second
+movement of His mind and heart here. He teaches us not only how to
+think of men, but how that sight should touch us.
+
+'He was moved with compassion on them when He saw the multitude'--with
+the eye of a god, I was going to say, and the heart of a man. Pity
+belongs to the idea of divinity; compassion belongs to the idea of
+divinity incarnate; and the motion that passed across His heart is the
+motion that I would seek may pass, with its sweet and healing breath,
+across yours and mine. The right emotion for a Christian looking on
+the Christless crowds is pity, not aversion; pity, not anger; pity, not
+curiosity; pity, not indifference. How many of us walk the streets of
+the towns in which our lot is cast, and never know one touch of that
+emotion, when we look at these people here in England torn, and anarchic,
+and wearied, and shepherdless, within sound of our psalm-singing in
+our chapels? Why, on any Sunday there are thousands of men and women
+standing about the streets who, we may be sure, have not seen the
+inside of a church or a chapel since they were married, and that not
+one in five hundred of all the good people that are going with their
+prayer-books and hymn-books to church and chapel ever think anything
+about them as they pass them by; and some of them, perhaps, if they
+come to any especially disreputable one, will gather up their skirts
+and keep on the safe side of the pavement, and there an end of it. But
+Jesus Christ had no aversions. His white purity was a great deal nearer
+to the blackness of the woman that was a sinner, than was the leprous
+whiteness of the whited sepulchre of the self-righteous Pharisee. He
+had neither aversion, nor anger, nor indifference.
+
+And, if I might venture to touch upon another matter, compassion and
+not curiosity is an especial lesson for the day to the more thoughtful
+and cultivated amongst our congregations. I have just said that the
+appropriate Christian feeling in contemplating the state of the sheep
+without the Shepherd is compassion, not curiosity. That reminder is
+particularly needful in view of the prominence to-day of investigations
+into the new science of Comparative Religion. I speak with most
+unfeigned respect of it and of its teachers, and gratefully hail the
+wonderful light that it is casting upon ideas underlying the strange
+and often savage and obscene rites of heathenism; but it has a side of
+danger in it against which I would warn you all, especially young,
+reading men and women. The time has not yet come when we can afford to
+let such investigations be our principal occupation in the face of
+heathenism. If idolatry was dead we could afford to do that, but it
+is alive--the more's the pity; and it is not only a curious instance
+of the workings of man's intelligence, and a great apocalypse of
+earlier stages of society, but, besides that, it is a lie that is
+deceiving and damning our brethren, and we have got to kill it first
+and dissect it afterwards. So I say, do not only think of heathenism
+in its various forms as a subject for speculation and analysis; as
+much as you like of that, only do not let it drive out the other
+thing, and after you have tried to understand it, then come back to
+my text, 'He was moved with compassion.' And so pity, and neither
+anger, nor aversion, nor curiosity, nor indifference is what I urge
+as the Christian emotion.
+
+III. Let us take this text as teaching us how Christ would have us
+act, after such emotion built and based upon such a look.
+
+It is perfectly legitimate, although it is by no means the highest
+motive, to appeal to feeling as a stimulus to action. We have a
+right to base our urging of Christian men and women to missionary
+work either at home or abroad, upon the ground of the condition of
+the men to whom the Gospel has to be carried. I know that if taken
+alone it is a very inadequate motive. I believe that any failure
+that may be manifest in the interest of Christian people in
+missionary work is largely traceable to the blunder we have made in
+dwelling on superficial motives more than we ought to have done, in
+proportion to the degree in which we have dwelt on the deepest. We
+have been gathering the surface-water instead of going right down to
+the green sand, to which the artesian well must be sunk if the
+stream is to come up without pumping or wasting. So I say that a
+deeper reason than the sorrow and darkness of the heathen is--'the
+love of Christ constraineth me'; but yet the first is a legitimate
+one. Only remember this, that Bishop Butler taught us long ago, that
+if you excite emotions which are intended to lead to action, and the
+action does not follow, the excitation of the emotion without its
+appropriate action makes the heart a great deal harder than it was
+before. That is why it is playing with edged tools to speak so much
+to our Christian audiences, as we sometimes hear done, about the
+condition of the heathen as a stimulus to missionary work. If a man
+does not respond and do something, some crust of callousness and
+coldness comes over his own heart. You cannot indulge in the luxury
+of emotion which you do not use to drive your spindles, without
+doing yourselves harm. It is never intended to be blown off as waste
+steam and allowed to vanish into the air. It is meant to be conserved
+and guided, and to have something done with it. Therefore beware of
+sentimental contemplation of the sad condition of the shepherdless
+sheep which does not move you to do anything to help them.
+
+One word more. Take my text as a guide to the form of action into
+which we are to cast the emotions that should spring from this gaze
+upon the world. I will only name three points. Christ opened His
+mouth and spake to them, and taught them many things; Christ said to
+His disciples, 'Pray ye the Lord of the harvest'; and Christ sent
+out His apostles to preach the Kingdom. These three things in their
+bearing upon us are--personal work, prayer, help to send forth
+Christ's messengers. There is nothing like personal work for making
+a man understand and feel the miseries of his fellows. Christian men
+and women, it is your first business everywhere to proclaim the name
+of Jesus Christ, and no prayers and no subscriptions absolve you
+from that. In this army a man cannot buy himself off and send in a
+substitute at the cost of an annual guinea. If Christ sent the
+apostles, do you hold up the hands of the apostles' successors, and
+so by God's grace you and I may help on the coming of that blessed
+day when there shall be one flock and one Shepherd, and when 'the
+Lamb that is in the midst of the throne'--for the Shepherd is
+Himself a lamb--'shall feed them and lead them, and God shall wipe
+away all tears from their eyes.'
+
+
+
+
+THE OBSCURE APOSTLES
+
+
+    'These twelve Jesus sent forth.'--MATT. x. 5.
+
+And half of 'these twelve' are never heard of as doing any work for
+Christ. Peter and James and John we know; the other James and Judas
+have possibly left us short letters; Matthew gives us a Gospel; and
+of all the rest no trace is left. Some of them are never so much as
+named again, except in the list at the beginning of the Acts of the
+Apostles; and none of them except the three who 'seemed to be pillars'
+appear to have been of much importance in the early diffusion of the
+Gospel.
+
+There are many instructive and interesting points in reference to
+the Apostolate. The number of twelve, in obvious allusion to the
+tribes of Israel, proclaims the eternal certainty of the divine
+promises to His people, and the dignity of the New Testament Church
+as their true heir. The ties of relationship which knit so many of
+the apostles together, the order of the names varying, but within
+certain limits, in the different catalogues, the uncultivated
+provincial rudeness of most of them, would all afford material for
+important reflections. But, perhaps, not the least important fact
+about the Apostolate is that one to which we have referred, which
+like the names of countries on the map, escapes notice because it is
+'writ' so 'large'--namely, the small place which the apostles as a
+body fill in the subsequent narrative, and the entire oblivion into
+which so many of them pass from the moment of their appointment.
+
+It is to that fact that we wish to turn attention now. It may
+suggest some considerations worth pondering, and among other things,
+may help to show the exaggeration of the functions of the office by
+the opposite extremes of priests and rationalists. The one school
+makes it the depository of exclusive supernatural powers; the other
+regards it as a master-stroke of organisation, to which the early
+rapid growth of Christianity was largely due. The facts seem to show
+that it was neither.
+
+I. The first thought which this peculiar and unexpected silence
+suggests is of the True Worker in the Church's progress.
+
+The way in which the New Testament drops these apostles is of a piece
+with the whole tone of the Bible. Throughout, men are introduced into
+its narratives and allowed to slip out with well-marked indifference.
+Nowhere do we get more vivid, penetrating portraiture, but nowhere do
+we see such carelessness about following the fortunes or completing the
+biographies even of those who have filled the largest space in its pages.
+
+Recall, for example, the way in which the New Testament deals with
+'the very chiefest' apostles, the illustrious triad of Peter, James,
+and John. The first escapes from prison; we see him hammering at
+Mary's door in the grey of the morning, and after brief, eager talk
+with his friends he vanishes to hide in 'another place,' and is no
+more heard of, except for a moment in the great council, held in
+Jerusalem, about the admission of Gentiles to the Church. The second
+of the three is killed off in a parenthesis. The third is only seen
+twice in the Book of the Acts, as a silent companion of Peter at a
+miracle and before the Sanhedrim. Remember how Paul is left in his
+own hired house, within sight of trial and sentence, and neither the
+original writer of the book nor any later hand thought it worth
+while to add three lines to tell the world what became of him. A
+strange way to write history, and a most imperfect narrative, surely!
+Yes, unless there be some peculiarity in the purpose of the book,
+which explains this cold-blooded, inartistic, and tantalising habit
+of letting men leap upon the stage as if they had dropped from the
+clouds, and vanish from it as abruptly as if they had fallen through
+a trap-door.
+
+Such a peculiarity there is. One of the three to whom we have
+referred has explained it in the words with which he closes his
+gospel, words which might stand for the motto of the whole book,
+'These are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Son of
+God.' The true purpose is not to speak of men except in so far as
+they 'bore witness to that light' and were illuminated for a moment
+by contact with Him. From the beginning the true 'Hero' of the Bible
+is God; its theme is His self-revelation culminating for evermore in
+the Man Jesus. All other men interest the writers only as they are
+subsidiary or antagonistic to that revelation. As long as that
+breath blows through them they are music; else they are but common
+reeds. Men are nothing except as instruments and organs of God. He
+is all, and His whole fulness is in Jesus Christ. Christ is the sole
+worker in the progress of His Church. That is the teaching of all
+the New Testament. The thought is expressed in the deepest, simplest
+form in His own unapproachable words, unfathomable as they are in
+their depth of meaning, and inexhaustible in their power to
+strengthen and to cheer: 'I am the vine, ye are the branches,
+without Me ye can do nothing.' It shapes the whole treatment of the
+history of the so-called 'Acts of the Apostles,' which by its very
+first sentence proclaims itself to be the Acts of the ascended
+Jesus, 'the former treatise' being declared to have had for its
+subject 'all that Jesus _began_ to do and teach while on earth,
+and this treatise being manifestly the continuance of the same
+theme, and the record of the heavenly activity of the Lord. So the
+thought runs through all the book: 'The help that is done on earth,
+He does it all Himself.'
+
+_So_ let us think of Him and of His relation to us as well as
+to that early Church. His continuous energy is pouring down on us if
+we will accept it. _In_ us, _for_ us, _by_ us He works. 'My Father worketh
+hitherto, said He when here, 'and I work'; and now, exalted on high,
+He has passed into that divine repose, which is at the same time the
+most energetic divine activity. He is all in all to His people. He is
+all their strength, wisdom, and righteousness. They are but the clouds
+irradiated by the sun and bathed in its brightness; He is the light
+which flames in their grey mist and turns it to a glory. They are but
+the belts and cranks and wheels; He is the power. They are but the
+channel, muddy and dry; He is the flashing life that fills it and makes
+it a joy. They are the body; He is the soul dwelling in every part to
+save it from corruption and give movement and warmth.
+
+  'Thou art the organ, whose full breath is thunder;
+   I am the keys, beneath thy fingers pressed.'
+
+If this be true, how it should deliver us from all overestimate of
+men, to which our human affections and our feeble faith tempt us so
+sorely! There _is_ One man, and One man only, whose biography
+is a 'Gospel, who owes nothing to circumstances, and who originates
+the power which He wields; One who is a new beginning, and has
+changed the whole current of human history, One to whom we are right
+to bring offerings of the gold, and incense, and myrrh of our
+hearts, and wills, and minds, which it is blasphemy and degradation
+to lay at the feet of any others. We may utterly love, trust, and
+obey Jesus Christ. We dare not do so to any other. The inscription
+written over the whole book, that it may be transcribed on our whole
+nature, is, 'No man any more save Jesus only.'
+
+If this thought be true, what confidence it ought to give us as we
+think of the tasks and fortunes of the Church! If we think only of the
+difficulties and of the enormous work before us, so disproportioned
+to our weak powers, we shall be disposed to agree with our enemies,
+who talk as if Christianity was on the point of perishing, as they
+have been doing ever since it began. But the outlook is wonderfully
+different when we take Christ into the account. We are very apt to
+leave Him out of the reckoning. But one man with Christ to back him is
+always in the majority. He flings his sword clashing into one scale,
+and it weighs down all that is in the other. The walls are very lofty
+and strong, and the besiegers few and weak, badly armed, and quite
+unfit for the assault; but if we lift our eyes high enough, we, too,
+shall see a man with a drawn sword over against us, and our hearts
+may leap up in assured confidence of victory as we recognise in Him
+the Captain of the Lord's Host, who has already overcome, and will
+make us valiant in fight and more than conquerors.
+
+When conscious of our own weakness, and tempted to think of our task
+as heavy, or when complacent in our own power, and tempted to regard
+our task as easy, let us think of His ever-present work in and for His
+people, till it braces us for all duty, and rebukes our easy-going
+idleness. Surely from that thought of the active, ascended Christ may
+come to many of His slothful followers the pleading question, as from
+His own lips, 'Dost thou not care that thou hast left me to serve
+alone?' Surely to us all it should bring inspiration and strength,
+courage and confidence, deliverance from man, and elevation above the
+reverence of blind impersonal forces. Surely we may all lay to heart
+the grand lesson that union with Him is our only strength, and oblivion
+of ourselves our highest wisdom. Surely he has best learned his true
+place and the worth of Jesus Christ, who abides with unmoved humility
+at His feet, and, like the lonely, lowly forerunner, puts away all
+temptations to self-assertion while joyfully accepting it as the law
+of his life to
+
+  'Fade in the light of the planet he loves,
+   To fade in his light and to die.'
+
+Blessed is he who is glad to say,' He must increase, I must
+decrease!'
+
+II. This same silence of Scripture as to so many of the apostles may
+be taken as suggesting what the real work of these delegated workers
+was.
+
+It certainly seems very strange that, if they were the possessors of
+such extraordinary powers as the theory of Apostolic Succession
+implies, we should hear so little of these in the narratives. The
+silence of Scripture about them goes a long way to discredit such
+ideas, while it is entirely accordant with a more modest view of the
+apostolic office.
+
+What was an apostle's function during the life of Christ? One of the
+evangelists divides it into three portions: to be with Jesus; to
+preach the kingdom; to cast out devils and to heal. There is nothing
+in these offices peculiar to them. The seventy had miraculous powers
+too, and some at least were our Lord's companions and preachers of
+His kingdom who were simple disciples. What was an apostle's
+function after the resurrection? Peter's words, on proposing the
+election of a new apostle, lay down the duty as simply 'to bear
+witness' of that resurrection. They were not supernatural channels
+of mysterious grace, not lords over God's heritage, not even leaders
+of the Church, but bearers of a testimony to the great historical
+fact, on the acceptance of which all belief in an historical Christ
+depended then and depends now. Each of the greater of the apostles
+is penetrated with the same thought. Paul disclaims anything beside
+in his 'Not I, but the grace of God in me.' Peter thrusts the
+question at the staring crowd, 'Why look ye on us as though by
+_our_ power or holiness _we_ had made this man to walk?' John, in his
+calm way, tells his children at Ephesus, 'Ye need not that any man
+teach you.'
+
+Such an idea of the apostolic office is far more reasonable and
+accordant with Scripture than a figment about unexampled powers and
+authority in the Church. It accounts for the qualifications as
+stated in the same address of Peter's, which merely secure the
+validity of their testimony. The one thing that _must_ be found
+in an apostle was that he should have been in familiar intercourse
+with Christ during his earthly life, both before and after His
+resurrection, in order that he might be able to say, 'I knew Him
+well; I know that He died; I know that He rose again; I saw Him go
+up to heaven.' For such a work there was no need for men of
+commanding power. Plain, simple, honest men who had the requisite
+eye-witness were sufficient. The guidance and the missionary work of
+the Church need not necessarily be in their hands, and, in fact,
+does not seem to have been. In harmony with this view of the office
+and its requisites, we find that Paul rests the validity of his
+apostolate on the fact that 'He was seen of me also,' and regards
+that vision as his true appointment which left him not 'one whit
+behind the very chiefest apostles.' Miraculous gifts indeed they
+had, and miraculous gifts they imparted; but in both instances
+others shared these powers with them. It was no apostle who laid his
+hands on the blinded Saul in that house in Damascus and said,
+'Receive the Holy Ghost.' An apostle stood by passive and wondering
+when the Holy Ghost fell on Cornelius and his comrades. In reality
+apostolic succession is absurd, because there is nothing to succeed
+to, except what cannot be transmitted, personal knowledge of the
+reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. To establish that fact
+as indubitable history is to lay the foundation of the Christian
+Church, and the eleven plain men, who did that, need no
+superstitious mist around them to magnify their greatness.
+
+In so far as any succession to them or any devolution of their office
+is possible, all Christian men inherit it, for to bear witness of the
+living power of the risen Lord is still the office and honour of
+every believing soul. It is still true that the sharpest weapon which
+any man can wield for Christ is the simple adducing of his own personal
+experience. 'That which we have seen and handled we declare' is still
+the best form into which our preaching can be cast. And such a voice
+every man and woman who has found the sweetness and the power of Christ
+filling their own souls, is bound--rather let us say, is privileged--to
+lift up. 'This honour have all the saints.' Christ is the true worker,
+and all our work is but to proclaim Him, and what He has done and is
+doing for ourselves and for all men.
+
+III. We may gather, too, the lesson of how often faithful work is
+unrecorded and forgotten.
+
+No doubt those apostles who have no place in the history toiled
+honestly and did their Lord's commands, and oblivion has swallowed
+it all. Bartholomew and 'Lebbaeus, whose surname was Thaddaeus,' and
+the rest of them, have no place in the record, and their obscure
+work is faded, faithful and good as certainly it was.
+
+So it will be sooner or later with us all. For most of us, our
+service has to be unnoticed and unknown, and the memory of our poor
+work will live perhaps for a year or two in the hearts of some few
+who loved us, but will fade wholly when they follow us into the
+silent land. Well, be it so; we shall sleep none the less sweetly,
+though none be talking about us over our heads. The world has a
+short memory, and, as the years go on, the list that it has to
+remember grows so crowded that it is harder and harder to find room
+to write a new name on it, or to read the old. The letters on the
+tombstones are soon erased by the feet that tramp across the
+churchyard. All that matters very little. The notoriety of our work
+is of no consequence. The earnestness and accuracy with which we
+strike our blow is all-important; but it matters nothing how far it
+echoes. It is not the heaven of heavens to be talked about, nor does
+a man's life consist in the abundance of newspaper or other
+paragraphs about him. 'The love of fame' is, no doubt, sometimes
+found in 'minds' otherwise 'noble,' but in itself is very much the
+reverse of noble. We shall do our work best, and be saved from much
+festering anxiety which corrupts our purest service and fevers our
+serenest thoughts, if we once fairly make up our minds to working
+unnoticed and unknown, and determine that, whether our post be a
+conspicuous or an obscure one, we shall fill it to the utmost of our
+power--careless of praise or censure, because our judgment is with
+our God; careless whether we are unknown or well known, because we
+are known altogether to Him.
+
+The magnitude of our work in men's eyes is as little important as
+the noise of it. Christ gave all the apostles their tasks--to some
+of them to found the Gentile churches, to some of them to leave to
+all generations precious teaching, to some of them none of these
+things. What then? Were the Peters and the Johns more highly
+favoured than the others? Was their work greater in His sight? Not
+so. To Him all service done from the same motive is the same, and
+His measure of excellence is the quantity of love and spiritual
+force in our deeds, not the width of the area over which they
+spread. An estuary that goes wandering over miles of shallows may
+have less water in it, and may creep more languidly, than the
+torrent that thunders through some narrow gorge. The deeds that
+stand highest on the records in heaven are not those which we
+vulgarly call great. Many 'a cup of cold water only' will be found
+to have been rated higher there than jewelled golden chalices
+brimming with rare wines. God's treasures, where He keeps His
+children's gifts, will be like many a mother's secret store of
+relics of her children, full of things of no value, what the world
+calls 'trash,' but precious in His eyes for the love's sake that was
+in them.
+
+All service which is done from the same motive and with the same
+spirit is of the same worth in His eyes. It does not matter whether
+you have the gospel in a penny Testament printed on thin paper with
+black ink and done up in cloth, or in an illuminated missal glowing
+in gold and colour, painted with loving care on fair parchment, and
+bound in jewelled ivory. And so it matters little about the material
+or the scale on which we express our devotion and our aspirations;
+all depends on what we copy, not on the size of the canvas on which,
+or on the material in which, we copy it. 'Small service is true
+service while it lasts,' and the unnoticed insignificant servants
+may do work every whit as good and noble as the most widely known,
+to whom have been intrusted by Christ tasks that mould the ages.
+
+IV. Finally, we may add that forgotten work is remembered, and
+unrecorded names are recorded above.
+
+The names of these almost anonymous apostles have no place in the
+records of the advancement of the Church or of the development of
+Christian doctrine. They drop out of the narrative after the list in
+the first chapter of the Acts. But we do hear of them once more. In
+that last vision of the great city which the seer beheld descending
+from God, we read that in its 'foundations were the names of the
+twelve apostles of the Lamb.' All were graven there--the inconspicuous
+names carved on no record of earth, as well as the familiar ones cut
+deep in the rock to be seen of all men for ever. At the least that
+grand image may tell us that when the perfect state of the Church is
+realised, the work which these men did when their testimony laid its
+foundation, will be for ever associated with their names. Unrecorded
+on earth, they are written in heaven.
+
+The forgotten work and its workers are remembered by Christ. His
+faithful heart and all-seeing eye keep them ever in view. The world,
+and the Church whom these humble men helped, may forget, yet He will
+not forget. From whatever muster-roll of benefactors and helpers
+their names may be absent, they will be in His list. The Apostle
+Paul, in his Epistle to the Philippians, has a saying in which his
+delicate courtesy is beautifully conspicuous, where he half apologises
+for not sending his greetings 'to others my fellow-workers' by name,
+and reminds them that, however their names may be unwritten in his
+letter, they have been inscribed by a mightier hand on a better page,
+and 'are in the Lamb's book of life.' It matters very little from what
+record ours may be absent so long as they are found there. Let us
+rejoice that, though we may live obscure and die forgotten, we may
+have our names written on the breastplate of our High Priest as He
+stands in the Holy Place, the breastplate which lies close to His
+heart of love, and is girded to His arm of power.
+
+The forgotten and unrecorded work lives, too, in the great whole. The
+fruit of our labour may perhaps not be separable from that of others,
+any more than the sowers can go into the reaped harvest-field and
+identify the gathered ears which have sprung from the seed that they
+sowed, but it is there all the same; and whosoever may be unable to
+pick out each man's share in the blessed total outcome, the Lord of
+the harvest knows, and His accurate proportionment of individual
+reward to individual service will not mar the companionship in the
+general gladness, when 'he that soweth and he that reapeth shall
+rejoice together.'
+
+The forgotten work will live, too, in blessed results to the doers.
+Whatever of recognition and honour we may miss here, we cannot be
+robbed of the blessing to ourselves, in the perpetual influence on
+our own character, of every piece of faithful even if imperfect
+service. Habits are formed, emotions deepened, principles confirmed,
+capacities enlarged by every deed done for Christ, and these make an
+over-measure of reward here, and in their perfect form hereafter are
+heaven. Nothing done for Him is ever wasted. 'Thou shalt find it
+after many days.' We are all writing our lives' histories here, as
+if with one of these 'manifold writers'--a black blank page beneath
+the flimsy sheet on which we write, but presently the black page
+will be taken away, and the writing will stand out plain on the page
+behind that we did not see. Life is the filmy, unsubstantial page on
+which our pen rests; the black page is death; and the page beneath
+is that indelible transcript of our earthly actions, which we shall
+find waiting for us to read, with shame and confusion of face, or
+with humble joy, in another world.
+
+Then let us do our work for Christ, not much careful whether it be
+greater or smaller, obscure or conspicuous; assured that whoever
+forgets us and it, He will remember, and however our names may be
+unrecorded on earth, they will be written in heaven, and confessed
+by Him before His Father and the holy angels.
+
+
+
+
+CHRIST'S CHARGE TO HIS HERALDS
+
+
+    'These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them,
+    saying, do not into the way of the Gentiles, and into
+    any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: 6. But go
+    rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. 7. And
+    as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at
+    hand. 8. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the
+    dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely
+    give. 9. Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in
+    your purses, 10. Nor scrip for your journey, neither
+    two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves: for the
+    workman is worthy of his meat. 11. And into whatsoever
+    city or town ye shall enter, enquire who in it is
+    worthy: and there abide till ye go thence. 12. And when
+    ye come into an house, salute it. 13. And if the house
+    be worthy, let your peace come upon it: but if it be
+    not worthy, let your peace return to you. 14. And
+    whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words,
+    when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the
+    dust of your feet. 15. Verily I say unto you, It shall
+    be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in
+    the day of judgment, than for that city. 16. Behold, I
+    send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye
+    therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.'
+    --Matt. x. 5-16.
+
+The letter of these instructions to the apostles has been abrogated
+by Christ, both in reference to the scope of, and the equipment for,
+their mission (Matt. xxviii. 19; Luke xxii. 36). The spirit of them
+remains as the perpetual obligation of all Christian workers, and
+every Christian should belong to that class. Some direct
+evangelistic work ought to be done by every believer, and in doing
+it he will find no better directory than this charge to the
+apostles.
+
+I. We have, first, the apostles' mission in its sphere and manner
+(vs. 5-8). They are told where to go and what to do there. Mark that
+the negative prohibition precedes the positive injunction, as if the
+apostles were already so imbued with the spirit of universalism that
+they would probably have overpassed the bounds which for the present
+were needful. The restriction was transient. It continued in the
+line of divine limitation of the sphere of Revelation which confined
+itself to the Jew, in order that through him it might reach the
+world. That method could not be abandoned till the Jew himself had
+destroyed it by rejecting Christ. Jesus still clung to it. Even when
+the commission was widened to 'all the world,' Paul went 'to the Jew
+first,' till he too was taught by uniform failure that Israel was
+fixed in unbelief.
+
+How tenderly our Lord designates the nation as 'the lost sheep of
+the house of Israel'! He is still influenced by that compassion
+which the sight of the multitudes had moved in Him (chap. ix. 36).
+Lost indeed, wandering with torn fleece, and lying panting, in
+ignorance of their pasture and their Shepherd, they are yet 'sheep,'
+and they belong to that chosen seed, sprung from so venerable
+ancestors, and heirs of so glorious promises. Clear sight of, and
+infinite pity for, men's miseries, must underlie all apostolic
+effort.
+
+The work to be done is twofold--a glad truth is to be proclaimed,
+gracious deeds of power are to be done. How blessed must be the kingdom,
+the forerunners of which are miracles of healing and life-giving! If
+the heralds can do these, what will not the King be able to do? If such
+hues attend the dawn, how radiant will be the noontide! Note 'as ye
+go,' indicating that they were travelling evangelists, and were to
+speak as they went, and go when they had spoken. The road was to be
+their pulpit, and each man they met their audience. What a different
+world it would be if Christians carried their message with them _so_!
+
+'Freely ye have received'; namely, in the first application of the
+words, the message of the coming kingdom and the power to work
+miracles. But the force of the injunction, as applied to us, is even
+more soul-subduing, as our gift is greater, and the freedom of its
+bestowal should evoke deeper gratitude. The deepest springs of the
+heart's love are set flowing by the undeserved, unpurchased gift of
+God, which contains in itself both the most tender and mighty motive
+for self-forgetting labour, and the pattern for Christian service.
+How can one who has received that gift keep it to himself? How can
+he sell what he got for nothing? 'Freely give'--the precept forbids
+the seeking of personal profit or advantage from preaching the
+gospel, and so makes a sharp test of our motives; and it also
+forbids clogging the gift with non-essential conditions, and so
+makes a sharp test of our methods.
+
+II. The prohibition to make gain out of the message, serves as a
+transition to the directions as to equipment. The apostles were to
+go as they stood; for the command is, '_Get_ you no gold,' etc.
+It has been already noted that these prohibitions were abrogated by
+Jesus in view of His departure, and the world-wide mission of the
+Church. But the spirit of them is not abrogated. Note that the
+descending value of the metals named makes an ascending stringency
+in the prohibition. Not even copper money is to be taken. The
+'wallet' was a leather satchel or bag, used by shepherds and others
+to carry a little food; sustenance, then, was also to be left
+uncared for. Dress, too, was to be limited to that in wear; no
+change of inner robe nor a spare pair of shoes was to encumber them,
+nor even a spare staff. If any of them had one in his hand, he was
+to take it (Mark vi. 8). The command was meant to lift the apostles
+above suspicion, to make them manifestly disinterested, to free them
+from anxiety about earthly things, that their message might absorb
+their thoughts and efforts, and to give room for the display of
+Christ's power to provide. It had a promise wrapped in it. He who
+forbade them to provide for themselves thereby pledged Himself to
+take care of them. 'The labourer is worthy of his food.' They may be
+sure of subsistence, and are not to wish for more.
+
+All this has a distinct bearing on modern church arrangements. On
+the one hand, it vindicates the right of those who preach the gospel
+to live of the gospel, and sets any payments to them on the right
+footing, as not being charity or generosity, but the discharge of a
+debt. On the other hand, it enjoins on preachers and others who are
+paid for service not to serve for pay, not to be covetous of large
+remuneration, and to take care that no taint of greed for money
+shall mar their work, but that their conduct may confirm their words
+when they say with Paul, 'We seek not yours, but you.'
+
+III. The conduct required from, and the reception met with by, the
+messengers come next. Christ first enjoins discretion and
+discrimination of character, so far as possible. The messenger of
+the kingdom is not to be mixed up with disreputable people, lest the
+message should suffer. The principle of his choice of a home is to
+be, not position, comfort, or the like, but 'worthiness'; that is,
+predisposition to receive the message. However poor the chamber in
+the house of such, there is the apostle to settle himself. 'If ye
+have judged me to be faithful, come into my house,' said Lydia. The
+less Christ's messengers are at home with Christ's neglecters, the
+calmer their own hearts, and the more potent their message. They
+give the lie to it, if they voluntarily choose as their associates
+those to whom their dearest convictions are idle. Christian charity
+does not blind to distinctions of character. A little common sense
+in reading these will save many a scandal, and much weakening of
+influence.
+
+Christian earnestness does not abolish courtesy. The message is not
+to be blurted out in defiance of even conventional forms. Zeal for
+the Lord is no excuse for rude abruptness. But the salutation of the
+true apostle will deepen the meaning of such forms, and make the
+conventional the real expression of real goodwill. No man should say
+'Peace be unto you' so heartily as Christ's servant. The servant's
+benediction will bring the Master's ratification; for Jesus says,
+'_Let_ your peace come upon it,' as if commanding the good
+which we can only wish. That will be so, if the requisite condition
+is fulfilled. There must be soil for the seed to root in.
+
+But no true wish for others' good--still more, no effort for it--is
+ever void of blessed issue. If the peace does not rest on a house
+into which jarring and sin forbid its entrance, it will not be
+homeless, but come back, like the dove to the ark, and fold its
+wings in the heart of the sender. The reflex influence of Christian
+effort is precious, whatever its direct results are. How the Church
+has been benefited by its missionary enterprises!
+
+Jesus encouraged no illusions in His servants as to their success.
+From the beginning they were led to expect that some would receive
+and some would reject their words. In this rapid preparatory
+mission, there was no time for long delay anywhere; but for us, it
+is not wise to conclude that patient effort will fail because first
+appeals have not succeeded. Much close communion with Jesus, not a
+little self-suppression, and abundant practical wisdom, are needed
+to determine the point at which further efforts are vain. No doubt,
+there is often great waste of strength in trying to impress
+unimpressible people, or to revive some moribund enterprise; but it
+is a pardonable weakness to be reluctant to abandon a field. Still
+it _is_ a weakness, and there come times when the only right
+thing to do is to 'shake off the dust' of the messenger's feet in
+token that all connection is ended, and that he is clear from the
+blood of the rejecters. The awful doom of such is solemnly
+introduced by 'Verily, I say unto you.' It rests on the plain
+principle that the measure of light is the measure of criminality,
+and hence the measure of punishment. The rejecters of Christ among
+us are as much more guilty than 'that city' as its inhabitants were
+than the men of Sodom.
+
+The first section of this charge properly ends with verse 15, the
+following verse being a transition to the second part. The Greek
+puts strong emphasis on 'I.' It is He who sends among wolves,
+therefore He will protect. A strange thing for a shepherd to do! A
+strange encouragement for the apostles on the threshold of their
+work! But the words would often come back to them when beset by the
+pack with their white teeth gleaming, and their howls filling the
+night. They are not promised that they will not be torn, but they
+are assured that, even if they are, the Shepherd wills it, and will
+not lose one of His flock.
+
+What is the Christian defence? Prudence like the serpent's, but not
+the serpent's craft or malice; harmlessness like the dove's, but not
+without the other safeguard of 'wisdom.' The combination is a rare
+one, and the surest way to possess it is to live so close to Jesus
+that we shall be progressively changed into His likeness. Then our
+prudence will never degenerate into cunning, nor our simplicity
+become blindness to dangers. The Christian armour and arms are meek,
+unconquerable patience, and Christ-likeness, To resist is to be
+beaten; to endure unretaliating is to be victorious. 'Be not
+overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.'
+
+
+
+
+THE WIDENED MISSION, ITS PERILS AND DEFENCES
+
+
+    'Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of
+    wolves; be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless
+    as doves. 17. But beware of men: for they will deliver
+    you up to the councils, and they will scourge you in
+    their synagogues; 18. And ye shall be brought before
+    governors and kings for My sake, for a testimony
+    against them and the Gentiles. 19. But when they
+    deliver you up, take no thought how or what ye shall
+    speak: for it shall be given you in that same hour what
+    ye shall speak. 20. For it is not ye that speak, but
+    the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you.
+    21. And the brother shall deliver up the brother to
+    death, and the father the child: and the children shall
+    rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put
+    to death. 22. And ye shall be hated of all men for My
+    name's sake: but he that endureth to the end shall be
+    saved. 23. But when they persecute you in this city,
+    flee ye into another: for verily I say unto you, Ye
+    shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the
+    Son of Man be come. 24. The disciple is not above his
+    master, nor the servant above his lord. 25. It is
+    enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and
+    the servant as his lord. If they have called the master
+    of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they call
+    them of his household? 26. Fear them not therefore: for
+    there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed;
+    and hid, that shall not be known. 27. What I tell you
+    in darkness, that speak ye in light: and what ye hear
+    in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops. 28. And
+    fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to
+    kill the soul: but rather fear Him which is able to
+    destroy both soul and body in hell. 29. Are not two
+    sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not
+    fall on the ground without your Father. 30. But the
+    very hairs of your head are all numbered. 31. Fear ye
+    not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.'
+    --MATT. x. 16-31.
+
+We have already had two instances of Matthew's way of bringing
+together sayings and incidents of a like kind without regard to
+their original connection. The Sermon on the Mount and the series of
+miracles in chapters viii. and ix. are groups, the elements of which
+are for the most part found disconnected in Mark and Luke. This
+charge to the twelve in chapter x. seems to present a third
+instance, and to pass over in verse 16 to a wider mission than that
+of the twelve during our Lord's lifetime, for it forebodes
+persecution, whereas the preceding verses opened no darker prospect
+than that of indifference or non-reception. The 'city' which, in
+that stage of the gospel message, simply would 'not receive you nor
+hear your words,' in this stage has worsened into one where 'they
+persecute you,' and the persecutors are now 'kings' and 'Gentiles,'
+as well as Jewish councils and synagogue-frequenters. The period
+covered in these verses, too, reaches to the 'end,' the final
+revelation of all hidden things.
+
+Obviously, then, our Lord is looking down a far future, and giving a
+charge to the dim crowd of His later disciples, whom His prescient
+eye saw pressing behind the twelve in days to come. He had no dreams
+of swift success, but realised the long, hard fight to which He was
+summoning His disciples. And His frankness in telling them the worst
+that they had to expect was as suggestive as was His freedom from
+the rosy, groundless visions of at once capturing a world which
+enthusiasts are apt to cherish, till hard experience shatters the
+illusions. He knew the future in store for Himself, for His Gospel,
+for His disciples. And He knew that dangers and death itself will
+not appal a soul that is touched into heroic self-forgetfulness by
+His love. 'Set down my name,' says the man in _Pilgrim's Progress_,
+though he knew--may we not say, because he knew?--that the enemies
+were outside waiting to fall on him.
+
+A further difference between this and the preceding section is, that
+there the stress was laid on the contents of the disciples' message,
+but that here it is laid on their sufferings. Not so much by what
+they say, as by how they endure, are they to testify. 'The noble
+army of martyrs praise Thee,' and the primitive Church preached
+Jesus most effectually by dying for Him.
+
+The keynote is struck in verse 16, in which are to be noted the
+'Behold,' which introduces something important and strange, and
+calls for close attention; the majestic '_I_ send you,' which
+moves to obedience whatever the issues, and pledges Him to defend
+the poor men who are going on His errands and the pathetic picture
+of the little flock huddled together, while the gleaming teeth of
+the wolves gnash all round them. A strange theme to drape in a
+metaphor! but does not the very metaphor help to lighten the
+darkness of the picture, as well as speak of His calmness, while He
+contemplates it? If the Shepherd sends His sheep into the midst of
+wolves, surely He will come to their help, and surely any peril is
+more courageously faced when they can say to themselves, 'He put us
+here.' The sheep has no claws to wound with nor teeth to tear with,
+but the defenceless Christian has a defence, and in his very
+weaponlessness wields the sharpest two-edged sword. 'Force from
+force must ever flow.' Resistance is a mistake. The victorious
+antagonist of savage enmity is patient meekness. 'Sufferance is the
+badge of all' true servants of Jesus. Wherever they have been
+misguided enough to depart from Christ's law of endurance and to
+give blow for blow, they have lost their cause in the long run, and
+have hurt their own Christian life more than their enemies' bodies.
+Guilelessness and harmlessness are their weapons. But 'be ye wise as
+serpents' is equally imperative with 'guileless as doves.' Mark the
+fine sanity of that injunction, which not only permits but enjoins
+prudent self-preservation, so long as it does not stoop to crooked
+policy, and is saved from that by dove-like guilelessness. A
+difficult combination, but a possible one, and when realised, a
+beautiful one!
+
+The following verses (17-22) expand the preceding, and mingle in a
+very remarkable way plain predictions of persecution to the death
+and encouragements to front the worst. Jewish councils and
+synagogues, Gentile governors and kings, will unite for once in
+common hatred, than which there is no stronger bond. That is a grim
+prospect to set before a handful of Galilean peasants, but two
+little words turn its terror into joy; it is 'for My sake,' and that
+is enough. Jesus trusted His humble friends, as He trusts all such
+always, and believed that 'for My sake' was a talisman which would
+sweeten the bitterest cup and would make cowards into heroes, and
+send men and women to their deaths triumphant. And history has
+proved that He did not trust them too much. 'For His sake'--is that
+a charm for _us_, which makes the crooked straight and the
+rough places plain, which nerves for suffering and impels to noble
+acts, which moulds life and takes the sting and the terror out of
+death? Nor is that the only encouragement given to the twelve, who
+might well be appalled at the prospect of standing before Gentile
+kings. Jesus seems to discern how they shrank as they listened, at
+the thought of having to bear 'testimony' before exalted personages,
+and, with beautiful adaptation to their weakness, He interjects a
+great promise, which, for the first time, presents the divine Spirit
+as dwelling in the disciples' spirits. The occasion of the dawning
+of that great Christian thought is very noteworthy, and not less so
+is the designation of the Spirit as 'of your Father,' with all the
+implications of paternal care and love which that name carries.
+Special crises bring special helps, and the martyrologies of all
+ages and lands, from Stephen outside the city wall to the last
+Chinese woman, have attested the faithfulness of the Promiser. How
+often have some calm, simple words from some slave girl in Roman
+cities, or some ignorant confessor before Inquisitors, been
+manifestly touched with heavenly light and power, and silenced
+sophistries and threats!
+
+The solemn foretelling of persecution, broken for a moment, goes on
+and becomes even more foreboding, for it speaks of dearest ones
+turned to foes, and the sweet sanctities of family ties dissolved by
+the solvent of the new Faith. There is no enemy like a brother
+estranged, and it is tragically significant that it is in connection
+with the rupture of family bonds that death is first mentioned as
+the price that Christ's messengers would have to pay for
+faithfulness to their message. But the prediction springs at a
+bound, as it were, from the narrow circle of home to the widest
+range, and does not fear to spread before the eyes of the twelve
+that they will become the objects of hatred to the whole human race
+if they are true to Christ's charge. The picture is dark enough, and
+it has turned out to be a true forecast of facts. It suggests two
+questions. What right had Jesus to send men out on such an errand,
+and to bid them gladly die for Him? And what made these men gladly
+take up the burden which He laid on them? He has the right to
+dispose of us, because He is the Son of God who has died for us.
+Otherwise He is not entitled to say to us, Do my bidding, even if it
+leads you to death. His servants find their inspiration to absolute,
+unconditional self-surrender in the Love that has died for them.
+That which gives Him His right to dispose of us in life and death
+gives us the disposition to yield ourselves wholly to Him, to be His
+apostles according to our opportunities, and to say, 'Whether I live
+or die, I am the Lord's.'
+
+That thought of world-wide hatred is soothed by the recurrence of
+the talisman, 'For My name's sake,' and by a moment's showing of a
+fair prospect behind the gloom streaked with lightning in the
+foreground. 'He that endureth to the end shall be saved.' The same
+saying occurs in chapter xxiv. 13, in connection with the prediction
+of the fall of Jerusalem, and in the same connection in Mark xiii.
+13, in both of which places several other sayings which appear in
+this charge to the apostles are found. It is impossible to settle
+which is the original place for these, or whether they were twice
+spoken. The latter supposition is very unfashionable at present, but
+has perhaps more to say for itself than modern critics are willing
+to allow. But Luke (xxi. 19) has a remarkable variation of the
+saying, for his version of it is, 'In your patience, ye shall win
+your souls.' His word 'patience' is a noun cognate with the verb
+rendered in Matthew and Mark 'endureth,' and to 'win one's soul' is
+obviously synonymous with being 'saved.' The saying cannot be
+limited, in any of its forms, to a mere securing of earthly life,
+for in this context it plainly includes those who have been
+delivered to death by parents and brethren, but who by death have
+won their lives, and have been, as Paul expected to be, thereby
+'saved into His heavenly kingdom.' To the Christian, death is the
+usher who introduces him into the presence-chamber of the King, and
+he that loseth his life 'for My name's sake,' finds it glorified in,
+and into, life eternal.
+
+But willingness to endure the utmost is to be accompanied with
+willingness to take all worthy means to escape it. There has been a
+certain unwholesome craving for martyrdom generated in times of
+persecution, which may appear noble but is very wasteful. The worst
+use that you can put a man to is to burn him, and a living witness
+may do more for Christ than a dead martyr. Christian heroism may be
+shown in not being afraid to flee quite as much as in courting, or
+passively awaiting, danger. And Christ's Name will be spread when
+His lovers are hounded from one city to another, just as it was when
+'they that were scattered abroad, went everywhere, preaching the
+word.' When the brands are kicked apart by the heel of violence,
+they kindle flames where they fall.
+
+But the reason for this command to flee is perplexing. 'Ye shall not
+have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come.' Is
+Jesus here reverting to the narrower immediate mission of the
+apostles? What 'coming' is referred to? We have seen that the first
+mission of the twelve was the theme of verses 5-15, and was there
+pursued to its ultimate consequences of final judgment on rejecters,
+whilst the wider horizon of a future mission opens out from verse 16
+onwards. A renewed contraction of the horizon is extremely unlikely.
+It would be as if 'a flower should shut and be a bud again.' The
+recurrence in verse 23 of 'Verily I say unto you,' which has already
+occurred in verse 15, closing the first section of the charge, makes
+it probable that here too a section is completed, and that
+probability is strengthened if it is observed that the same phrase
+occurs, for a third time, in the last verse of the chapter, where
+again the discourse soars to the height of contemplating the final
+reward. The fact that the apostles met with no persecution on their
+first mission, puts out of court the explanation of the words that
+refers them to that mission, and takes the 'coming' to be Jesus' own
+appearances in the places they had preceded Him as His heralds. The
+difficult question as to what is the _terminus ad quem_ pointed
+to here seems best solved by taking the 'coming of the Son of Man'
+to be His judicial manifestation in the destruction of Jerusalem and
+the consequent desolation of many of 'the cities of Israel,' whilst
+at the same time, the nearer and smaller catastrophe is a prophecy
+and symbol of the remoter and greater 'day of the Son of Man' at the
+end of the days. The recognition of that aspect of the fall of
+Jerusalem is forced on us by the eschatological parts of the
+Gospels, which are a bewildering whirl without it. Here, however, it
+is the crash of the fall itself which is in view, and the thought
+conveyed is that there would be cities enough to serve for refuges,
+and scope enough for evangelistic work, till the end of the Jewish
+possession of the land.
+
+In verses 26-31, 'fear not' is thrice spoken, and at each occurrence
+is enforced by a reason. The first of these encouragements is the
+assurance of the certain ultimate world-wide manifestation of hidden
+things. That same dictum occurs in other connections, and with other
+applications, but in the present context can only be taken as an
+assurance that the Gospel message, little known as it thus far was,
+was destined to fill all ears. Therefore the disciples were to be
+fearless in doing their part in making it known, and so working in
+alliance with the divine purpose. It is the same thing that is meant
+by the 'covered' that 'shall be revealed,' the 'hidden' that 'shall
+be known,' 'that which is spoken in darkness,' and 'that which is
+whispered in the ear'; and all four designations refer to the word
+which every Christian has it in charge to sound out. We note that
+Jesus foresees a far wider range of publicity for His servants'
+ministry than for His own, just as He afterwards declared that they
+would do 'greater works' than His. He spoke to a handful of men in
+an obscure corner of the world. His teaching was necessarily largely
+confidential communication to the fit few. But the spark is going to
+be a blaze, and the whisper to become a shout that fills the world.
+Surely, then, we who are working in the line of direction of God's
+working should let no fear make us dumb, but should ever hear and
+obey the command: 'Lift up thy voice with strength, lift it up, be
+not afraid.'
+
+A second reason for fearlessness is the limitation of the enemy's
+power to hurt, reinforced by the thought that, while the penalties
+that man can inflict for faithfulness are only corporeal,
+transitory, and incapable of harming the true self, the consequences
+of unfaithfulness fling the whole man, body and soul, down to utter
+ruin. There is a fear that makes cowards and apostates; there is a
+fear which makes heroes and apostles. He who fears God, with the awe
+that has no torment and is own sister to love, is afraid of nothing
+and of no man. That holy and blessed fear drives out all other, as
+fire draws the heat out of a burn. He that serves Christ is lord of
+the world; he that fears God fronts the world, and is not afraid.
+
+The last reason for fearlessness touches a tender chord, and
+discloses a gracious thought of God as Father, which softens the
+tremendous preceding word: 'Who is able to destroy both soul and
+body in hell.' Take both designations together, and let them work
+together in producing the awe which makes us brave, and the filial
+trust which makes us braver. A bird does not 'fall to the ground'
+unless wounded, and if it falls it dies. Jesus had looked pityingly
+on the great mystery, the woes of the creatures, and had stayed
+Himself on the thought of the all-embracing working of God. The very
+dying sparrow, with broken wing, had its place in that universal
+care. God is 'immanent' in nature. The antithesis often drawn
+between His universal care and His 'special providence' is
+misleading. Providence is special because it is universal. That
+which embraces everything must embrace each thing. But the immanent
+God is 'your Father,' and because of that sonship, 'ye are of more
+value than many sparrows.' There is an ascending order, and an
+increasing closeness and tenderness of relation. 'A man is better
+than a sheep,' and Christians, being God's children, may count on
+getting closer into the Father's heart than the poor crippled bird
+can, or than the godless man can. 'Your Father,' on the one hand,
+can destroy soul and body, therefore fear Him; but, on the other, He
+determines whether you shall 'fall to the ground' or soar above
+dangers, therefore fear none but Him.
+
+
+
+
+LIKE TEACHER, LIKE SCHOLAR
+
+
+    'The disciple is not above his master, nor the servant
+    above his lord. 26. It is enough for the disciple that
+    he be as his master, and the servant as his lord.'
+    --MATT. x. 24, 25.
+
+These words were often on Christ's lips. Like other teachers, He too
+had His favourite sayings, the light of which He was wont to flash
+into many dark places. Such a saying, for instance, was, 'To him
+that hath shall be given.' Such a saying is this of my text; and
+probably several other of our Lord's utterances, which are repeated
+more than once in different Gospels, and have too hastily been
+sometimes assumed to have been introduced erroneously by the
+evangelists, in varying connections.
+
+This half-proverb occurs four times in the Gospels, and in three
+very different connections, pointing to three different subjects.
+Here, and once in John's Gospel, in the fifteenth chapter, it is
+employed to enforce the lesson of the oneness of Christ and His
+disciples in their relation to the world; and that His servants
+cannot expect to be better off than the Master was. 'If they have
+called Me Beelzebub they will not call you anything else.'
+
+Then in Luke's Gospel (vi. 40) it is employed to illustrate the
+principle that the scholar cannot expect to be wiser than his
+master; that a blind teacher will have blind pupils, and that they
+will both fall into the ditch. Of course, the scholar may get beyond
+his master, but then he will get up and go away from the school, and
+will not be his scholar any longer. As long as he is a scholar, the
+best that can happen to him, and that will not often happen, is to
+be on the level of his teacher.
+
+Then in another place in John's Gospel (xiii. 16) the saying is
+employed in reference to a different subject, viz. to teach the
+meaning of the pathetic, symbolical foot-washing, and to enforce the
+exhortation to imitate Jesus Christ, as generally in conduct, so
+specially in His wondrous humility. 'The servant is not greater than
+his lord.' 'I have left you an example that ye should do as I have
+done to you.'
+
+So if we put these three instances together we get a threefold
+illustration of the relation between the disciple and the teacher,
+in respect to wisdom, conduct, and reception by the world. And these
+three, with their bearing on the relation between Christians and
+Jesus Christ, open out large fields of duty and of privilege. The
+very centre of Christianity is discipleship, and the very highest
+hope, as well as the most imperative command which the Gospel brings
+to men is, 'Be like Him whom you profess to have taken as your
+Master. Be like Him here, and you shall be like Him hereafter.'
+
+I. Likeness to the teacher in wisdom is the disciple's perfection.
+
+'If the blind lead the blind both shall fall into the ditch.' 'The
+disciple is not greater than his master.' 'It is enough for the
+disciple that he be as his master.' If that be a true principle,
+that the best that can happen to the scholar is to tread in his
+teacher's footsteps, to see with his eyes, to absorb his wisdom, to
+learn his truth, we may apply it in two opposite directions. First,
+it teaches us the limitations, and the misery, and the folly of
+taking men for our masters; and then, on the other hand, it teaches
+us the large hope, the blessing, freedom, and joy of having Christ
+for our Master.
+
+Now, first, look at the principle as bearing upon the relation of
+disciple and human teacher. All such teachers have their
+limitations. Each man has his little circle of favourite ideas that
+he is perpetually reiterating. In fact, it seems as if one truth was
+about as much as one teacher could manage, and as if, whensoever God
+had any great truth to give to the world, He had to take one man and
+make him its sole apostle. So that teachers become mere fragments,
+and to listen to them is to dwarf and narrow oneself.
+
+The chances are that no scholar shall be on his master's level. The
+eyes that see truth directly and for themselves in this world are
+very few. Most men have to take truth at second-hand, and few indeed
+are they who, like a perfect medium, receive even the fragmentary
+truth that human lips can impart to them, and transmit it as pure as
+they receive it. Disciples present exaggerations, caricatures,
+misconceptions, the limitations of the master becoming even more
+rigid in the pupil. Schools spring up which push the founder's
+teaching to extremes, and draw conclusions from it which he never
+dreamed of. Instead of a fresh voice, we have echoes, which, like
+all echoes, give only a syllable or two out of a sentence. Teachers
+can tell what they see, but they cannot give their followers eyes,
+and so the followers can do little more than repeat what their
+leader said he saw. They are like the little suckers that spring up
+from the 'stool' of a cut-down tree, or like the kinglets among
+whose feebler hands the great empire of an Alexander was divided at
+his death.
+
+It is a dwarfing thing to call any man master upon earth. And yet
+men will give to a man the credence which they refuse to Christ. The
+followers of some of the fashionable teachers of to-day--Comte,
+Spencer, or others--protest, in the name of mental independence,
+against accepting Christ as the absolute teacher of morals and
+religion, and then go away and put a man in the very place which
+they have denied to Him, and swallow down his _dicta_ whole.
+
+Such facts show how heart and mind crave a teacher; how discipleship
+is ingrained in our nature; how we all long for some one who shall
+come to us authoritatively and say, 'Here is truth--believe it and
+live on it.' And yet it is fatal to pin one's faith on any, and it
+is miserable to have to change guides perpetually and to feel that
+we have outgrown those whom we reverence, and that we can look down
+on the height which once seemed to touch the stars--and, if we cut
+ourselves loose from all men's teaching, the isolation is dreary,
+and few of us are strong enough of arm, or clear enough of eye, to
+force or find the path through the tangled jungles of error.
+
+So take this thought, that the highest hope of a disciple is to be
+like the master in wisdom, in its bearing on the relation between us
+and Christ, and look how it then flashes up into blessedness and
+beauty.
+
+Such a teacher as we have in Him has no limitations, and it is safe
+to follow Him absolutely and Him alone. All others have plainly
+borne the impress of their age, or their nation, or their
+idiosyncrasy, in some way or another; Christ Jesus is the only
+teacher that the world has ever heard of, in whose teaching there is
+no mark of the age or generation or set of circumstances in which it
+originated. This water does not taste of any soil through which it
+has passed, it has come straight down from Heaven, and is pure and
+uncontaminated as the Heaven from which it has come. This teacher is
+safe to listen to absolutely: there are no limitations there; you
+never hear Him arguing; there is no sign about His words as if He
+had ever dug out for Himself the wisdom that He is proclaiming, or
+had ever seen it less distinctly than He sees it at the moment. The
+great peculiarity of His teaching is that He does not reason, but
+declares that His 'Verily! Verily!' is the confirmation of all His
+message. His teaching is Himself; other men bring lessons about truth;
+He says, 'I am the Truth.' Other teachers keep their personality in
+the background; He clashes His down in the foreground. Other men say,
+'Listen to what I tell you, never mind about me.' He says, 'This is
+life eternal, that ye should believe on Me.' This Teacher has His
+message level to all minds, high and low, wise and foolish, cultivated
+and rude. This Teacher does not only impart wisdom by words as from
+without, though He does that too, but He comes into men's spirits, and
+communicates Himself, and so makes them wise. Other teachers fumble at
+the outside, but 'in the hidden parts He makes me to know wisdom.' So
+it is safe to take this Teacher absolutely, and to say, 'Thou art my
+Master, Thy word is truth, and the opening of Thy lips to me is wisdom.'
+
+In following Christ as our absolute Teacher, there is no sacrifice
+of independence or freedom of mind, but listening to Him is the way
+to secure these in their highest degree. We are set free from men,
+we are growingly delivered from errors and misconceptions, in the
+measure in which we keep close to Christ as our Master. The Lord is
+that Teacher, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there, and there
+only, is liberty; freedom from self, from the dominion of popular
+opinion, from the coterie-speech of schools, from the imposing
+authority of individuals, and from all that makes cowardly men say
+as other people say, and fall in with the majority; and freedom from
+our own prejudices and our own errors, which are cleared away when
+we take Christ for our Master and cleave to Him.
+
+His teaching can never cease until it has accomplished its purpose,
+and not until we have gathered into our consciousness all the truth
+that He has to give, and have received all the wisdom that He can
+impart unto us as to God and Himself, does His teaching cease. Here
+we may grow indefinitely in the knowledge of Christ, and in the
+future we shall know even as we are known. His merciful teaching
+will not come to a close till we have drunk in all His wisdom, and
+till He has declared to us all which He has heard of the Father. He
+will pass us from one form to another of His school, but in Heaven
+we shall still be His scholars; 'Every one shall sit at Thy feet,
+every one shall receive of Thy words.'
+
+So, then, let us turn away from men, from rabbis and Sanhedrins,
+from authorities and schools, from doctors and churches. Why resort
+to cisterns when we may draw from the spring? Why listen to men when
+we may hear Christ? He is, as Dante called the great Greek thinker,
+'the Master of those who know.' Why should we look to the planets
+when we can see the sun? 'Call no man master upon earth, for One is
+your Master, and all ye are brethren.' And His merciful teaching
+will never cease until 'everyone that is perfected shall be as his
+Master.'
+
+II. Now, turn to the second application of this principle. Likeness
+to the Master in life is the law of a disciple's conduct.
+
+That pathetic and wonderful story about the foot-washing in John's
+Gospel is meant for a symbol. It is the presenting, in a picturesque
+form, of the very heart and essence of Christ's Incarnation in its
+motive and purpose. The solemn prelude with which the evangelist
+introduces it lays bare our Lord's heart and His reason for His
+action. 'Having loved His own, which were in the world, He loved
+them to the end.' His motive, then, was love. Again, the exalted
+consciousness which accompanied His self-abasement is made prominent
+in the words, 'Knowing that the Father had given all things into His
+hand, and that He was come from God and went to God.' And the
+majestic deliberation and patient continuance in resolved humility
+with which He goes down the successive steps of the descent, are
+wonderfully given in the evangelist's record of how He 'riseth from
+supper, and laid aside His garments and girded Himself, and poured
+water into the basin.' It is a parable. Thus, in the consciousness
+of His divine authority and dignity, and moved by His love to the
+whole world, He laid aside the garments of His glory, and vested
+Himself with the towel of His humanity, the servant's garb, and took
+the water of His cleansing power, and came to wash the feet of all
+who will let Him cleanse them from their soil. And then, having
+reassumed His garments, He speaks from His throne to those who have
+been cleansed by His humiliation and His sacrifice, 'Know ye what I
+have done to you? The servant is not greater than his lord.'
+
+That is to say, dear brethren, in this one incident, which is the
+condensation, so to speak, of the whole spirit of His life, is the
+law for our lives as well. We, too, are bound to that same love as
+the main motive of all our actions; we, too, are bound to that same
+stripping off of dignity and lowly equalising of ourselves with
+those below us whom we would help, and we, too, are bound to make it
+our main object, in our intercourse with men, not merely that we
+should please nor enlighten them, nor succour their lower temporal
+needs, but that we should cleanse them and make them pure with the
+purity that Christ gives.
+
+A Christian life all moved and animated by self-denuding love, and
+which came amongst men to make them better and purer, and all the
+influence of which tended in the direction of helping poor foul
+hearts to get rid of their filth, how different it would be from our
+lives! What a grim contrast much of our lives is to the Master's
+example and command! Did you ever strip yourself of anything, my
+brother, in order to make some poor, wretched creature a little
+purer and liker the Saviour? Did you ever drop your dignity and go
+down to the low levels in order to lift up the people that were
+there? Do men see anything of that example, as reproduced in your
+lives, of the Master that lays aside the garments of Heaven for the
+vesture of earth, and dies upon the Cross in order that He might
+make our poor hearts purer and liker His own?
+
+But, hard as such imitation is, it is only one case of a general
+principle. Discipleship is likeness to Jesus Christ in conduct.
+There is no discipleship worth naming which does not, at least,
+attempt that likeness. What is the use of a man saying that he is
+the disciple of Incarnate Love if his whole life is incarnate
+selfishness? What is the use of your calling yourselves Christians,
+and saying that you are followers of Jesus Christ, when He came to
+do God's will and delighted in it, and you come to do your own, and
+never do God's will at all, or scarcely at all, and then reluctantly
+and with many a murmur? What kind of a disciple is he, the habitual
+tenor of whose life contradicts the life of his Master and disobeys
+His commandments? And I am bound to say that that is the life of an
+enormously large proportion of the professing disciples in this age
+of conventional Christianity.
+
+'The disciple shall be as his master.' Do you make it your effort to
+be like Him? If so, then the saying is not only a law, but a
+promise, for it assures us that our effort shall not fail but
+progressively succeed, and lead on at last to our becoming what we
+behold, and being conformed to Him whom we love, and like the Master
+to whose wisdom we profess to listen. They whose earthly life is a
+following of Christ, with faltering steps and afar off, shall have
+for their heavenly blessedness, that they shall 'follow the Lamb
+whithersoever He goeth.'
+
+III. And now, lastly, likeness to the Master in relation to the
+world is the fate that the disciple must put up with.
+
+'If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much
+more shall they call them of his household?' 'The disciple is not
+above his master, nor the servant above his lord.' Our Lord
+reiterated the statement in another place in John's Gospel,
+reminding them that He had said it before.
+
+If we are like Jesus Christ in conduct, and if we have received His
+Word as the truth upon which we repose, depend upon it, in our
+measure and in varying fashions, we shall have to bear the same kind
+of treatment that He received from the world. The days of so-called
+persecution are over in so-called Christian countries, but if you
+are a disciple in the sense of believing all that Jesus Christ says,
+and taking Him for your Teacher, the public opinion of this day will
+have a great many things to say about you that will not be very
+pleasant. You will be considered to be 'old-fashioned,' 'narrow,'
+'behind the times,' etc. etc. etc. Look at the bitter spirit of
+antagonism to an earnest and simple Christianity and adoption of
+Christ as our authoritative Teacher which goes through much of our
+high-class literature to-day. It is a very small matter as measured
+with what Christian men used to have to bear; but it indicates the
+set of things. We may make up our minds that if we are not contented
+with the pared-down Christianity which the world allows to pass at
+present, but insist upon coming to the New Testament for our beliefs
+and practices, and avow--'I believe all that Jesus Christ says, and
+I believe it because He says it, and I take Him as my model'; we
+shall find out that the disciple has to be 'as his Master,' and that
+the Pharisees and the Scribes of to-day stand in the same relation
+to the followers as their predecessors did to the Leader. If you are
+like your Master in conduct, you will be no more popular with the
+world than He was. As long as Christianity will be quiet, and let
+the world go its own gait, the world is very well contented to let
+it alone, or even to say polite things to it. Why should the world
+take the trouble of persecuting the kind of Christianity that so
+many of us display? What is the difference between our Christianity
+and their worldliness? The world is quite willing to come to church
+on Sundays, and to call itself a Christian world, if only it may
+live as it likes. And many professing Christians have precisely the
+same idea. They attend to the externals of Christianity, and call
+themselves Christians, but they bargain for its having very little
+power over their lives. Why, then, should two sets of people who
+have the same ideas and practices dislike each other? No reason at
+all! But let Christian men live up to their profession, and above
+all let them become aggressive, and try to attack the world's evil,
+as they are bound to do; let them fight drunkenness, let them go
+against the lust of great cities, let them preach peace in the face
+of a nation howling for war, let them apply the golden rules of
+Christianity to commerce and social relationships and the like, and
+you will very soon hear a pretty shout that will tell you that the
+disciple who is a disciple has to share the fate of the Master,
+notwithstanding nineteen centuries of Christian teaching.
+
+If you do not know what it is to find yourselves out of harmony with
+the world, I am afraid it is because you have less of the Master's
+spirit than you have of the world's. The world loves its own. If you
+are not 'of the world, the world will hate you.' If it does not, it
+must be because, in spite of your name, you belong to it.
+
+But if we are like Him in our relation to the world, because we are
+like Him in character, our very share in 'His reproach,' and our
+sense of being 'aliens' here, bear the promise that we shall be like
+Him in all worlds. His fortune is ours. 'The disciple shall be as
+his master.' If we suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him. No
+cross, no crown;--if cross, then crown! The end of discipleship is
+not reached until the Master's image and the Master's lot are
+repeated in the scholar.
+
+Take Christ for your sacrifice, trust to His blood, listen to His
+teaching, walk in His footsteps, and you shall share His sovereignty
+and sit on His throne. 'It is enough,'--ay! more than enough, and
+nothing less than that is enough,--'for the disciple that he be
+_as_'--and _with_--'his master.' 'I shall be satisfied when I awake in
+Thy likeness.'
+
+
+
+
+
+THE KING'S CHARGE TO HIS AMBASSADORS
+
+
+    'Whosoever therefore shall confess Me before men, him
+    will I confess also before My Father which is in heaven.
+    33. But whosoever shall deny Me before men, him will I
+    also deny before My Father which is in heaven. 34. Think
+    not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to
+    send peace, but a sword. 35. For I am come to set a man
+    at variance against his father, and the daughter against
+    her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother
+    in law. 36. And man's foes shall be they of his own
+    household. 37. He that loveth father or mother more than
+    Me is not worthy of Me: and he that loveth son or
+    daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. 38. And he
+    that taketh not his cross, and followeth after Me, is
+    not worthy of Me. 39. He that findeth his life shall
+    lose it: and he that loseth his life for My sake shall
+    find it 40. He that receiveth you receiveth Me, and he
+    that receiveth Me receiveth Him that sent Me. 41. He
+    that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall
+    receive a prophet's reward; and he that receiveth a
+    righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall
+    receive a righteous man's reward. 42. And whosoever
+    shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup
+    of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I
+    say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward.'
+    --MATT. x. 32-42.
+
+The first mission of the apostles, important as it was, was but a
+short flight to try the young birds' wings. The larger portion of
+this charge to them passes far beyond the immediate occasion, and
+deals with the permanent relations of Christ's servants to the world
+in which they live, for the purpose of bringing it into subjection
+to its true King. These solemn closing words, which make our present
+subject, contain the duty and blessedness of confessing Him, the vision
+of the antagonisms which He excites, His demand for all-surrendering
+following, and the rewards of those who receive Christ's messengers,
+and therein receive Himself and His Father.
+
+I. The duty and blessedness of confessing Him (vs. 32, 33). The
+'therefore' is significant. It attaches the promise which follows to
+the immediately preceding thoughts of a watchful, fatherly care,
+extending like a great invisible hand over the true disciple.
+Because each is thus guarded, each shall be preserved to receive the
+honour of being confessed by Christ. No matter what may befall His
+witnesses, the extremest disaster shall not rob them of their reward.
+They may be flung down from the house-tops where they lift up their
+bold voices, but He who does not let a sparrow fall to the ground
+uncared for, will give His angels charge concerning them who are so
+much more precious, and they shall be borne up on outstretched wings,
+lest they be dashed on the pavement below. Thus preserved, they shall
+all attain at last to their guerdon. Nothing can come between Christ's
+servant and his crown. The tender providence of the Father, whose
+mercy is over all His works, makes sure of that. The river of the
+confessor's life may plunge underground, and be lost amid persecutions,
+but it will emerge again into the brighter sunshine on the other side
+of the mountains.
+
+The confession which is to be thus rewarded, like the denial opposed
+to it, is, of course, not merely a single utterance of the lip. So
+far Judas Iscariot confessed Christ, and Peter denied Him. But it is
+the habitual acknowledgment by lip and life, unwithdrawn to the end.
+The context implies that the confession is maintained in the face of
+opposition, and that the denial is a cowardly attempt to save one's
+skin at the cost of treason to Jesus. The temptation does not come
+in that sharpest form to us. Perhaps some cowards would be made
+brave if it did. It is perhaps easier to face the gibbet and the
+fire, and screw oneself up for once to a brief endurance, than to
+resist the more specious blandishments of the world, especially when
+it has been christened, and calls itself religious. The light laugh
+of scorn, the silent pressure of the low average of Christian
+character, the close associations in trade, literature, public and
+domestic life which Christians have with non-Christians, make many a
+man's tongue lie silent, to the sore detriment of his own religious
+life. 'Ye have not yet resisted unto blood,' and find it hard to
+fulfil the easier conflict to which you are called. The sun has more
+power than the tempest to make the pilgrim drop his garment. But the
+duty remains the same for all ages. Every man is bound to make the
+deepest springs of his life visible, and to stand to his
+convictions, whatever they be. If he do not, his convictions will
+disappear like a piece of ice hid in a hot hand, which will melt and
+trickle away. This obligation lies with infinitely increased weight
+on Christ's servants; and the consequences of failing to discharge
+it are more tragic in their cases, in the exact proportion of the
+greater preciousness of their faith. Corn hoarded is sure to be
+spoiled by weevils and rust. The bread of life hidden in our sacks
+will certainly go mouldy.
+
+The reward and punishment of confession and denial come to them not
+as separate acts, but as each being the revelation of the spiritual
+condition of the doers. Christ implies that a true disciple cannot
+but be a confessor, and that therefore the denier must certainly be
+one whom He has never known. Because, therefore, each act is
+symptomatic of the doer, each receives the congruous and
+correspondent reward. The confessor is confessed; the denier is
+denied. What calm and assured consciousness of His place as Judge
+underlies these words! His recognition is God's acceptance; His
+denial is darkness and misery. The correspondence between the work
+and the reward is beautifully brought out by the use of the same
+word to express each. And yet what a difference between our
+confession of Him and His of us! And what a hope is here for all who
+have tremblingly, and in the consciousness of much unworthiness,
+ventured to say that they were Christ's subjects, and He their King,
+brother, and all! Their poor, feeble confession will be endorsed by
+His. He will say, 'Yes, this man is mine, and I am his.' That will
+be glory, honour, blessedness, life, heaven.
+
+II. The vision of the discord which follows the coming of the King
+of peace. It is not enough to interpret these words as meaning that
+our Lord's purpose indeed was to bring peace, but that the result of
+His coming was strife. The ultimate purpose is peace; but an
+immediate purpose is conflict, as the only road to the peace. He is
+first King of righteousness, and after that also King of peace. But,
+if His kingdom be righteousness, purity, love, then unrighteousness,
+filthiness, and selfishness will fight against it for their lives.
+The ultimate purpose of Christ's coming is to transform the world
+into the likeness of heaven; and all in the world which hates such
+likeness is embattled against Him. He saw realities, and knew men's
+hearts, and was under no illusion, such as many an ardent reformer
+has cherished, that the fair form of truth need only be shown to
+men, and they will take her to their hearts. Incessant struggle is
+the law for the individual and for society till Christ's purpose for
+both is realised.
+
+That conflict ranges the dearest in opposite ranks. The gospel is
+the great solvent. As when a substance is brought into contact with
+some chemical compound, which has greater affinity for one of its
+elements than the other element has, the old combination is
+dissolved, and a new and more stable one is formed, so Christianity
+analyses and destroys in order to synthesis and construction. In
+verse 21 our Lord had foretold that brother should deliver up
+brother to death. Here the severance is considered from the opposite
+side. The persons who are 'set at variance' with their kindred are
+here Christians. Perhaps it is fanciful to observe that they are all
+junior members of families, as if the young would be more likely to
+flock to the new light. But however that may be, the separation is
+mutual, but the hate is all on one side. The 'man's foes' are of his
+own household; but he is not their foe, though he be parted from
+them.
+
+III. Earthly love may be a worse foe to a true Christian than even
+the enmity of the dearest; and that enmity may often be excited by
+the Christian subordination of earthly to heavenly love. So our Lord
+passes from the warnings of discord and hate to the danger of the
+opposite--undue love.
+
+He claims absolute supremacy in our hearts. He goes still farther,
+and claims the surrender, not only of affections, but of self and
+life to Him. What a strange claim this is! A Jewish peasant, dead
+nineteen hundred years since, fronts the whole race of man, and
+asserts His right to their love, which is strange, and to their
+supreme love, which is stranger still. Why should we love Him at
+all, if He were only a man, however pure and benevolent? We may
+admire, as we do many another fair nature in the past; but is there
+any possibility of evoking anything as warm as love to an unseen
+person, who can have had no knowledge of or love to us? And why
+should we love Him more than our dearest, from whom we have drawn,
+or to whom we have given, life? What explanation or justification
+does He give of this unexampled demand? Absolutely none. He seems to
+think that its reasonableness needs no elucidation. Surely never did
+teacher professing wisdom, modesty, and, still more, religion, put
+forward such a claim of right; and surely never besides did any
+succeed in persuading generations unborn to yield His demand, when
+they heard it. The strangest thing in the world's history is that
+to-day there are millions who do love Jesus Christ more than all
+besides, and whose chief self-accusation is that they do not love
+Him more. The strange, audacious claim is most reasonable, if we
+believe that Jesus is the Son of God, who died for each of us, and
+that each man and woman to the last of the generations had a
+separate place in His divine human love when He died. It is meet to
+love Him, if that be true; it is not, unless it be. The requirement
+is as stringent as strange. If the two ever seem to conflict, the
+earthly must give way. If the earthly be withdrawn, there must be
+found sufficiency for comfort and peace in the heavenly. The lower
+must not be permitted to hinder the flight of the heavenly to its
+home. 'More than Me' is a rebuke to most of us. What a contrast
+between the warmth of our earthly and the tepidity or coldness of
+our heavenly love! How spontaneously our thoughts, when left free,
+turn to the one; how hard we find it to keep them fixed on the
+other! How sweet service is to the dear ones here; how reluctantly
+it is given to Christ! How we long, when parted, to rejoin them; how
+little we are drawn to the place where He is! We have all to confess
+that we are 'not worthy of' Him; that we requite His love with
+inadequate returns, and live lives which tax His love for its
+highest exercise, the free forgiveness of sins against itself.
+Compliance with that stringent law, and subordinating all earthly
+love to His, is the true elevating and ennobling of the earthly. It
+is promoted, not degraded, when it is made second, and is infinitely
+sweeter and deeper then than when it was set in the place of
+supremacy, where it had no right to be.
+
+But Christ's demand is not only for the surrender of the heart, but
+for the giving up of self, and, in a very profound sense, for the
+surrender of life. How enigmatical that saying about taking up the
+cross must have sounded to the disciples! They knew little about the
+cross, as a punishment; they had not yet associated it in any way
+with their Lord. This seems to have been the first occasion of His
+mentioning it, and the allusion is so veiled as to be but partially
+intelligible. But what was intelligible was bewildering. A strange
+royal procession that, of the King with a cross on His shoulder, and
+all His subjects behind Him with similar burdens! Through the ages
+that procession has marched, and it marches still. Self-denial for
+Christ's sake is 'the badge of all our tribe.' Observe that word
+'take.' The cross must be willingly and by ourselves assumed. No
+other can lay it on our shoulders. Observe that other word 'his.'
+Each man has his own special form in which self-denial is needful
+for him. We require pure eyes, and hearts kept in very close
+communion with Jesus, to ascertain what our particular cross is. He
+has them of many patterns, shapes, sizes, and materials. We can
+always make sure of strength to carry the one which He means us to
+carry, but not of strength to bear what is not ours.
+
+IV. We have the rewards of those who receive Christ's messengers,
+and therein receive Him and His Father. Our Lord first identifies
+these twelve with Himself in a manner which must have sounded
+strange to them then, but have heartened them for their work by the
+consciousness of His mysterious oneness with them. The whole
+doctrine of Christ's unity with His people lay in germ in these
+words, though much more was needed, both of teaching and of
+experience, before their depth of blessing and strengthening could
+be apprehended. _We_ know that He dwells in His true subjects
+by His Spirit, and that a most real union subsists between the head
+and the members, of which the closest unions of earth are but faint
+shadows, so as that not only those who receive His followers receive
+Him, but, more wonderful still, His followers are received at the
+last by God Himself as joined to Him, and portions of His very self,
+and therefore 'accepted in the Beloved.' Our Lord adds to these
+words the thought that, in like manner, to receive Him is to receive
+the Father, and so implies that our relation to Him is in certain
+real respects parallel with His relation to the Father. We too are
+sent. He who sends abides with us, as the Son ever abode in God, and
+God in Him. We are sent to be the brightness of Christ's glory, and
+to manifest Him to men, as He was sent to reveal the Father.
+
+
+
+
+A LIFE LOST AND FOUND
+[Footnote: Preached after the funeral of Mr. F. W. Crossley.]
+
+
+    'He that loseth his life for My sake shall find it.'
+    --MATT. x. 39.
+
+My heart impels me to break this morning my usual rule of avoiding
+personal references in the pulpit. Death has been busy in our own
+congregation this last week, and yesterday we laid in the grave all
+that was mortal of a man to whom Manchester owes more than it knows.
+Mr. Crossley has been for thirty years my close and dear friend. He
+was long a member of this church and congregation. I need not speak
+of his utter unselfishness, of his lifelong consecration, of his
+lavish generosity, of his unstinted work for God and man; but
+thinking of him and of it, I have felt as if the words of my text
+were the secret of his life, and as if he now understood the fulness
+of the promise they contain: 'He that loseth his life for My sake
+shall find it.' Now, looking at these words in the light of the
+example so tenderly beloved by some of us, so sharply criticised by
+many, but now so fully recognised as saintly by all, I ask you to
+consider--
+
+I. The stringent requirement for the Christian life that is here
+made.
+
+Now we shall very much impoverish the meaning and narrow the sweep
+of these great and penetrating words, if we understand by 'losing
+one's life' only the actual surrender of physical existence. It is
+not only the martyr on whose bleeding brows the crown of life is
+gently placed; it is not only the temples that have been torn by the
+crown of thorns, that are soothed by that unfading wreath; but there
+is a daily dying, which is continually required from all Christian
+people, and is, perhaps, as hard as, or harder than, the brief and
+bloody passage of martyrdom by which some enter into rest. For the
+true losing of life is the slaying of self, and that has to be done
+day by day, and not once for all, in some supreme act of surrender
+at the end, or in some initial act of submission and yielding at the
+beginning, of the Christian life. We ourselves have to take the
+knife into our own hands and strike, and that not once, but ever,
+right on through our whole career. For, by natural disposition, we
+are all inclined to make our own selves to be our own centres, our
+own aims, the objects of our trust, our own law; and if we do so, we
+are dead whilst we live, and the death that brings life is when, day
+by day, we 'crucify the old man with his affections and lusts.'
+Crucifixion was no sudden death; it was an exquisitely painful one,
+which made every nerve quiver and the whole frame thrill with
+anguish; and that slow agony, in all its terribleness and
+protractedness, is the image that is set before us as the true ideal
+of every life that would not be a living death. The world is to be
+crucified to me, and I to the world.
+
+We have our centre in ourselves, and we need the centre to be
+shifted, or we live in sin. If I might venture upon so violent an
+image, the comets that career about the heavens need to be caught
+and tamed, and bound to peaceful revolution round some central sun,
+or else they are 'wandering stars to whom is reserved the blackness
+of darkness for ever.' So, brethren, the slaying of self by a
+painful, protracted process, is the requirement of Christ.
+
+But do not let us confine ourselves to generalities. What is meant?
+This is meant--the absolute submission of the will to commandments
+and providences, the making of that obstinate part of our nature
+meek and obedient and plastic as the clay in the potter's hands. The
+tanner takes a stiff hide, and soaks it in bitter waters, and
+dresses it with sharp tools, and lubricates it with unguents, and
+his work is not done till all the stiffness is out of it and it is
+flexible. And we do not lose our lives in the lofty, noble sense,
+until we can say--and verify the speech by our actions--'Not my will
+but Thine be done.' They who thus submit, they who thus welcome into
+their hearts, and enthrone upon the sovereign seat in their wills,
+Christ and His will--these are they who have lost their lives. When
+we can say, 'I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me,' then, and
+only then, have we in the deepest sense of the words 'lost our
+lives.'
+
+The phrase means the suppression, and sometimes the excision, of
+appetites, passions, desires, inclinations. It means the hallowing
+of all aims; it means the devotion and the consecration of all
+activities. It means the surrender and the stewardship of all
+possessions. And only then, when we have done these things, shall we
+have come to practical obedience to the initial requirement that
+Christ makes from us all--to lose our lives for His sake.
+
+I need not diverge here to point to that life from which my thoughts
+have taken their start in this sermon. Surely if there was any one
+characteristic in it more distinct and lovely than another, it was
+that self was dead and that Christ lived. There may be sometimes a
+call for the actual--which is the lesser--surrender of the bodily
+life, in obedience to the call of duty. There have been Christian
+men who have wrought themselves to death in the Master's service.
+Perhaps he of whom I have been speaking was one of these. It may be
+that, if he had done like so many of our wealthy men--had flung
+himself into business and then collapsed into repose--he would have
+been here to-day. Perhaps it would have been better if there had
+been a less entire throwing of himself into arduous and clamant
+duties. I am not going to enter on the ethics of that question. I do
+not think there are many of this generation of Christians who are
+likely to work themselves to death in Christ's cause; and perhaps,
+after all, the old saying is a true one, 'Better to wear out than to
+rust out.' But only this I will say: we honour the martyrs of
+Science, of Commerce, of Empire, why should not we honour the
+martyrs of Faith? And why should they be branded as imprudent
+enthusiasts, if they make the same sacrifice which, when an explorer
+or a soldier makes, his memory is honoured as heroic, and his cold
+brows are crowned with laurels? Surely it is as wise to die for
+Christ as for England. But be that as it may; the requirement, the
+stringent requirement, of my text is not addressed to any spiritual
+aristocracy, but is laid upon the consciences of all professing
+Christians.
+
+II. Observe the grounds of this requirement.
+
+Did you ever think--or has the fact become so familiar to you that
+it ceases to attract notice?--did you ever think what an
+extraordinary position it is for the son of a carpenter in Nazareth
+to plant Himself before the human race and say, 'You will be wise if
+you die for My sake, and you will be doing nothing more than your
+plain duty'? What business has He to assume such a position as that?
+What warrants that autocratic and all-demanding tone from His lips?
+'Who art Thou'--we may fancy people saying--'that Thou shouldst put
+out a masterful hand and claim to take as Thine the life of my
+heart?' Ah! brethren, there is but one answer: 'Who loved me, and
+gave Himself for me.' The foolish, loving, impulsive apostle that
+blurted out, before his time had come, 'I will lay down my life for
+Thy sake,' was only premature; he was not mistaken. There needed
+that His Lord should lay down His life for Peter's sake; and then He
+had a right to turn to the apostle and say, 'Thou shalt follow Me
+afterwards,' and 'lay down thy life for My sake.' The ground of
+Christ's unique claim is Christ's solitary sacrifice. He who has
+died for men, and He only, has the right to require the unconditional,
+the absolute surrender of themselves, not only in the sacrifice of a
+life that is submitted, but, if circumstances demand, in the sacrifice
+of a death. The ground of the requirement is laid, first in the fact
+of our Lord's divine nature, and second, in the fact that He who asks
+my life has first of all given His.
+
+But that same phrase, 'for My sake,' suggests--
+
+III. The all-sufficient motive which makes such a loss of life
+possible.
+
+I suppose that there is nothing else that will wholly dethrone self
+but the enthroning of Jesus Christ. That dominion is too deeply
+rooted to be abolished by any enthusiasms, however noble they may
+be, except the one that kindles its undying torch at the flame of
+Christ's own love. God forbid that I should deny that wonderful and
+lovely instances of self-oblivion may be found in hearts untouched
+by the supreme love of Christ! But whilst I recognise all the beauty
+of such, I, for my part, humbly venture to believe and assert that,
+for the entire deliverance of a man from self-regard, the one
+sufficient motive power is the reception into his opening heart of
+the love of Jesus Christ.
+
+Ah! brethren, you and I know how hard it is to escape from the
+tyrannous dominion of self, and how the evil spirits that have taken
+possession of us mock at all lesser charms than the name which
+'devils fear and fly'; 'the Name that is above every name.' We have
+tried other motives. We have sought to reprove our selfishness by
+other considerations. Human love--which  itself is sometimes only
+the love of self, seeking satisfaction from another--human love does
+conquer it, but yet conquers it partially. The demons turn round
+upon all other would-be exorcists, and say, 'Jesus we know ... but
+who are ye?' It is only when the Ark is carried into the Temple that
+Dagon falls prone before it. If you would drive self out of your
+hearts--and if you do not it will slay you--if you would drive self
+out, let Christ's love and sacrifice come in. And then, what no
+brooms and brushes, no spades nor wheelbarrows, will ever do--namely,
+cleanse out the filth that lodges there--the turning of the river in
+will do, and float it all away. The one possibility for complete,
+conclusive deliverance from the dominion and tyranny of Self is to
+be found in the words 'For My sake.' Ah! brethren, I suppose there
+are none of us so poor in earthly love, possessed or remembered, but
+that we know the omnipotence of these words when whispered by beloved
+lips, 'For My sake'; and Jesus Christ is saying them to us all.
+
+IV. Lastly, notice the recompense of the stringent requirement.
+
+'Shall find it,' and that finding, like the losing, has a twofold
+reference and accomplishment: here and now, yonder and then.
+
+Here and now, no man possesses himself till he has given himself to
+Jesus Christ. Only then, when we put the reins into His hands, can we
+coerce and guide the fiery steeds of passion and of impulse, And so
+Scripture, in more than one place, uses a remarkable expression, when
+it speaks of those that believe to the 'acquiring of their souls.'
+You are not your own masters until you are Christ's servants; and
+when you fancy yourselves to be most entirely your own masters, you
+have promised yourselves liberty and have become the slave of
+corruption. So if you would own yourselves, give yourselves away. And
+such an one 'shall find' his life, here and now, in that all earthly
+things will be sweeter and better. The altar sanctifies the gift.
+When some pebble is plunged into a sunlit stream, the water brings
+out the veined colourings of the stone that looked all dull and dim
+when it was lying upon the bank. Fling your whole being, your wealth,
+your activities, and everything, into that stream, and they will
+flash in splendour else unknown. Did not my friend, of whom I have
+been speaking, enjoy his wealth far more, when he poured it out like
+water upon good causes, than if he had spent it in luxury and
+self-indulgence? And shall we not find that everything is sweeter,
+nobler, better, fuller of capacity to delight, if we give it all to
+our Master? The stringent requirement of Christ is the perfection of
+prudence. 'Who pleasure follows pleasure slays,' and who slays
+pleasure finds a deeper and a holier delight. The keenest
+epicureanism could devise no better means for sucking the last drop
+of sweetness out of the clustering grapes of the gladnesses of
+earth than to obey this stringent requirement, and so realise the
+blessed promise, 'Whoso loseth his life for My sake shall find it.'
+The selfish man is a roundabout fool. The self-devoted man, the
+Christ-enthroning man, is the wise man.
+
+And there will be the further finding hereafter, about which we
+cannot speak. Only remember, how in a passage parallel with this of
+my text, spoken when almost within sight of Calvary, our Lord laid
+down not only the principle of His own life but the principle for
+all His servants, when He said, 'Except a corn of wheat fall into
+the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth
+forth much fruit.' The solitary grain dropped into the furrow brings
+forth a waving harvest. We may not, we need not, particularise, but
+the life that is found at last is as the fruit an hundredfold of the
+life that men called 'lost' and God called 'sown.'
+
+'Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord; they rest from their
+labours, and their works do follow them.'
+
+
+
+
+THE GREATEST IN THE KINGDOM, AND THEIR REWARD
+
+
+    'He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet
+    shall receive a prophet's reward; and he that receiveth
+    a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall
+    receive a righteous man's reward. 42. And whosoever
+    shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup
+    of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I
+    say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward.'
+    --MATT. x. 41, 42.
+
+ There is nothing in these words to show whether they refer to the
+present or to the future. We shall probably not go wrong if we
+regard them as having reference to both. For all godliness has
+'promise of the life that now is, as well as of that which is to
+come,' and '_in_ keeping God's commandments,' as well as _for_
+keeping them, 'there is great reward,' a reward realised in the
+present, even although Death holds the keys of the treasure-house
+in which the richest rewards are stored. No act of holy obedience
+is here left without foretastes of joy, which, though they be but
+'brooks by the way,' contain the same water of life which hereafter
+swells to an ocean.
+
+Some people tell us that it is defective morality in Christianity to
+bribe men to be good by promising them Heaven, and that he who is
+actuated by such a motive is selfish. Now that fantastic and
+overstrained objection may be very simply answered by two
+considerations: self-regard is not selfishness, and Christianity
+does not propose the future reward as the motive for goodness. The
+motive for goodness is love to Jesus Christ; and if ever there was a
+man who did acts of Christian goodness only for the sake of what he
+would get by them, the acts were not Christian goodness, because the
+motive was wrong. But it is a piece of fastidiousness to forbid us
+to reinforce the great Christian motive, which is love to Jesus
+Christ, by the thought of the recompense of reward. It is a stimulus
+and an encouragement of, not the motive for, goodness. This text
+shows us that it is a subordinate motive, for it says that the
+reception of a prophet, or of a righteous man, or of 'one of these
+little ones,' which is rewardable, is the reception 'in the name of'
+a prophet, a disciple, and so on, or, in other words, is the
+recognising of the prophet, or the righteous man, or the disciple
+for what he is, and because he is that, and not because of the
+reward, receiving him with sympathy and solace and help.
+
+So, with that explanation, let us look at these very remarkable
+words of our text.
+
+I. The first thing which I wish to observe in them is the three
+classes of character which are dealt with--'prophet,' 'righteous
+man,' 'these little ones.'
+
+Now the question that I would suggest is this: Is there any meaning
+in the order in which these are arranged? If so, what is it? Do we
+begin at the bottom, or at the top? Have we to do with an ascending
+or with a descending scale? Is the prophet thought to be greater
+than the righteous man, or less? Is the righteous man thought to be
+higher than the little one, or to be lower? The question is an
+important one, and worth considering.
+
+Now, at first sight, it certainly does look as if we had here to do
+with a descending scale, as if we began at the top and went
+downwards. A prophet, a man honoured with a distinct commission from
+God to declare His will, is, in certain very obvious respects,
+loftier than a man who is not so honoured, however pure and
+righteous he may be. The dim and venerable figures, for instance, of
+Isaiah and Jeremiah, tower high above all their contemporaries; and
+godly men who hung upon their lips, like Baruch on Jeremiah's, felt
+themselves to be, and were, inferior to them. And, in like manner,
+the little child who believes in Christ may seem to be insignificant
+in comparison with the prophet with his God-touched lips, or the
+righteous man of the old dispensation with his austere purity; as a
+humble violet may seem by the side of a rose with its heart of fire,
+or a white lily regal and tall. But one remembers that Jesus Christ
+Himself declared that 'the least of the little ones' was greater
+than the greatest who had gone before; and it is not at all likely
+that He who has just been saying that whosoever received His
+followers received Himself, should classify these followers beneath
+the righteous men of old. The Christian type of character is
+distinctly higher than the Old Testament type; and the humblest
+believer is blessed above prophets and righteous men because his
+eyes behold and his heart welcomes the Christ.
+
+Therefore I am inclined to believe that we have here an ascending
+series--that we begin at the bottom and not at the top; that the
+prophet is less than the righteous man, and the righteous man less
+than the little one who believes in Christ. For, suppose there were
+a prophet who was not righteous, and a righteous man who was not a
+prophet. Suppose the separation between the two characters were
+complete, which of them would be the greater? Balaam was a prophet;
+Balaam was not a righteous man; Balaam was immeasurably inferior to
+the righteous whose lives he did not emulate, though he could not
+but envy their deaths. In like manner the humblest believer in Jesus
+Christ has something that a prophet, if he is not a disciple, does
+not possess; and that which he has, and the prophet has not, is
+higher than the endowment that is peculiar to the prophet alone.
+
+May we say the same thing about the difference between the righteous
+man and the disciple? Can there be a righteous man that is not a
+disciple? Can there be a disciple that is not a righteous man? Can
+the separation between these two classes be perfect and complete?
+No! in the profoundest sense, certainly not. But then at the time
+when Christ spoke there were some men standing round Him, who, 'as
+touching the righteousness which is of the law,' were 'blameless.'
+And there are many men to-day, with much that is noble and admirable
+in their characters, who stand apart from the faith that is in Jesus
+Christ; and if the separation be so complete as that, then it is to
+be emphatically and decisively pronounced that, if we have regard to
+all that a man ought to be, and if we estimate men in the measure in
+which they approximate to that ideal in their lives and conduct,
+'the Christian is the highest style of man.' The disciple is above
+the righteous men adorned with many graces of character, who, if
+they are not Christians, have a worm at the root of all their
+goodness, because it lacks the supreme refinement and consecration
+of faith; and above the fiery-tongued prophet, if he is not a
+disciple.
+
+Now, brethren, this thought is full of very important practical
+inferences. Faith is better than genius. Faith is better than
+brilliant gifts. Faith is better than large acquirements. The poet's
+imagination, the philosopher's calm reasoning, the orator's tongue
+of fire, even the inspiration of men that may have their lips
+touched to proclaim God to their brethren, are all less than the
+bond of living trust that knits a soul to Jesus Christ, and makes it
+thereby partaker of that indwelling Saviour. And, in like manner, if
+there be men, as there are, and no doubt some of them among my
+hearers, adorned with virtues and graces of character, but who have
+not rested their souls on Jesus Christ, then high above these, too,
+stands the lowliest person who has set his faith and love on that
+Saviour. Neither intellectual endowments nor moral character are the
+highest, but faith in Jesus Christ. A man may be endowed with all
+brilliancy of intellect and fair with many beauties of character,
+and he may be lost; and on the other hand simple faith, rudimentary
+and germlike as it often is, carries in itself the prophecy of all
+goodness, and knits a man to the source of all blessedness. 'Whether
+there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it
+shall vanish away. Now abideth these three, faith, hope, charity.'
+'Rejoice not that the spirits are subject unto you, but rather
+rejoice because your names are written in Heaven.'
+
+Ah! brethren, if we believed in Christ's classification of men, and
+in the order of importance and dignity in which He arranges them, it
+would make a wonderful practical difference to the lives, to the
+desires, and to the efforts of a great many of us. Some of you
+students, young men and women that are working at college or your
+classes, if you believed that it was better to trust in Jesus Christ
+than to be wise, and gave one-tenth, ay! one-hundredth part of the
+attention and the effort to secure the one which you do to secure
+the other, would be different people. 'Not many wise men after the
+flesh,' but humble trusters in Jesus Christ, are the victors in the
+world. Believe you that, and order your lives accordingly.
+
+Oh! what a reversal of this world's estimates is coming one day,
+when the names that stand high in the roll of fame shall pale, like
+photographs that have been shut up in a portfolio, and when you take
+them out have faded off the paper. 'The world knows nothing of its
+greatest men,' but there is a time coming when the spurious mushroom
+aristocracy that the world has worshipped will be forgotten, like
+the nobility of some conquered land, who are brushed aside and
+relegated to private life by the new nobility of the conquerors, and
+when the true nobles, God's aristocrats, the righteous, who are
+righteous because they have trusted in Christ, shall shine forth
+like the sun 'in the Kingdom of My Father.'
+
+Here is the climax: gifts and endowments at the bottom, character
+and morality in the middle, and at the top faith in Jesus Christ.
+
+II. Now notice briefly in the second place the variety of the reward
+according to the character.
+
+The prophet has his, the righteous man has his, the little one has
+his. That is to say, each level of spiritual or moral stature
+receives its own prize. There is no difficulty in seeing that this
+is so in regard to the rewards of this life. Every faithful message
+delivered by a prophet increases that prophet's own blessedness, and
+has joys in the receiving of it from God, in the speaking of it to
+men, in the marking of its effects as it spreads through the world,
+which belong to him alone. In all these, and in many other ways, the
+'prophet' has rewards that no stranger can intermeddle with. All
+courses of obedient conduct have their own appropriate consequences
+and satisfaction. Every character is adapted to receive, and does
+receive, in the measure of its goodness, certain blessings and joys,
+here and now. 'Surely the righteous shall be recompensed in the
+earth.'
+
+And the same principle, of course, applies if we think of the reward
+as altogether future. It must be remembered, however, that
+Christianity does not teach, as I believe, that if there be a
+prophet or a righteous man who is not a disciple, that prophet or
+righteous man will get rewards in the future life. It must be
+remembered, too, that every disciple is righteous in the measure of
+his faith. Discipleship being presupposed, then the disciple who is
+a prophet will have one reward, and the disciple who is a righteous
+man shall have another; and where all three characteristics
+coincide, there shall be a triple crown of glory upon his head.
+
+That is all plain and obvious enough, if only we get rid of the
+prejudice that the rewards of a future life are merely bestowed upon
+men by God's arbitrary good pleasure. What is the reward of Heaven?
+'Eternal life,' people say. Yes! 'Blessedness.' Yes! But where does
+the life come from, and where does the blessedness come from? They
+are both derived, they come from God in Christ; and in the deepest
+sense, and in the only true sense, God is Heaven, and God is the
+reward of Heaven. 'I am thy shield,' so long as dangers need to be
+guarded against, and then, thereafter, 'I am thine exceeding great
+Reward.' It is the possession of God that makes all the Heaven of
+Heaven, the immortal life which His children receive, and the
+blessedness with which they are enraptured. We are heirs of
+immortality, we are heirs of life, we are heirs of blessedness,
+because, and in the measure in which, we become heirs of God.
+
+And if that be so, then there is no difficulty in seeing that in
+Heaven, as on earth, men will get just as much of God as they can
+hold; and that in Heaven, as on earth, capacity for receiving God is
+determined by character. The gift is one, the reward is one, and yet
+the reward is infinitely various. It is the same light which glows
+in all the stars, but 'star differeth from star in glory.' It is the
+same wine, the new wine of the Kingdom, that is poured into all the
+vessels, but the vessels are of divers magnitudes, though each be
+full to the brim.
+
+And so in those two sister parables of our Master's, which are so
+remarkably discriminated and so remarkably alike, we have both these
+aspects of the Heavenly reward set forth--both that which declares
+its identity in all cases, and the other which declares its variety
+according to the recipient's character. All the servants receive the
+same welcome, the same prize, the same entrance into the same joy;
+although one of them had ten talents, and another five, and another
+two. But the servants who were each sent out to trade with one poor
+pound in their hands, and by their varying diligence reaped varying
+profits, were rewarded according to the returns that they had
+brought; and one received ten, and the other five, and the other
+two, cities over which to have authority and rule. So the reward is
+one, and yet infinitely diverse. It is not the same thing whether a
+man or a woman, being a Christian, is an earnest, and devoted, and
+growing Christian here on earth, or a selfish, and an idle, and a
+stagnant one. It is not the same thing whether you content
+yourselves with simply laying hold on Christ, and keeping a
+tremulous and feeble hold of Him for the rest of your lives, or
+whether you grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour.
+There is such a fate as being saved, yet so as by fire, and going
+into the brightness with the smell of the fire on your garments.
+There is such a fate as having just, as it were, squeezed into
+Heaven, and got there by the skin of your teeth. And there is such a
+thing as having an abundant entrance ministered, when its portals
+are thrown wide open. Some imperfect Christians die with but little
+capacity for possessing God, and therefore their heaven will not be
+as bright, nor studded with as majestic constellations, as that of
+others. The starry vault that bends above us so far away, is the
+same in the number of its stars when gazed on by the savage with his
+unaided eye, and by the astronomer with the strongest telescope; and
+the Infinite God, who arches above us, but comes near to us,
+discloses galaxies of beauty and oceans of abysmal light in Himself,
+according to the strength and clearness of the eye that looks upon
+Him. So, brethren, remember that the one glory has infinite degrees;
+and faith, and conduct, and character here determine the capacity
+for God which we shall have when we go to receive our reward.
+
+III. The last point that is here is the substantial identity of the
+reward to all that stand on the same level, however different may be
+the form of their lives.
+
+'He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive
+a prophet's reward.' And so in the case of the others. The active
+prophet, righteous man, or disciple, and the passive recogniser of
+each in that character, who receives each as a prophet, or righteous
+man, or disciple, stand practically and substantially on the same
+level, though the one of them may have his lips glowing with the
+divine inspiration and the other may never have opened his mouth for
+God.
+
+That is beautiful and deep. The power of sympathising with any
+character is the partial possession of that character for ourselves.
+A man who is capable of having his soul bowed by the stormy thunder
+of Beethoven, or lifted to Heaven by the ethereal melody of
+Mendelssohn, is a musician, though he never composed a bar. The man
+who recognises and feels the grandeur of the organ music of
+'Paradise Lost' has some fibre of a poet in him, though he be but 'a
+mute, inglorious Milton.'
+
+All sympathy and recognition of character involve some likeness to
+that character. The poor woman who brought the sticks and prepared
+food for the prophet entered into the prophet's mission and shared
+in the prophet's work and reward, though his task was to beard Ahab,
+and hers was only to bake Elijah's bread. The old knight that
+clapped Luther on the back when he went into the Diet of Worms, and
+said to him, 'Well done, little monk!' shared in Luther's victory
+and in Luther's crown. He that helps a prophet because he is a
+prophet, has the making of a prophet in himself.
+
+As all work done from the same motive is the same in God's eyes,
+whatever be the outward shape of it, so the work that involves the
+same type of spiritual character will involve the same reward. You
+find the Egyptian medal on the breasts of the soldiers that kept the
+base of communication as well as on the breasts of the men that
+stormed the works at Tel-el-Kebir. It was a law in Israel, and it is
+a law in Heaven: 'As his part is that goeth down into the battle, so
+shall his part be that tarrieth by the stuff, they shall part
+alike.' 'I am going down into the pit, you hold the ropes,' said
+Carey, the pioneer missionary. They that hold the ropes, and the
+daring miner that swings away down in the blackness, are one in the
+work, may be one in the motive, and, if they are, shall be one in
+the reward. So, brethren, though no coal of fire may be laid upon
+your lips, if you sympathise with the workers that are trying to
+serve God, and do what you can to help them, and identify yourself
+with them, and so hold the ropes, my text will be true about you.
+'He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive
+a prophet's reward.' They who by reason of circumstances, by
+deficiency of power, or by the weight of other tasks and duties, can
+only give silent sympathy, and prayer, and help, are one with the
+men whom they help.
+
+Dear brethren! remember that this awful, mystical life of ours is
+full everywhere of consequences that cannot be escaped. What we sow
+we reap, and we grind it, and we bake it, and we live upon it. We
+have to drink as we have brewed; we have to lie on the beds that we
+have made. 'Be not deceived: God is not mocked.' The doctrine of
+reward has two sides to it. 'Nothing human ever dies.' All our deeds
+drag after them inevitable consequences; but if you will put your
+trust in Jesus Christ, He will not deal with you according to your
+sins, nor reward you according to your iniquities; and the darkest
+features of the recompense of your evil will all be taken away by
+the forgiveness which we have in His blood. If you will trust
+yourselves to Him you will have that eternal life, which is not
+wages, but a gift; which is not reward, but a free bestowment of
+God's love. And then, if we build upon that Foundation on which
+alone men can build their hopes, their thoughts, their characters,
+their lives, however feeble may be our efforts, however narrow may
+be our sphere,--though we be neither prophets nor sons of prophets,
+and though our righteousness may be all stained and imperfect, yet,
+to our own amazement and to God's glory, we shall find, when the
+fire is kindled which reveals and tests our works, that, by the
+might of humble faith in Christ, we have built upon that Foundation,
+gold and silver and precious stones; and shall receive the reward
+given to every man whose work abides that trial by fire.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN'S DOUBTS OF JESUS, AND JESUS' PRAISE OF JOHN
+
+
+    'Now when John had heard in the prison the works of
+    Christ, he sent two of his disciples, 3. And said unto
+    Him, Art Thou He that should come, or do we look for
+    another? 4. Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and
+    shew John again those things which ye do hear and see:
+    5. The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk,
+    the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead
+    are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached
+    to them. 6. And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be
+    offended in Me. 7. And as they departed, Jesus began
+    to say unto the multitudes concerning John, What went
+    ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with
+    the wind? 8. But what went ye out for to see? A man
+    clothed in soft raiment? behold, they that wear soft
+    clothing are in kings' houses. 9. But what went ye out
+    for to see? A prophet? yea, I say unto you, and more
+    than a prophet. 10. For this is he, of whom it is
+    written. Behold, I send My messenger before Thy face,
+    which shall prepare Thy way before Thee. 11. Verily I
+    say unto you, Among them that are born of women there
+    hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist:
+    notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of
+    heaven is greater than he. 12. And from the days of
+    John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven
+    suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.
+    13. For all the prophets and the law prophesied until
+    John--And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which
+    was for to come. 16. He that hath ears to hear, let
+    him hear.'--MATT. xi. 2-15.
+
+This text falls into two parts: the first, from verses 2-6
+inclusive, giving us the faltering faith of the great witness, and
+Christ's gentle treatment of the waverer; the second, from verse 7
+to the end, giving the witness of Christ to John, exuberant in
+recognition, notwithstanding his momentary hesitation.
+
+I. We do not believe that this message of John's was sent for the sake
+of strengthening his disciples' faith in Jesus as Messiah, nor that it
+was merely meant as a hint to Jesus to declare Himself. The question
+is John's. The answer is sent to him: it is he who is to ponder the
+things which the messengers saw, and to answer his own question
+thereby. The note which the evangelist prefixes to his account
+gives the key to the incident. John was 'in prison,' in that gloomy
+fortress of Machaerus which Herod had rebuilt at once for 'a sinful
+pleasure-house' and for an impregnable refuge, among the savage cliffs
+of Moab. The halls of luxurious vice and the walls of defence are gone;
+but the dungeons are there still, with the holes in the masonry into
+which the bars were fixed to which the prisoners--John, perhaps, one of
+them--were chained. No wonder that in the foul atmosphere of a dark
+dungeon the spirit which had been so undaunted in the free air of the
+desert began to flag; nor that even he who had seen the fluttering dove
+descend on Christ's head, and had pointed to Him as the Lamb of God,
+felt that 'all his mind was clouded with a doubt.' It would have been
+wiser if commentators, instead of trying to save John's credit at the
+cost of straining the narrative, had recognised the psychological truth
+of the plain story of his wavering conviction and had learned its
+lessons of self-distrust. There is only one Man with whom it was always
+high-water; all others have ebbs and flows in their religious life, and
+variations in their grasp of truth.
+
+The narrative further gives the motive for John's embassy, in the
+report which had reached him of 'the works of Christ.' We need only
+recall John's earlier testimony to understand how these works would
+not seem to him to fill up the role which he had anticipated for
+Messiah. Where is the axe that was to be laid at the root of the
+trees, or the fan that was to winnow out the chaff? Where is the
+fiery spirit which he had foretold? This gentle Healer is not the
+theocratic judge of his warning prophecies. He is tending and
+nurturing, rather than felling, the barren trees. A nimbus of
+merciful deeds, not of flashing 'wrath to come,' surrounds His head.
+So John began to wonder if, after all, he had been premature in his
+recognition. Perhaps this Jesus was but a precursor, as he himself
+was, of the Messiah. Evidently he continues firm in the conviction
+of Christ's being sent from God, and is ready to accept His answer
+as conclusive; but, as evidently, he is puzzled by the contrariety
+between Jesus' deeds and his own expectations. He asks, 'Art Thou
+_He that cometh_'--a well-known name for Messiah--'or are we to
+expect another?' where it should be noted that the word for
+'another' means not merely a second, but a different kind of,
+person, who should present the aspects of the Messiah as revealed in
+prophecy, and as embodied in John's own preaching, which Jesus had
+left unfulfilled.
+
+We may well take to heart the lesson of the fluctuations possible to
+the firmest faith, and pray to be enabled to hold fast that we have.
+We may learn, too, the danger to right conceptions of Christ, of
+separating the two elements of mercy and judgment in His character
+and work. John was right in believing that the Christ must come to
+judge. A Christ without the fan in His hand is a maimed Christ. John
+was wrong in stumbling at the gentleness, just as many to-day, who
+go to the opposite extreme, are wrong in stumbling at the judicial
+side of His work. Both halves are needed to make the full-orbed
+character. We have not to 'look for a different' Christ, but we have
+to look for Him, coming the second time, the same Jesus, but now
+with His axe in His pierced hands, to hew down trees which He has
+patiently tended. Let John's profound sense of the need for a
+judicial aspect in the Christ who is to meet the prophecies written
+in men's hearts, as well as in Scripture, teach us how one-sided and
+superficial are representations of His work which suppress or slur
+over His future coming to judgment.
+
+Our Lord does not answer 'Yes' or 'No.' To do so might have stilled,
+but would not have removed, John's misconception. A more thorough
+cure is needed. So Christ attacks it in its roots by referring him
+back for answer to the very deeds which had excited his doubt. In
+doing so, He points to, or indeed, we may say, quotes, two prophetic
+passages (Isa. xxxv. 5, 6; lxi. 1) which give the prophetic 'notes' of
+Messiah. It is as if He had said, 'Have you forgotten that the very
+prophets whose words have fed your hopes, and now seem to minister to
+your doubts, have said this and this about the Messiah?' Further,
+there is deep wisdom in sending John back again to think over the very
+deeds at which he was stumbling. It is not Christ's work which is
+wanting in conformity to the divine idea; it is John's conceptions of
+that idea that need enlarging. What he wants is not so much to be told
+that Jesus is the Christ, as to grow up to a truer, because more
+comprehensive, notion of what the Christ is to be. A wide principle is
+taught us here. The very points in Christ's work which may occasion
+difficulty, will, when we stand at the right point of view, become
+evidences of His claims. What were stumbling-blocks become
+stepping-stones. Arguments against become proofs of, the truth when we
+look at them with clearer eyes, and from the proper angle. Further, we
+are taught here, that what Christ does is the best answer to the
+question as to who He is. Still He is doing these works among us.
+Darkened eyes are flooded with light by His touch, and see a new
+world, because they gaze with faith on Him. Lame limbs are endowed
+with strength, and can run in the way of His commandments, and walk
+with unfainting perseverance the thorniest paths of duty and
+self-sacrifice. Lepers are cleansed from the rotting leprosy of sin,
+and their flesh comes again, 'as the flesh of a little child.' Deaf
+ears hear the voice of the Son of God, and the dead who hear live.
+Good news is preached to all the poor in spirit, and whosoever knows
+himself to be in need of all things may claim all things as his own in
+Christ. He who through the ages has been working such works, and works
+them still, 'needs not to speak anything' to confirm His claims,
+'neither is there salvation in any other.' We look for no second
+Christ; but we look for that same Jesus to come the second time to be
+the Judge of the world of which He is the Saviour.
+
+The benediction on him who finds none occasion of stumbling in
+Christ, is at once a beatitude and a warning. It rebukes in the
+gentlest fashion John's temper, which found difficulty in even the
+perfect personality of Jesus, and made that which should have been
+the 'sure foundation' of his spirit a stone of stumbling. Our Lord's
+consciousness of absolute perfection of moral character, and of
+absolute perfectness in His office and work, is distinct in the
+words. He knows that 'there is none occasion of stumbling in Him,'
+and that whoever finds any, brings it or makes it. He knows and
+warns us that all blessedness lies for us in recognising Him for
+what He is--God's sure foundation of our hopes, our peace, our
+thoughts, our lives. He knows that all woe and loss are involved in
+stumbling on this stone, against which whosoever falls is broken,
+and by which, when it begins to move, and falls on a man, he is
+ground to powder, like the dust of the threshing-floor. What
+tremendous arrogance of assertion! Who is he who can venture on such
+words without blasphemy against God, and universal ridicule from
+men?
+
+II. The witness of Christ to John. Praise from Jesus is praise
+indeed; and it is poured out here with no stinted hand on the
+languishing prisoner whose doubts had just been brought to Him. Such
+an eulogium at such a time is a wonderful instance of loving
+forbearance with a true-hearted follower's weakness, and of a desire
+which, in a man, we should call magnanimous, to shield John's
+character from depreciation on account of his message. The world
+praises a man to his face, and speaks of his faults behind his back.
+Christ does the opposite. Not till the messengers were departing
+does He begin to speak 'concerning John.' He lays bare the secret of
+the Baptist's power, and allocates his place as greatest in one
+epoch and as less than the least in another, with an authority more
+than human, and on principles which set Himself high above all
+comparison with men, whether the greatest or the least. The King
+places His subjects, and Himself sits enthroned above them all.
+
+First, Christ praises John's great personal character in the
+dramatic and vivid questions which begin this section. He recalls
+the scenes of popular enthusiasm when all Israel streamed out to the
+desert preacher. A small man could not have made such an upheaval.
+What drew the crowds? Just what will draw them; the qualities
+without which, either possessed in reality or in popular estimation,
+no man can be a power religiously. The first essential is heroic
+firmness. It was not reeds swaying in the wind by Jordan's banks,
+nor a poor feeble man like these, that the people flocked to listen
+to. His emblem was not the reed, but 'an iron pillar.' His whole
+career had been marked by decisiveness, constancy, courage. Nothing
+can be done worth doing in the world without a wholesome obstinacy
+and imperturbability, which keep a man true to his convictions and
+his task, whatever winds blow in his teeth. The multitudes will not
+flock to listen to a teacher who does not speak with the accent of
+conviction, nor will truths feebly grasped touch the lips with fire.
+The first requisite for a religious teacher is that he shall be sure
+of his message and of himself. Athanasius has to 'stand against the
+world' before the world accepts his teaching. 'Though there were as
+many devils in Worms as there are tiles on the house-tops, go I
+will,' said Luther. That is the temper for God's instruments.
+
+The next requisite, which John also had, is manifest indifference to
+material ease. Silken courtiers do not haunt the desert. Kings'
+houses, and not either the wilderness or kings' dungeons, are the
+sunny spots where they spread their plumage. If the gaunt ascetic,
+with his girdle of camel's hair and his coarse fare, had been a
+self-indulgent sybarite, his voice would never have shaken a nation.
+The least breath of suspicion that a preacher is such a man ends his
+power, and ought to end it; for self-indulgence and the love of
+fleshly comforts eat the heart out of goodness, and make the eyes
+too heavy to see visions. John was the same man then as they had
+known him to be; therefore it was no impatience of the hardships of
+his prison that had inspired his doubts.
+
+Our Lord next speaks of John's great office. He was a prophet. The
+dim recognition that God spoke in His fiery words had drawn the
+crowds, weary of teachers in whose endless jangle and jargon of
+casuistry was no inspiration. The voice of a man who gets his
+message at first-hand from God has a ring in it which even dull ears
+detect as something genuine. Alas for the bewildering babble of
+echoes and the paucity of voices to-day!
+
+So far Jesus had been appealing to His hearers' knowledge; He now
+goes on to add higher truth concerning John. He declares that he is
+more than a prophet, because he is His messenger before His face;
+that is, immediately preceding Himself. We cannot stay to comment on
+the remarkable variation between the original form of the quotation
+from Malachi and Christ's version of it, which, in its substitution
+of 'thee' for 'me,' bears so forcibly on the divinity of Christ; but
+we may mark the principle on which John's superiority to the whole
+prophetic order is based. It is that nearness to Jesus makes
+greatness. The closer the relation to Him, the higher the honour. In
+that long procession the King comes last; and of 'them that go
+before, crying, Hosanna to Him that cometh,' the order of precedence
+is that the first are last, and that the highest is he who walks in
+front of the Sovereign.
+
+Next, we have the limitations of the forerunner and his relative
+inferiority to the least in the kingdom of heaven. Another standard
+of greatness is here from that of the world, which smiles at the
+contrast between the uncultured preacher of repentance and the
+mighty thinkers, poets, legislators, kingdom-makers, whom it enrols
+among the great. In Christ's eyes greatness is nearness to Him, and
+understanding of Him and His work. Neither natural faculty nor worth
+is in question, but simply relation to the Kingdom and the King. He
+who had only to preach of Him who should come after him, and had but
+a partial apprehension of Christ and His work, stood on a lower
+level than the least who has to look to a Christ who has come, and
+has opened the gates of the kingdom to the humblest believer. The
+truths which were hid from ages, and were but visible as in morning
+twilight to John, are sunlit to us. The scholars in our Sunday-schools
+know familiarly more than prophets and kings ever knew. We 'hold the
+grey barbarian lower than the Christian child'; and not merely he, but
+the wisest of the prophets, and the forerunner himself. The history of
+the world is parted into two by the coming of Jesus Christ, as every
+dictionary of dates tells, and the least of the greater is greater than
+the greatest of the less. What a place, then, does Christ claim! Our
+relation to Him determines greatness. To recognise Him is to be in the
+Kingdom of Heaven. Union to Him brings us to fulfil the ideal of human
+nature; and this is life, to know and trust Him, the King.
+
+Our Lord adds a brief characterisation of the effect of John's
+ministry. It was of mingled good and evil, and there is a tone of
+sadness perceptible in the ambiguous words. John had aroused great
+popular excitement, and had stirred multitudes to seek to enter the
+Kingdom. So far was good. But had all the crowds understood what sort
+of kingdom it was? Had they not too often dragged down the lofty
+conception to their own vulgar level, and, with their dream of an
+outward sovereignty, thought to gain it for their own by violence
+instead of meekness, by arms and worldly force rather than by
+submission? The earnestness was good, but Christ's sad insight saw
+how much strange fire had mingled in the blaze, as if some earth-born
+smoky flame should seek to blend with the pure sunlight. Such seems
+the most natural interpretation of the words, but they are ambiguous,
+and may possibly mean by 'the violent' those who had been roused to
+genuine earnestness by the clarion voice which rang in the ears of
+that slumbering generation.
+
+Then follows the explanation of this new interest in the kingdom.
+'All the prophets and the law prophesied until John.' The whole
+period till his coming was one of preparation, and it all converged
+on the epoch of the forerunner. The eagerness to flock into the
+Kingdom which characterised his time would have been impossible in
+the earlier days. He closes that order of things, standing, as it
+were, on the isthmus between prophecy and fulfilment, belonging
+properly to neither, but having affinities with both, and being the
+transition from the one to the other. Then our Lord closes His words
+concerning John with the distinct statement, which He expects His
+hearers to have difficulty in receiving, probably from the
+contradiction to it which John's present condition seemed to give,
+that in him was fulfilled Malachi's prophecy of the sending of
+'Elijah the prophet before ... day of the Lord.' The fiery Tishbite,
+gaunt and grim, ascetic and solitary, who bearded Ahab, and flamed
+across a corrupt age with a stern message of repentance or
+destruction, was repeated in the lonely ascetic who had his Ahab in
+Herod, and his Jezebel in Herodias, and like his prototype, knew no
+fear, but flashed out the lightnings of his words on every sin. The
+two men were brothers, and their voices answer each other across the
+centuries. Christ crowns His witness to John while thus quoting the
+last swansong of ancient prophecy, and thereby at once sets John on
+a pinnacle of greatness, and advances a claim concerning Himself all
+the more weighty, because He leaves it to be inferred. 'He that hath
+ears to hear, let him hear'--this eulogium on the forerunner needs
+to be reflected on ere all its bearings are seen. If John was Elias,
+the day of the Lord was at hand, and 'the Sun of Righteousness' was
+already above the horizon. Jesus' witness concerning John ends in
+witness concerning Himself.
+
+
+
+
+THE FRIEND OF PUBLICANS AND SINNERS
+
+
+    'The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say,
+    Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of
+    publicans and sinners. But wisdom is justified of her
+    children,'--MATT. xi. 19.
+
+Jesus very seldom took notice of His enemies' slanders. 'When He was
+reviled He reviled not again.' If ever He did, it was for the sake
+of those whom it harmed to distort His beauty. Thus, here He speaks,
+without the slightest trace of irritation, of the capricious
+inconsistency of condemning Himself and John on precisely opposite
+grounds. John will not suit them because he neither eats nor drinks.
+Well, one would think that Jesus would be hailed since He does both.
+But He pleases them just as little. What was at the root of this
+contrary working dislike? It was the dislike for the truths they
+both preached, the rejection of the wisdom of which they were the
+messengers. When men do not like the message, nothing that the
+messengers do, or are, is right. Never mind consistency, but object
+to this form of Christian teaching that it is too harsh, and to
+that, that it is too soft; to this man that he is always thundering
+condemnation, to that, that he is always preaching mercy; to one,
+that he has too much to say about duty, to another, that he dwells
+too much on grace; to this presentation of the gospel, that it is
+too learned and doctrinal, to that, that it is too sentimental and
+emotional, and so on, and so on. The generation of children who
+neither like piping nor lamenting, lives still.
+
+But my purpose now is not to dwell on the conduct with which our
+Lord is dealing, but on this caricature of Him which His own lips
+repeat without a sign of anger. It is the only calumny of
+antagonists reported by Himself. We owe our knowledge of its
+currency to this saying. Like other words of His enemies, this
+saying is a distorted refraction of His glory. The facts it embodies
+are facts; the conclusions it draws are false. If Jesus had not come
+eating and drinking, He could not have been called gluttonous and a
+wine-bibber. If He had not drawn publicans and sinners to Him in a
+conspicuous manner and degree, He could not have been called their
+friend. The charge, like all others, is a tribute. Let us try to see
+what was the blessed truth that it caricatured. We may take the two
+points separately, for though closely connected they are distinct,
+and cover different ground.
+
+I. His enemies' witness to Christ's participation in common life.
+
+(_a_) That participation witnesses to His true manhood.
+
+Significant use of 'Son of Man' in context.
+
+Because He is so, He must pass into all human circumstances.
+
+Looked at in the light of incarnation, the simple fact that He
+shared our common lot in all things assumes proportions of majestic
+condescension.
+
+Extend to all physical necessities, and to simple material
+pleasures.
+
+What a witness this hostile criticism is to Christ's genial
+identification of Himself with homely feasters!
+
+(_b_) It sets forth the highest type of manhood.
+
+John could be ascetic, but the Pattern Man could not.
+
+The true perfecting of humanity is not the extirpation, but the
+control, of the flesh by the spirit. And in accordance with this
+thought, we may see in the eating and drinking Christ, the pattern
+for the religious life. Asceticism is not the noblest form of
+sanctity. There is nothing more striking in Old Testament than the
+way in which its heroes and saints mingle in all ordinary duties.
+They are warriors, statesmen, shepherds, they buy, they sell.
+Asceticism came later, along with formalisms of other sorts. When
+devotion cools, it is crusted with superstition and external marks
+of godliness. Propriety in posturing in worship, casuistry in the
+interpretation of law, and abstinence from common enjoyments, came
+in Pharisaic times. And into such a world Jesus came, eating and
+drinking.
+
+But His bearing in these matters is example for us. They were
+rigidly kept in subordination. They were all done in communion with
+God.
+
+So He has hallowed all by taking part in them.
+
+Christ should be present in all our material enjoyments. If you
+cannot think that He is with you, if you cannot conceive of His
+being there, that is no place for you. If you cannot feel that He
+approves, that is no fit enjoyment for you.
+
+The tendency of this day is to take a wider view of the liberty
+allowed to Christians in regard to partaking in material enjoyment,
+and I dare say that many of you who have thought that I spoke well
+in insisting on all things belonging to the Christian, will think
+that I am dropping back into the old narrow groove in my next
+remark, that all such thoughts need guarding.
+
+One has heard the example of Christ invoked to justify unchristian
+laxity and excess. Therefore I wish to say that the liberty
+permitted to Christians in these matters is to be limited within the
+limits within which Christ's was confined.
+
+The excessive use of innocent things is not justified by His
+example, nor is the use of things innocent in themselves, which are
+mixed up with harmful things.
+
+Christ's example does not warrant the importance attached to luxury,
+the waste on mere eating and drinking. It is sometimes quoted as
+against total abstinence. It has no bearing on the question. But if
+He gave up heaven for His brethren, I think that they who give up an
+indulgence for the sake of theirs are in the line of His action. I
+venture to think that if Jesus Christ lived in England to-day, He
+would be a total abstinence fanatic.
+
+'If thy hand offend thee, cut it off.' Asceticism is not the
+highest, but it is sometimes necessary. If my indulgence in innocent
+things hurts me, or if my abstinence from them would help others, or
+increase my power for good, or if innocent things are intertwisted
+with things not innocent, then it is vain to try to shelter under
+Christ's example, and the only right course for His disciple is to
+abridge his liberty. He came eating and drinking, therefore His
+followers may use all innocent earthly blessings and bodily
+pleasures, subject to this one law: 'Whether ye eat or drink, or
+whatever ye do, do all to the glory of God,' and to this solemn
+warning: 'He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap
+corruption.'
+
+II. His enemies' witness to Jesus as the friend of the outcasts.
+
+The fact was that He drew them to Himself and evidently was glad to
+have them round Him. The inference natural to low natures was
+_noscitur a sociis_ and that the bond between Him and them was
+common evil tendencies and ways. His censors could not conceive of
+any one's seeking the outcasts from pity and for their good.
+
+(_a_) Christ's consorting with these was the revelation of His
+love to them.
+
+It meant no complicity with, nor minimising of, sinfulness.
+
+His sternness is as conspicuous as His love.
+
+He warned, rebuked, tried to win back.
+
+The highest purity is not repellent to sinners.
+
+So in Jesus is the combination of tenderest love and intense moral
+earnestness.
+
+How difficult for anything but actual sight of such a life to have
+painted it! Where did the evangelists get such an embodiment of two
+attitudes so unlike each other, and which we so seldom see united in
+fact? I venture to think that the combination in perfect harmony and
+proportion of these, is a strong presumption in favour of the
+historical truth of the Christ of the gospels.
+
+But remember that if we take His own statement ('He that hath seen
+Me hath seen the Father'), we are to see in this kindly consorting
+with sinners not only the love of a perfectly pure manhood, but a
+revelation of the heart of God. And that adds wonderfulness and awe
+to the fact. This man to whom sinners were drawn by strange
+attraction, in whom they found the highest purity and yet softest
+tenderness, therein revealed God.
+
+(_b_) It witnesses to His boundless hope.
+
+No outcasts were hopeless in His view. To man's eyes there are
+hopeless classes, but He sees deeper. 'Perhaps a spark lies hid.'
+There are dormant possibilities in all souls.
+
+None are so hard as that they cannot be melted by the high
+temperature of love, just as there are no metals that cannot be
+volatilised if exposed to intense heat.
+
+Carry the most thick-ribbed ice into the sun and it will thaw.
+
+So the Christian view of mankind is much more hopeful than that of
+mere educationists or moralists.
+
+None of them paint human nature so black as it does, but none of
+them have such boundless confidence in the possibility of making it
+lustrously white.
+
+Urge, then, that none are beyond the power of Christ's gospel. His
+divine Spirit can change any man. There are no incurables in the
+judgment of the great Physician.
+
+(_c_) It witnesses to the truth that gross sin does not shut
+out from Him so much as does self-complacent ignorance of our own
+need.
+
+'They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.'
+Where should the physician be but at the sick man's bedside?
+
+The one impassable barrier between us and Christ is fancying that we
+are not sinners and do not need Him.
+
+This boundless hopefulness and seeking after the outcasts is the
+unique glory of Christianity. What has been the mainspring of all
+movements for their elevation? What broke the chains of slavery?
+What has sent men to the ends of the earth for the elevation of
+savage races? What is the motive power in the benevolent works of
+this day? Is it philosophical altruism or is it Christian faith? No
+doubt, there are some sporadic movements among people who do not
+accept the gospel. At present, I do not ask how far these are due to
+the underground influence of Christianity filtering to men who stand
+apart from it. But I gravely doubt whether you will ever get any
+large, continuous, self-sacrificing efforts for the outcasts, unless
+they are the direct result of the spirit of Christ moving on men who
+owe their own deliverance to Him. We have not yet seen agnostic
+missionary societies or the like.
+
+This spirit must mark all living Christianity. If ever churches
+forget their obligations to the publicans and sinners, they will
+cease to grow. It will be a sign that they have lost their hold of
+Christ. They will soon die, and no mourners will attend their
+funerals. It is a good sign to-day that all Christian churches are
+waking up to feel more their obligations to the outcasts. Only, we
+must take heed that we go to them as Christ did, making no
+compromise with sin, speaking no false flatteries, and bent on one
+thing, their emancipation from the evil which is slaying them.
+
+Let us all take the blessed thought for ourselves, that Jesus Christ
+is our friend because He is the friend of sinners, and we are
+sinners. Degrees of sinfulness vary, but the fact is invariable. The
+universality of sinfulness makes the universality of Christ's love
+the more wonderful and blessed. If He did not love sinners, there
+would be none for Him to love. We may be His enemies, or may neglect
+all His beseechings; but He is still our friend, wishing us well,
+and desiring to bless us. But He cannot give us His deepest
+friendship unless we are willing to recognise our sin. We must come
+to Him on the footing of transgressors if we are to come to Him at
+all.
+
+He will deliver us from our sins.
+
+Appeal to give hearts to Him.
+
+How has He shown His friendship? 'Greater love hath no man than
+this,' that 'while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.'
+
+To be friends of Christ is the highest honour and blessing.
+
+'Ye are my friends if ye do whatsoever I command you.'
+
+'He was called the friend of God.' Abraham's name in Mohammedan
+lands is still El Khalil, the companion or friend. That is our
+highest title. Christ's friends will not continue sinners.
+
+
+
+
+SODOM, CAPERNAUM, MANCHESTER
+
+
+    'Then began He to upbraid the cities wherein most of
+    His mighty works were done, because they repented not.'
+    --MATT. xi. 20.
+
+These words, and the woes which they introduce, are found in another
+connection in Luke's Gospel. He attaches them to his report of the
+mission of the seventy disciples. Matthew here introduces them in an
+order which seems not to depend upon time, but upon identity of
+subject. It is his method in his Gospel to group together similar
+events, as we have it exemplified, for instance, in the Sermon on
+the Mount, and in the long procession of miracles which immediately
+follows it, as well as in other parts of the Gospel. In this chapter
+it is not difficult to discover the common idea which binds its
+parts into a whole. We have a number of instances strung together,
+illustrating the different effects of Christ's appearance and work
+on different classes of persons. There pass before us, John the
+Baptist with his doubts, the excitable multitude ready to take the
+Kingdom of Heaven by storm, the critics who cavilled with impartial
+inconsistency alike at John's asceticism and at Christ's freedom.
+Then follow the woes pronounced by Him upon the indifference of
+those who knew Him best, and these are succeeded by His rejoicing in
+spirit over the babes who accepted Him; and the whole is crowned by
+great words of invitation which extend equally over those and over
+all other varieties of disposition, and, since all 'labour and are
+heavy laden,' summon all, be they what they may, to come and find
+rest in Him. Obviously, then, the order in this chapter is not that
+of time, but that of subject.
+
+Notice that of all these different classes and types of character
+that pass in review before us, the one that is singled out for the
+solemn denunciation of heavy judgment is that of the people who
+stood in a blaze of light, and simply paid no attention to it. These
+are the worst sort. I wonder how many of them are in my audience
+now?
+
+Let me try, then, to bring before you the thoughts naturally
+suggested by these introductory words, and the solemn, sorrowful
+forebodings of retribution which follow them. I ask you to look at
+three things,--the blaze of light; the neglect of the light; the
+rebuke for the neglected light. 'Jesus began to upbraid the cities
+wherein most of His mighty works were done.'
+
+I. First, then, consider the blaze of light.
+
+According to the words of my text, the larger number of the miracles
+of our Lord were wrought in these three places. 'Cities,' our Bible
+calls them; two of them were little fishing villages, the third a
+somewhat considerable town. Where are these miracles recorded? Not
+in our gospels. As for Chorazin, we never hear its name except in
+this verse, and in the parallel in Luke's Gospel; and all that He
+did there is swallowed up in oblivion. As for Bethsaida, there are a
+couple of miracles, probably, recorded as having been wrought there,
+though there is some obscurity in reference to the locality of at
+least one of them. As for Capernaum, there are several miracles
+recorded as having been performed in that place, and several others
+referred to as having been done there. But there is nothing in the
+four gospels that would suggest the statement of the text.
+
+Now the inference (which has nothing to do with my present subject,
+but which I just note in passing) is,--how extremely fragmentary and
+incomplete these four gospels avowedly are! They harvest for us a
+few ears plucked in the great waving cornfield,--and all the others
+withered and died where they grew. The light falls upon one or two
+groups in the crowd of miserables whom He helped, the rest lie in
+dim shadow. You have to think of dozens, I suppose I should not be
+exaggerating if I were to say hundreds, of miracles unrecorded but
+known, lying behind the specimens that we have in the gospels. 'Many
+other things truly did Jesus, which are not written in this book.'
+
+Our Lord takes these two little fishing villages, and He parallels
+and contrasts them with the two great maritime cities of Tyre and
+Sidon, and says that these insignificant places have far more light
+than those had. Then He isolates Capernaum, a place of more
+importance, and His own usual settled residence; and, in like
+manner, He contrasts it with the long-buried Sodom, and proclaims
+the superiority of the illumination which fell on the more modern
+three. Why were they so superior? Because they had Moses? because
+they had the prophets, the law, the temple, the priesthood? By no
+means. Because they had _Him_. So He sets Himself forth as
+being the highest and clearest of all the revelations that God has
+made to the world, and asserts that in Him, in His character, in His
+deeds, men ought to find motives that should bow them in penitence
+before God; motives sweeter, tenderer, stronger than any that the
+world knows besides. There is no such light of the knowledge of the
+glory of God anywhere else as there is in the face of Jesus Christ.
+And oh! brother; no thoughts of the nobleness of rectitude, and the
+imperfection of one's own life, no thoughts of a divine justice and
+a divine punishment, will bow a man in penitence like having once
+caught a glimpse of the perfect sweetness and perfect beauty of the
+perfect Humanity that is revealed to us in Jesus Christ.
+
+But now, mark;--as Capernaum is to Sodom, so is Manchester to
+Capernaum! I wonder if Jesus Christ were to come amongst us now,
+whether He would not repeat in spirit the same lesson that is in my
+text, and bid us contrast our greater illumination with the morning
+twilight that dawned upon these men, and yet was light enough to
+bring condemnation? Think,--these people of whom our Lord is
+speaking here, and setting them high above Tyre and Sidon and Sodom,
+knew nothing about His cross, death, resurrection, ascension. They
+knew Him only as 'a dubious Name,' as a possible Divine Messenger
+and a Miracle-worker; but all the sweetest and the deepest thoughts
+about Him lay unrevealed. Whilst they stood but in the morning
+twilight, you and I stand in the noonday blaze. _They_ might be
+pardoned for doubting whether the light that shone from Him was
+sunshine or candle, but men of this twentieth century, who have the
+whole story of Christ, which is the gospel for the world, wrought
+out through all the tragedy and pathos of His death, and triumph and
+power of His resurrection, and who have, besides, the history of the
+world and of the Church for nineteen centuries, are more
+unpardonable unless they listen to Him with penitence and faith,
+than were any of His contemporaries.
+
+My brother, we stand in the very focus and fountain, as it were, of
+the heavenly radiance. A whole Christ, a crucified Christ, a risen
+Christ, an ascended Christ, a Christ who is the Lord of the Spirit,
+a Christ who through the centuries is saving and blessing men, a
+Christ who can point to nineteen hundred years and say, 'That is My
+work, in so far as it is good and noble,'--this Christ shines with a
+clearer evidence than the Miracle-worker of Capernaum and Bethsaida.
+And to you the word comes, 'If the mighty works which have been done
+in _thee_, had been done in Bethsaida and Chorazin, they would
+have remained until this day.'
+
+There are many of you here saturated with the knowledge of the
+gospel, who from childhood have heard it and heard it and heard it.
+You have lived in the light all your days. Alas! 'If the light that
+is' round 'thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!'
+
+II. That brings me in the next place to notice the negligent
+indifference to the Light in all its blaze.
+
+The men of these three little fishing towns were not sinners above
+all the Galileans of their day. Their crime was that they did
+nothing. No persecution is recorded as having been raised against
+Him by them; there were no angry antagonisms, no scornful words, no
+violent opposition. They simply stolidly stood like some black rock
+in the sunshine, and let the sunshine pour down upon them, and
+remained grim and black as ever. That was all.
+
+That is to say, the thing that brings down the severest rebuke is not
+the angry antagonism of the men who are contending in half-darkness,
+with a misunderstood and therefore disliked Christ, but the sleek,
+passive apathy that is never touched deeper than its ears by the
+message of God's word. It is not a difficult thing to incur this
+condemnation. You have simply to do what some of you are doing, and
+have been doing all your lives, as to Christianity, and that is--nothing!
+You have simply to acquiesce politely and respectfully, as many of you
+do, and say you are Christians; and there an end. You have simply to
+take my words (as I fear so many of those that listen to them do) as
+matters of course, the proper things to be said on a Sunday, and for me
+to say, which may be very true in some vague, general way, but which
+have no felt application to _you_. That is all you have to do.
+It is quite enough. Negative vices will ruin a man, in mind, body, and
+estate; and the negative sin of simple indifference avails to put a
+barrier between you and Jesus Christ, through which none of His blessing
+can filter. If a sailor does _not_ lash himself to something fixed,
+the next sea that comes across the deck will do the rest. If a sick man
+does _not_ take the medicine, by doing nothing he has committed
+suicide. And simple passivity, that is to say (to translate it out
+of Latin into good, honest English), doing nothing, is all that is
+needed in order to part you from Christ and Christ from you. He
+'upbraided the cities because they repented _not_.'
+
+One can fancy some well-to-do and thoroughly respectable and
+clean-living native of Capernaum saying, 'What! those foul beasts in
+Sodom better off than I? Impossible!' Well, Jesus Christ says so
+upon very intelligible grounds. The measure of light is the measure
+of responsibility. That is one ground. And the not preferring Him is
+the preferring of self and the world, and that is the sin of sins.
+He will 'convince the world of sin because they believe not on Me.'
+
+Now, one more point, viz. this gelatinous kind of indifference, as
+of a disposition not stiff enough to take any impression, is found
+most deeply seated, and hopeless, amongst--shall I venture?--amongst
+people like _you_, who have been listening, listening, listening, until
+your systems have become so habituated to this Christian preaching
+that it does not produce the least effect. It all runs off you like
+rain off waterproof. You have waterproofed your consciences and your
+spiritual susceptibilities by long habit of listening and doing nothing.
+
+And some of you have come to this point, that you positively rather
+like the titillation and excitement, slight though it may be, which
+is produced by coming in contact now and then with a good, wholesome,
+rousing Christian appeal. Not that you ever intend to do anything,
+but it is pleasant to see a man in earnest, and preaching as if he
+believed what he was saying. And so perhaps some of you are feeling
+here to-night.
+
+Ah! my dear friends, it is possible for a man to live by the side of
+Niagara until he cannot hear the cataract; and it is an awful thing
+for men and women to live under the sound of Christian teaching
+until it produces no more effect upon their wills and natures than
+the ringing of the church bells, to which they pay no attention.
+
+You do not know the despair that comes over us preachers time after
+time, as we look down upon the faces of our congregations, and feel,
+'What _shall_ I do to put a sharp enough point upon this truth
+to get it into the heart of some man that has been sitting there as
+long as I have been standing here, and is never a bit the better for
+it?' Our most earnest preaching is like putting a red-hot iron into
+a pond: the cold water puts it out and closes above it, and there is
+no more heard nor seen of it. Our old Puritan forefathers used to
+talk about 'gospel-hardened hearers.' I believe that there are
+people listening to me now who have become so inured to Christian
+preaching that, like artillery horses, they will not move a muscle
+or quiver if a whole battery of cannon is fired off under their
+noses. God knows I despair sometimes, many a time, when I think of
+the hundreds of people to whom I speak, year after year, and how
+there seems next to nothing in the world to come of it all.
+
+III. Now lastly, notice here the rebuke of this negligence of the
+light.
+
+'He began to upbraid the cities.' But oh! we shall misunderstand Him
+and His purpose if we think that that upbraiding was anything but
+the sorrowful expression of His own loving heart, which warned of
+what was coming in order that He might never need to send it.
+'_Woe_ unto you; _woe_ unto you,' and His own lips quivered and His own
+heart felt the woe, as He laid bare the sin and foreannounced the
+retribution.
+
+I do not feel that I dare dwell upon, or that it beseems me to say
+much about, this solemn thought. Only, dear friends, I do desire, if
+I could, to wake some of you to look realities for once in the face,
+and to be sure of this, that retribution is proportioned to light,
+and that the sin of sins is the rejection of Jesus Christ. Beneath
+the broad folds of that 'more tolerable' there lie infinite degrees
+of retribution. The same deed done by a group of men may be
+indefinitely varied in its culpability, according to the motives and
+the clearness of knowledge which accompany or prompt the doing of
+it. And so, just because the life beyond is the accurate outcome and
+issue of the whole character and conduct, estimated according to
+motive and knowledge, therefore there must be differences infinitely
+wide between the fate of the servant that knew his Lord's will, and
+the servant that knew not.
+
+Where do you think we gospel-drenched English men and women will
+stand in that allocation of culpability? I do not presume to say
+more, but I beseech you,--let no present controversies about the
+duration and the possible termination of retribution in another
+state, or the possible prolongation of a probation into another
+state, blind you to the fact that however these questions be
+settled, this is a truth, independent of them, but being forgotten
+amidst the dust of controversy, that the next life is a life of
+retribution, and that there you and I will give account of our
+deeds, and chiefly of our attitude to Jesus.
+
+And now let me say, in one word,--hoisting the danger-signal is the
+work of kindness, and Jesus Christ was never more loving than when
+from His lips there came these words, heavy with His own sorrow, and
+stern with the prophecy of retribution. I know that Christian
+teachers have often spoken of the solemn things beyond, in tones
+much to be deplored, and which weaken the force of their message.
+But surely, surely, if we believe in a judgment to come, and if we
+believe that some of those that listen to us are in peril of it,
+surely, surely, the plainest duty is that with tears in our voice
+and pleading tenderness in our tone, seeing the sword coming, we
+should give warning, and beseech men to flee for refuge to the hope
+of the Gospel. The solemn words that we have been looking at now,
+lead up to, and are intended to make more impressive and gracious,
+the invitation with which this chapter ends: 'Come unto Me, all ye
+that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.'
+
+Dear friends, we stand in the blaze of the light. Our familiarity
+with Jesus Christ may be our ruin. We are tempted to pay no heed to
+His words because we know them so well. Neglect of Christ on your
+part will bring deeper woes on your head than the people of
+Capernaum pulled down upon theirs. The brighter the sunshine, the
+louder the thunder and the fiercer the lightning; the longer the
+summer day, the longer the winter night; the closer the comet comes
+to the sun, the further away it plunges, at the other extremity of
+its orbit, into space and darkness. So I beseech you, listen as if
+you had never heard it before, and listen as if your lives depended
+upon it (as indeed they do) to that merciful invitation, 'Come unto
+Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden,' and then you will get
+rest for your souls here, and at that day when Sodom and Capernaum
+and Manchester--they and we--shall stand before His throne, you may
+lift up your eyes, and be glad to see who it is that sits on the
+tribunal, and that you learned to know and love the face of your
+Saviour, before you saw Him enthroned as your Judge.
+
+
+
+
+CHRIST'S STRANGE THANKSGIVING
+
+
+    'I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth,
+    because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and
+    prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.'
+    --MATT. xi. 25.
+
+When Jesus was about to cure one dumb man, He lifted up His eyes to
+heaven and sighed. Sorrow filled His soul in the act of working
+deliverance. The thought of the depth of the miseries He had come to
+heal, and of the ocean of them which He was then diminishing but by
+one poor drop, saddened Him. When Jesus thought of the woes that had
+fallen on the impenitent Sodom, and of the worse that still remained
+to be revealed at the day of judgment, He rejoiced in spirit.
+Strange! and yet all in harmony with His depth of love. This once,
+and this once only, do we read that His heart filled with joy. Did
+He lift up His solemn thanksgiving to God, for the woes that had
+fallen on Chorazin? Oh no! For the blinding of the wise and prudent?
+Oh no! For the revelation to babes? Yes, and not only for that, but
+for that full and universal offer and possibility of salvation,
+which forms the reason for both the revelation to babes and the
+hiding from the wise. If we attend to the connection of this passage
+we get light on its force. It begins with a clear prophecy of
+endless woe and sorrow upon the rejecters. Then comes my text,
+alleviating the terror of that thought of destruction by showing the
+principles on which the reception and rejection are especially
+based, the sort of people who receive and who reject. Then follows
+the reason why the wise are shut out and the babes let in. That
+reason is not only God's inscrutable decree, but something in the
+very nature of the Gospel. God is hidden from all human sight. There
+is one divine Revealer apart from whom all is darkness. 'Neither
+doth any man know the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the
+Son willeth to reveal Him.' That is the characteristic which shuts
+out the wise and lets in the simple.
+
+Then follows the great call to all to come to Him. The practical
+issue of all these solemn thoughts is that the Gospel is a Gospel
+for all the world, and that the one qualification for coming within
+the terms of its offer is to be 'weary and heavy laden.' Thus all
+ends in the broad universality of the message, in its adaptation to
+all, in its offer to all; and thus it is shown that every apparent
+exclusion of any is but the result of its free offer to all, and
+that to say 'Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent'
+is but to say, 'Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the
+waters.' Well then might joy fill the heart of the Man of Sorrows.
+Well might He lift up His solemn thanksgiving to God and say, 'I
+thank Thee, Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth.'
+
+Consider--
+
+I. The Great Characteristics of the Gospel.
+
+We shall only understand the ground of the revealing and of the
+hiding if we understand what it is which is offered. It is of such a
+nature as necessarily to involve a twofold effect, caused by a
+twofold attitude towards it.
+
+1. The Gospel addresses itself to all men--man as man--not to what
+is sectional or accidental, not to classes, not to schools, not to
+the _elite_. It is broad and universal. It speaks no dialect of
+a province, but the universal language. It is addressed to Man as
+Man. 'We have all of us one human heart.' It appeals to the noble
+and the peasant, to the beggar on the dunghill and to the prince on
+his throne, in precisely the same fashion. It is equal as the
+providence of God, impartial as the light, universal as the air
+which reddens equally the blood that flows in long-descended veins
+and that of the foundling on the streets. In its sublime
+universality there are no distinctions. Death and the Gospel know no
+ranks. In both, 'the rich and the poor meet together, the Lord is
+the Maker of them all.' 'In Christ Jesus there is neither
+circumcision nor uncircumcision.' The blue sky which bends above all
+alike is like that great word.
+
+2. It treats all as utterly helpless.
+
+3. It offers to all Redemption as their most pressing want.
+Consequently, in substance it is the gift not of culture, but
+deliverance, and in form it is not a theory but a fact, not a system
+of _credenda_ but an action, not an _-ology_ but a power.
+
+4. It demands from all submission and trust.
+
+These being the characteristics, consider--
+
+II. The qualifications for reception as necessarily resulting from
+the characteristics.
+
+The persons who receive must be those who consent to take the
+station which the Gospel assigns. They must be babes, by which is
+meant not such as are innocent, but such as are reliant on a higher
+Power, self-distrustful, willing to obey.
+
+These qualifications are all moral. The organ for reception of the
+Gospel is the heart, not the head. To receive it by faith is a
+spiritual, not an intellectual process. Ignorance is no
+qualification nor no disqualification. Ignorance or knowledge is
+immaterial. The one condition is to be willing to accept.
+
+III. The disqualification of the wise as necessarily resulting from
+the qualification.
+
+The organ for the reception is not the head but the heart.
+Therefore, wisdom is a barrier only in this way, that it has nothing
+to do in the matter. Its presence or its absence is quite
+indifferent here as in many other spheres of experience. The joys of
+the affections, the joys of common emotions, the joys of bodily
+life--all these are utterly independent of the culture of the
+understanding.
+
+Hence 'wisdom' becomes a barrier, because its possessors are
+accustomed to think it the master key. Not intellect, but the pride
+of intellect, trusting in it, glorying in wisdom is the
+disqualification.
+
+It is not true that there is any discord between religion and
+cultivated thought. The loftier the soul, the loftier all its
+attributes, the nobler should be, may be, its religion. It is not
+true that there is any natural affinity between ignorance and
+religion, between narrow understandings and deep faith. That is not
+the Bible truth. The religion of Christ is not like owls that love
+the twilight, but like eagles that 'purge their sight at the very
+fountain itself of heavenly radiance.'
+
+Take history: the great names--an Augustine and a Luther, a Dante
+and a Milton, a Bacon and a Pascal--are enough to show that there is
+no antagonism. On the other hand, names enough rise to show that
+there is no alliance. The inference is that the intellect has little
+to do with a man's attitude towards the Revelation of God in Christ,
+but that the moral is all.
+
+Let me close with the repetition of the thought that the apparent
+exclusion is the result of the universality, and that 'Come unto Me'
+is Christ's commentary on my text. Well then may we rejoice when we
+think of a gospel for the world. Whatever you are, it is for you if
+you are a man. However foolish, though you cannot read a letter and
+know nothing, it is for you. If you be enriched with all knowledge,
+you must come on the same terms as that beggar at your side. That is
+a healthy discipline. You are more than a student, than a scholar,
+than a thinker; you are a man, you are a sinful man. There is a
+deeper chamber in your heart than any into which knowledge can
+penetrate. Christ brings a gospel for all. When we think of it, with
+its sublime disregard of all peculiarities, we may well rejoice with
+him who said, 'Ye see your calling, brethren,' and with Him, the
+loftiest, the incarnate, Wisdom who said, 'I thank Thee, Father.'
+For if you rightly grasp the bearing of this text, and mark what
+follows it in our Lord's heart and thoughts, you will see these deep
+eyes of solemn joy turned from the heaven to you, filmy with
+compassion, and those hands, then lifted in rapt devotion, stretched
+out to beckon you and all the world to His breast, and hear the
+voice that rose in that burst of thanksgiving melting into
+tenderness as it woos you, be you wise or ignorant, to come to Him
+and rest.
+
+
+
+
+THE REST GIVER
+
+
+    'Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden,
+    and I will give you rest. 29. Take My yoke upon you,
+    and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and
+    ye shall find rest unto your souls.'--MATT. xi. 28, 29.
+
+One does not know whether tenderness or majesty is predominant in
+these wonderful words. A divine penetration into man's true
+condition, and a divine pity, are expressed in them. Jesus looks
+with clearsighted compassion into the inmost history of all hearts,
+and sees the toil and the sorrow which weigh on every soul. And no
+less remarkable is the divine consciousness of power, to succour and
+to help, which speaks in them. Think of a Jewish peasant of thirty
+years old, opening his arms to embrace the world, and saying to all
+men, 'Come and rest on My breast.' Think of a man supposing himself
+to be possessed of a charm which could soothe all sorrow and lift
+the weight from every heart.
+
+A great sculptor has composed a group where there diverge from the
+central figure on either side, in two long lines, types of all the
+cruel varieties of human pains and pangs; and in the midst stands,
+calm, pure, with the consciousness of power and love in His looks,
+and with outstretched hands, as if beckoning invitation and dropping
+benediction, Christ the Consoler. The artist has but embodied the
+claim which the Master makes for Himself here. No less remarkable is
+His own picture of Himself, as 'meek and lowly in heart.' Did ever
+anybody before say, 'I am humble,' without provoking the comment,
+'He that says he is humble proves that he is not'? But Jesus Christ
+said it, and the world has allowed the claim; and has answered,
+'Though Thou bearest record of Thyself, Thy record is true.'
+
+But my object now is not so much to deal with the revelation of our
+Lord contained in these marvellous words, as to try, as well as I
+can, to re-echo, however faintly, the invitation that sounds in
+them. There is a very striking reduplication running through them
+which is often passed unnoticed. I shall shape my remarks so as to
+bring out that feature of the text, asking you to look first with me
+at the twofold designation of the persons addressed; next at the
+twofold invitation; and last at the twofold promise of rest.
+
+I. Consider then the twofold designation here of the persons
+addressed, 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden.'
+
+The one word expresses effort and toil, the other a burden and
+endurance. The one speaks of the active, the other of the passive,
+side of human misery and evil. Toil is work which is distasteful in
+itself, or which is beyond our faculties. Such toil, sometime or
+other, more or less, sooner or later, is the lot of every man. All
+work becomes labour, and all labour, sometime or other, becomes
+toil. The text is, first of all, and in its most simple and surface
+meaning, an invitation to all the men who know how ceaseless, how
+wearying, how empty the effort and energy of life is, to come to
+this Master and rest.
+
+You remember those bitter words of the Book of Ecclesiastes, where
+the preacher sets forth a circle of labour that only comes back to
+the point where it began, as being the law for nature and the law
+for man. And truly much of our work seems to be no better than that.
+We are like squirrels in a cage, putting forth immense muscular
+effort, and nothing to show for it after all. 'All is vanity, and
+striving after wind.'
+
+Toil is a curse; work is a blessing. But all our work darkens into
+toil; and the invitation, 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour,'
+reaches to the very utmost verge of the world and includes every
+soul.
+
+And then, in like manner, the other side of human experience is set
+forth in that other word. For most men have not only to work, but to
+bear; not only to toil, but to sorrow. There are efforts that need
+to be put forth, which task all our energy, and leave the muscles
+flaccid and feeble. And many of us have, at one and the same moment,
+to work and to weep, to toil whilst our hearts are beating like a
+forge-hammer; to labour whilst memories and thoughts that might
+enfeeble any worker, are busy with us. A burden of sorrow, as well
+as effort and toil, is, sooner or later, the lot of all men.
+
+But that is only surface. The twofold designation here before us
+goes a great deal deeper than that. It points to two relationships
+to God and to God's law of righteousness. Men labour with vague and
+yet with noble effort, sometimes, to do the thing that is right, and
+after all efforts there is left a burden of conscious defect. In the
+purest and the highest lives there come both of these things. And
+Jesus Christ, in this merciful invitation of His, speaks to all the
+men that have tried, and tried in vain, to satisfy their consciences
+and to obey the law of God, and says to them, 'Cease your efforts,
+and no longer carry that burden of failure and of sin upon your
+shoulders. Come unto Me, and I will give you rest.'
+
+I should be sorry to think that I was speaking to any man or woman
+who had not, more or less, tried to do what is right. You have
+laboured at that effort with more or less of consistency, with more
+or less of earnestness. Have you not found that you could not
+achieve it?
+
+I am sure that I am speaking to no man or woman who has not upon his
+or her conscience a great weight of neglected duties, of actual
+transgressions, of mean thoughts, of foul words and passions, of
+deeds that they would be ashamed that any should see; ashamed that
+their dearest should catch a glimpse of. My friend, universal
+sinfulness is no mere black dogma of a narrow Calvinism; it is no
+uncharitable indictment against the race; it is simply putting into
+definite words the consciousness that is in every one of your
+hearts. You know that, whether you like to think about it or not,
+you have broken God's law, and are a sinful man. You carry a burden
+on your back whether you realise the fact or no, a burden that clogs
+all your efforts, and that will sink you deeper into the darkness
+and the mire. 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour,' and with noble,
+but, at bottom, vain, efforts have striven after right and truth.
+'Come unto Me all ye that are burdened,' and bear, sometimes
+forgetting it, but often reminded of its pressure by galled
+shoulders and wearied limbs, the burden of sin on your bent backs.
+
+This invitation includes the whole race. In it, as in a blank form,
+you may each insert your name. Jesus Christ speaks to thee, John,
+Thomas, Mary, Peter, whatever thy name may be, as distinctly as if
+you saw your name written on the pages of your New Testament, when
+He says to you, 'Come unto Me, _all_ ye that labour and are
+heavy laden.' For the 'all' is but the sum of the units; and I, and
+thou, and thou, have our place within the word.
+
+II. Now, secondly, look at the twofold invitation that is here.
+
+'Come unto Me ... Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me.' These two
+things are not the same. 'Coming unto Me,' as is quite plain to the
+most superficial observation, is the first step in the approach to a
+companionship, which companionship is afterwards perfected and kept
+up by obedience and imitation. The 'coming' is an initial act which
+makes a man Christ's companion. And the 'Take My yoke upon you, and
+learn of Me,' is the continuous act by which that companionship is
+manifested and preserved. So that in these words, which come so
+familiarly to most of our memories that they have almost ceased to
+present a sharp meaning, there is not only a merciful summons to the
+initial act, but a description of the continual life of which that
+act is the introduction.
+
+And now, to put that into simpler words, when Jesus Christ says
+'Come unto Me,' He Himself has taught us what is His inmost meaning
+in that invitation, by another word of His: 'He that cometh unto Me
+shall never hunger, and he that believeth on Me shall never thirst';
+where the parallelism of the clauses teaches us that to come to
+Christ is simply to put our trust in Him. There is in faith a true
+movement of the whole soul towards the Master. I think that this
+metaphor teaches us a great deal more about that faith that we are
+always talking about in the pulpit, and which, I am afraid, many of
+our congregations do not very distinctly understand, than many a
+book of theology does. To 'come to Him' implies, distinctly, that
+He, and no mere theological dogma, however precious and clear, is
+the Object on which faith rests.
+
+And, therefore, if Christ, and not merely a doctrinal truth about
+Christ, be the Object of our faith, then it is very clear that
+faith, which grasps a Person, must be something more than the mere
+act of the understanding which assents to a truth. And what more is
+it? How is it possible for one person to lay hold of and to come to
+another? By trust and love, and by these alone. These be the bonds
+that bind men together. Mere intellectual consent may be sufficient
+to fasten a man to a dogma, but there must be will and heart at work
+to bind a man to a person; and if it be Christ and not a theology,
+to which we come by our faith, then it must be with something more
+than our brains that we grasp Him and draw near to Him. That is to
+say, your will is engaged in your confidence. Trust Him as you trust
+one another, only with the difference befitting a trust directed to
+an absolute and perfect object of trust, and not to a poor, variable
+human heart. Trust Him as you trust one another. Then, just as
+husband and wife, parent and child, friend and friend, pass through
+all intervening hindrances and come together when they trust and
+love, so you come closer to Christ as the very soul of your soul by
+an inward real union, than you do even to your dear ones, if you
+grapple Him to your heart with the hoops of steel, which, by simple
+trust in Him, the Divine Redeemer forges for us. 'Come unto Me,'
+being translated out of metaphor into fact, is simply 'Believe on
+the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.'
+
+And still further, we have here, not only the initial act by which
+companionship and union with Jesus Christ is brought about, but the
+continual course by which it is kept up, and by which it is
+manifested. The faith which saves a man's soul is not all which is
+required for a Christian life. 'Take My yoke upon you, and _learn
+of Me_.' The yoke is that which, laid on the broad forehead or
+the thick neck of the ox, has attached to it the cords which are
+bound to the burden that the animal draws. The burden, then, which
+Christ gives to His servants to pull, is a metaphor for the specific
+duties which He enjoins upon them to perform; and the yoke by which
+they are fastened to their burdens, 'obliged' to their duties, is
+His authority, So to 'take His yoke' upon us is to submit our wills
+to His authority. Therefore this further call is addressed to all
+those who have come to Him, feeling their weakness and their need
+and their sinfulness, and have found in Him a Saviour who has made
+them restful and glad; and it bids them live in the deepest
+submission of will to Him, in joyful obedience, in constant service;
+and, above all, in the daily imitation of the Master.
+
+You must put both these commandments together before you get
+Christ's will for His children completely expressed. There are some
+of you who think that Christianity is only a means by which you may
+escape the penalty of your sins; and you are ready enough, or fancy
+yourselves so, to listen when He says, 'Come to Me that you may be
+pardoned,' but you are not so ready to listen to what He says
+afterwards, when He calls upon you to take His yoke upon you, to
+obey Him, to serve Him, and above all to copy Him. And I beseech you
+to remember that if you go and part these two halves from one
+another, as many people do, some of them bearing away the one half
+and some the other, you have got a maimed Gospel; in the one case a
+foundation without a building, and in the other case a building
+without a foundation. The people who say that Christ's call to the
+world is 'Come unto Me,' and whose Christianity and whose Gospel is
+only a proclamation of indulgence and pardon for past sin, have laid
+hold of half of the truth. The people who say that Christ's call is
+'Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me,' and that Christianity is a
+proclamation of the duty of pure living after the pattern of Jesus
+Christ our great Example, have laid hold of the other half of the
+truth. And both halves bleed themselves away and die, being torn
+asunder; put them together, and each has power.
+
+That separation is one reason why so many Christian men and women
+are such poor Christians as they are--having so little real
+religion, and consequently so little real joy. I could lay my
+fingers upon many men, professing Christians--I do not say whether
+in this church or in other churches--whose whole life shows that
+they do not understand that Jesus Christ has a twofold summons to
+His servants; and that it is of no avail once, long ago, to have
+come, or to think that you have come, to Him to get pardon, unless
+day by day you are keeping beside Him, doing His commandments, and
+copying His sweet and blessed example.
+
+III. And now, lastly, look at the twofold promise which is here.
+
+I do not know if there is any importance to be attached to the
+slight diversity of language in the two verses, so as that in the
+one case the promise runs, 'I will _give_ you rest,' and in the
+other, 'Ye shall _find_ rest.' That sounds as if the rest that
+was contingent upon the first of the invitations was in a certain
+and more direct and exclusive fashion Christ's gift than the rest
+which was contingent upon the second. It may be so, but I attach no
+importance to that criticism; only I would have you observe that our
+Lord distinctly separates here between the rest of 'coming,' and the
+rest of wearing His 'yoke.' These two, howsoever they may be like
+each other, are still not the same. The one is the perfecting and
+the prolongation, no doubt, of the other, but has likewise in it
+some other, I say not more blessed, elements. Dear brethren, here
+are two precious things held out and offered to us all. There is
+rest in coming to Christ; the rest of a quiet conscience which gnaws
+no more; the rest of a conscious friendship and union with God, in
+whom alone are our soul's home, harbour, and repose; the rest of
+fears dispelled; the rest of forgiveness received into the heart. Do
+you want that? Go to Christ, and as soon as you go to Him you will
+get that rest.
+
+There is rest in faith. The very act of confidence is repose. Look
+how that little child goes to sleep in its mother's lap, secure from
+harm because it trusts. And, oh! if there steal over our hearts such
+a sweet relaxation of the tension of anxiety when there is some dear
+one on whom we can cast all responsibility, how much more may we be
+delivered from all disquieting fears by the exercise of quiet
+confidence in the infinite love and power of our Brother Redeemer,
+Christ! He will be 'a covert from the storm, and a refuge from the
+tempest'; as 'rivers of water in a dry place, and the shadow of a
+great rock in a weary land.' If we come to Him, the very act of
+coming brings repose.
+
+But, brethren, that is not enough, and, blessed be God! that is not
+all. There is a further, deeper rest in obedience, and emphatically
+and most blessedly there is a rest in Christ-likeness. 'Take My yoke
+upon you.' There is repose in saying 'Thou art my Master, and to
+Thee I bow.' You are delivered from the unrest of self-will, from
+the unrest of contending desires, you get rid of the weight of too
+much liberty. There is peace in submission; peace in abdicating the
+control of my own being; peace in saying, 'Take Thou the reins, and
+do Thou rule and guide me.' There is peace in surrender and in
+taking His yoke upon us.
+
+And most especially the path of rest for men is in treading in
+Christ's footsteps. 'Learn of Me,' it is the secret of tranquillity.
+We have done with passionate hot desires,--and it is these that
+breed all the disquiet in our lives--when we take the meekness and
+the lowliness of the Master for our pattern. The river will no
+longer roll, broken by many a boulder, and chafed into foam over
+many a fall, but will flow with even foot, and broad, smooth bosom,
+to the parent sea.
+
+There is quietness in self-sacrifice, there is tranquillity in
+ceasing from mine own works and growing like the Master.
+
+  'The Cross is strength; the solemn Cross is gain.
+   The Cross is Jesus' breast,
+   Here giveth He the rest,
+   That to His best beloved doth still remain.'
+
+'Take up thy cross daily,' and thou enterest into His rest.
+
+My brother, 'the wicked is like the troubled sea that cannot rest,
+whose waters cast up mire and dirt.' But you, if you come to Christ,
+and if you cleave to Christ, may be like that 'sea of glass, mingled
+with fire,' that lies pure, transparent, waveless before the Throne
+of God, over which no tempests rave, and which, in its deepest
+depths, mirrors the majesty of 'Him that sitteth upon the Throne,
+and of the Lamb.'
+
+
+
+
+THE PHARISEES' SABBATH AND CHRIST'S
+
+
+    'At that time Jesus went on the Sabbath day through the
+    corn; and His disciples were an hungred, and began to
+    pluck the ears of corn, and to eat. 2. But when the
+    Pharisees saw it they said unto Him, Behold, Thy
+    disciples do that which is not lawful to do upon the
+    Sabbath day. 3. But he said unto them, Have ye not read
+    what David did, when he was an hungred, and they that
+    were with him; 4. How he entered into the house of God,
+    and did eat the shewbread, which was not lawful for him
+    to eat, neither for them which were with him, but only
+    for the priests! 5. Or have ye not read in the law, how
+    that on the Sabbath days the priests in the temple
+    profane the Sabbath, and are blameless! 6. But I say
+    unto you, That in this place is one greater than the
+    temple. 7. But if ye had known what this meaneth, I
+    will have mercy, and not sacrifice, ye would not have
+    condemned the guiltless. 8. For the Son of Man is Lord
+    even of the Sabbath day 9. And when he was departed
+    thence, He went into their synagogue: 10. And, behold,
+    there was a man which had his hand withered. And they
+    asked Him, saying, Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath
+    days? that they might accuse Him. 11. And He said unto
+    them, What man shall there be among you, that shall have
+    one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the Sabbath day,
+    will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out? 12. How
+    much then is a man better than a sheep? Wherefore it is
+    lawful to do well on the Sabbath days. 13. Then saith
+    He to the man, Stretch forth thine hand. And he
+    stretched it forth; and it was restored whole, like as
+    the other. 14. Then the Pharisees went out, and held a
+    counsel against Him, how they might destroy Him.'
+    --MATT. xii. 1-14.
+
+We have had frequent occasion to point out that this Gospel is
+constructed, not on chronological, but on logical lines. It groups
+together incidents related in subject, though separated in time.
+Thus we have the collection of Christ's sayings in the Sermon on the
+Mount, followed by the collection of doings in chapters viii. and
+ix., the collected charge to His ambassadors in chapter x., the
+collection of instances illustrative of the relations of different
+classes to the message of the Kingdom and its King in chapter xi.,
+and now in this chapter a series of incidents setting forth the
+growing bitterness of antagonism on the part of the guardians of
+traditional and ceremonial religion. This is followed, in the next
+chapter, with a series of parables.
+
+The present lesson includes two Sabbath incidents, in the first of
+which the disciples are the transgressors of the sabbatic tradition;
+in the second, Christ's own action is brought into question. The
+scene of the first is in the fields, that of the second is in the
+synagogue. In the one, Sabbath observance is set aside at the call
+of personal needs; in the other, at the call of another's calamity.
+So the two correspond to the old Puritan principle that the Sabbath
+law allowed of 'works of necessity and of mercy.'
+
+I. The Sabbath and personal needs. This is a strange sort of King
+who cannot even feed His servants. What a glimpse into the penury of
+their usual condition the quiet statement that the disciples were
+hungry gives us, especially if we remember that it is not likely
+that the Master had fared better than they! Indeed, His reference to
+David and his band of hungry heroes suggests that 'He was an
+hungred' as well as 'they that were with Him.' As they traversed
+some field path through the tall yellowing corn, they gathered a few
+ears, as the merciful provision of the law allowed, and hastily
+began to eat the rubbed-out grains. As soon as they 'began,' the
+eager Pharisees, who seem to have been at their heels, call Him to
+'behold' this dreadful crime, which, they think, requires His
+immediate remonstrance. If they had had as sharp eyes for men's
+necessities as for their faults, they might have given them food
+which it was 'lawful' to eat, and so obviated this frightful
+iniquity. But that is not the way of Pharisees. Moses had not
+forbidden such gleaning, but the casuistry which had spun its
+multitudinous webs over the law, hiding the gold beneath their dirty
+films, had decided that plucking the ears was of the nature of
+reaping, and reaping was work, and work was forbidden, which being
+settled, of course the inferential prohibition became more important
+than the law from which it was deduced. That is always the case with
+human conclusions from revelation; and the more questionable these
+are, the more they are loved by their authors, as the sickly child
+of a family is the dearest.
+
+Our Lord does not question the authority of the tradition, nor ask
+where Moses had forbidden what His disciples were doing. Still less
+does He touch the sanctity of the Jewish Sabbath. He accepts His
+questioners' position, for the time, and gives them a perfect answer
+on their own ground. Perhaps there may be just a hint in the double
+'Have ye not read?' that they could not produce Scripture for their
+prohibition, as He would do for the liberty which He allowed. He
+quotes two instances in which ceremonial obligations gave way before
+higher law. The first, that of David and his followers eating the
+shew-bread, which was tabooed to all but priests, is perhaps chosen
+with some reference to the parallel between Himself, the true King,
+now unrecognised and hunted with His humble followers, and the
+fugitive outlaw with his band. It is but a veiled allusion at most;
+but, if it fell on good soil, it might have led some one to ask, 'If
+this is David, where is Saul, and where is Doeg, watching him to
+accuse him?' This example serves our Lord's purpose of showing that
+even a divine prohibition, if it relates to mere ceremonial matter,
+melts, like wax, before even bodily necessities. What a thrill of
+holy horror would meet the enunciation of the doctrine that such a
+carnal thing as hunger rightfully abrogated a sacred ritual
+proscription! The law of right is rigid; that of external ceremonies
+is flexible. Better that a man should die than that the one should
+be broken; better that the other should be flung to the winds than
+that a hungry man should go unfed. It may reasonably be doubted
+whether all Christian communities have learned the sweep of that
+principle yet, or so judge of the relative importance of keeping up
+their appointed forms of worship, and of feeding their hungry
+brother. The brave Ahimelech, 'the son of Ahitub,' was ahead of a
+good many people of to-day.
+
+The second example comes still closer to the question in hand, and
+supplies the reference to the Sabbath law, which the former had not.
+There was much hard work done in the temple on the Sabbath--sacrifices
+to be slain, fires and lamps to be kindled, and so on. That was not
+Sabbath desecration. Why? Because it was done in the temple, and as a
+part of divine service. The sanctity of the place, and the consequent
+sanctity of the service, exempted it from the operation of the law.
+The question, no doubt, was springing to the lips of some scowling
+Pharisee, 'And what has that to do with our charge against your
+disciples?' when it was answered by the wonderful next words, 'In
+this place'--here among the growing corn, beneath the free heaven, far
+away from Jerusalem--'is one greater than the temple.' Profound words,
+which could only sound as blasphemy or nonsense to the hearers, but
+which touch the deepest truths concerning His person and His relations
+to men, and which involve the destruction of all temples and rituals.
+He is all that the temple symbolised. In Him the Godhead really dwells;
+He is the meeting-place of God and man, the place of the oracle, the
+place of sacrifice. Then, where He stands is holy ground, and all work
+done with reference to Him is worship. These poor followers of His are
+priests; and if, for His sake, they had broken a hundred Sabbath
+regulations, they were guiltless.
+
+So far our Lord has been answering His opponents; now He attacks.
+The quotation from Hosea is often on His lips. Here He uses it to
+unmask the real motives of His assailants. Their murmuring came not
+from more religion, but from less love. If they had had a little
+more milk of human kindness in them, it would have died on their
+lips; if they had grasped the real meaning of the religion they
+professed, they would have learned that its soul was 'mercy'--that
+is, of course, man's gentleness to man--and that sacrifice and
+ceremony were but the body, the help, and sometimes the hindrance,
+of that soul. They would have understood the relative importance of
+disposition and of external worship, as end and means, and not have
+visited a mere breach of external order with a heat of disapprobation
+only warranted by a sin against the former. Their judgment would have
+been liker God's if they had looked at those poor hungry men with
+merciful eyes and with merciful hearts, rather than with eager scrutiny
+that delighted to find them tripping in a triviality of outward
+observance. What mountains of harsh judgment by Christ's own followers
+on each other would have been removed into the sea if the spirit of
+these great words had played upon them!
+
+The 'for' at the beginning of verse 8 seems to connect with the last
+words of the preceding verse, 'I call them guiltless, for,' etc. It
+states more plainly still the claim already put forward in verse 6.
+'The Son of Man,' no doubt, is equivalent to 'Messiah'; but it is
+more, as revealing at once Christ's true manhood and His unique and
+complete manhood, in which the very ideal of man is personally
+realised. It can never be detached from His other name, the 'Son of
+God.' They are the obverse and reverse of the same golden coin. He
+asserts His power over the Sabbath, as enjoined upon Israel. His is
+the authority which imposed it. It is plastic in His hands. The
+whole order of which it is part has its highest purpose in
+witnessing of Him. He brings the true 'rest.'
+
+II. The Sabbath, and works of beneficence. Matthew appears to have
+brought together here two incidents which, according to Luke, were
+separated in time. The scene changes to a synagogue, perhaps that of
+Capernaum. Among the worshippers is a man with 'a withered hand,'
+who seems to have been brought there by the Pharisees as a bait to
+try to draw out Christ's compassion. What a curious state of mind
+that was,--to believe that Christ could work miracles, and to want
+Him to do one, not for pity's sake, nor for confirmation of faith,
+but to have material for accusing Him! And how heartlessly careless
+of the poor sufferer they are, when they use him thus! He for his
+part stands silent. Desire and faith have no part in evoking this
+miracle. Deadly hatred and calculating malignity ask for it, and for
+once they get their wish. Having baited their hook, and set the man
+with his shrunken hand full in view, they get into their corners and
+wait the event. Matthew tells us that they ask our Lord the question
+which Luke represents Him as asking them. Perhaps we may say that He
+gave voice to the question which they were asking in their hearts.
+Their motive is distinctly given here. They wanted material for a
+legal process before a local tribunal. The whole thing was an
+attempt to get Jesus within the meshes of the law. Again, as in the
+former case, it is the traditional, not the written, law, which
+healing would have broken. The question evidently implies that, in
+the judgment of the askers, healing was unlawful. Talmudical
+scholars tell us that in later days the rabbis differed on the
+point, but that the prevalent opinion was, that only sicknesses
+threatening immediate danger to life could lawfully be treated on
+the Sabbath. The more rigid doctrine was obviously held by Christ's
+questioners. It is a significant instance of the absurdity and
+cruelty which are possible when once religion has been made a matter
+of outward observance. Nothing more surely and completely ossifies
+the heart and blinds common sense.
+
+In His former answer Jesus had appealed to Scripture to bear out His
+teaching that Sabbath observance must bend to personal necessities.
+Here He appeals to the natural sense of compassion to confirm the
+principle that it must give way to the duty of relieving others. His
+question is as confident of an answer as the Pharisees' had been.
+But though He takes it for granted that His hearers could only
+answer it in one way, the microscopic and cold-blooded ingenuity of
+the rabbis, since His day, answers it in another. They say, 'Don't
+lift the poor brute out, but throw in a handful of fodder, and
+something for him to lie upon, and let him be till next day.' A
+remarkable way of making 'thine ox and thine ass' keep the Sabbath!
+There is a delicacy of expression in the question; the owner of 'one
+sheep' would be more solicitous about it than if he had a hundred;
+and our Shepherd looks on all the millions of His flock with a heart
+as much touched by their sorrow and needs as if each were His only
+possession. The question waits for no answer; but Christ goes on (as
+if there could be but one reply) to His conclusion, which He binds
+to His first question by another, equally easy to answer. Man's
+superiority to animals makes his claim for help more imperative.
+'You would not do less for one another than for a sheep in a hole,
+surely.' But the form in which our Lord put His conclusive answer to
+the Pharisees gives an unexpected turn to the reply. He does not
+say, 'It is lawful to heal,' but, 'It is lawful to do well,' thus at
+once showing the true justification of healing, namely, that it was
+a beneficent act, and widening the scope of His answer to cover a
+whole class of cases. 'To do well' here means, not to do right, but
+to do good, to benefit men. The principle is a wide one: the
+charitable succour of men's needs, of whatever kind, is congruous
+with the true design of that day of rest. Have the churches laid
+that lesson to heart? On the whole, it is to be observed that our
+Lord here distinctly recognises the obligation of the Sabbath, that
+He claims power over it, that He permits the pressure of one's own
+necessities and of others' need of help, to modify the manner of its
+observance, and that He leaves the application of these principles
+to the spiritual insight of His followers.
+
+The cure which follows is done in a singular fashion. Without a
+whisper of request from the sufferer or any one else, He heals him
+by a word. His command has a promise in it, and He gives the power
+to do what He bids the man do. 'Give what Thou commandest,' says St.
+Augustine, 'and command what Thou wilt.' We get strength to obey in
+the act of obedience. But beyond the possible symbolical
+significance of the mode of cure, and beyond the revelation of
+Christ's power to heal by a word, the manner of healing had a
+special reason in the very cavils of the Pharisees. Not even they
+could accuse Him of breaking any Sabbath law by such a cure. What
+had He done? Told the man to put out his hand. Surely that was not
+unlawful. What had the man done? Stretched it forth. Surely that
+broke no subtle rabbinical precept. So they were foiled at every
+turn, driven off the field of argument, and baffled in their attempt
+to find ground for laying an information against Him. But neither
+His gentle wisdom nor His healing power could reach these hearts,
+made stony by conceit and pedantic formalism; and all that their
+contact with Jesus did was to drive them to intenser hostility, and
+to send them away to plot His death. That is what comes of making
+religion a round of outward observances. The Pharisee is always
+blind as an owl to the light of God and true goodness; keen-sighted
+as a hawk for trivial breaches of his cobweb regulations, and cruel
+as a vulture to tear with beak and claw. The race is not extinct. We
+all carry one inside us, and need God's help to cast him out.
+
+
+
+
+AN ATTEMPT TO ACCOUNT FOR JESUS
+
+
+    'But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, This man
+    doth not cast out demons, but by Beelzebub, the prince
+    of the demons.'--MATT. xii. 24.
+
+Mark's Gospel tells us that this astonishing explanation of Christ
+and His work was due to the ingenious malice of an ecclesiastical
+deputation, sent down from Jerusalem to prevent the simple folk in
+Galilee from being led away by this new Teacher. They must have been
+very hard put to it to explain undeniable but unwelcome facts, when
+they hazarded such a preposterous theory.
+
+Formal religionists never know what to make of a man who is in
+manifest touch with the unseen. These scribes, like Christ's other
+critics, judged themselves in judging Him, and bore witness to the
+very truths that they were eager to deny. For this ridiculous
+explanation admits the miraculous, recognises the impossibility of
+accounting for Christ on any naturalistic hypothesis, and by its
+very outrageous absurdity indicates that the only reasonable
+explanation of the facts is the admission of His divine message and
+authority. So we may learn, even from such words as these, how the
+glory of Jesus Christ shines, though distorted and blurred, through
+the fogs of prejudice and malice.
+
+I. Note, then, first, the unwelcome and undeniable facts that insist
+upon explanation.
+
+I have said that these hostile critics attest the reality of the
+miracles. I know that it is not fashionable at present to attach
+much weight to the fact that none of all the enemies that saw them
+ever had a doubt about the reality of Christ's miracles. I know
+quite well that in an age that believed in the possibility of the
+supernatural, as this age does not, credence would be more easy, and
+that such testimony is less valuable than if it had come from a jury
+of scientific twentieth century sceptics. But I know, on the other
+hand, that for long generations the expectation of the miraculous
+had died out before Christ came; that His predecessor, John the
+Baptist, made no such claims; and that, at first, at all events,
+there was no expectation of Jesus working miracles, to lead to any
+initial ease of acceptance of His claims. And I know that there were
+never sharper and more hostile eyes brought to bear upon any man and
+his work than the eyes of these ecclesiastical 'triers.' It would
+have been so easy and so triumphant a way of ending the whole
+business if they could have shown, what they were anxious to be able
+to show, that the miracle was a trick. And so I venture to think
+that not without some weight is the attestation from the camp of the
+enemy, 'This man casteth out demons.'
+
+But you have to remember that amongst the facts to be explained is
+not only this one of Christ's works having passed muster with His
+enemies, but the other of His own reiterated and solemn claim to
+have the power of working what we call miracles. Now, I wish to
+dwell on that for one moment, because it is fashionable to put one's
+thumb upon it nowadays. It is not unusual to eliminate from the
+Gospel narrative all that side of it, and then to run over in
+eulogiums about the rest. But what we have to deal with is this
+fact, that the Man whom the world admits to be the consummate flower
+of humanity, meek, sane, humble, who has given all generations
+lessons in self-abnegation and devotion, claimed to be able to raise
+the dead, to cast out demons, and to do many wonderful works. And
+though we should be misrepresenting the facts if we said that He did
+what His followers have too often been inclined to do, _i.e._
+rested the stress of evidence upon that side of His work, yet it is
+an equal exaggeration in the other direction to do, as so many are
+inclined to do to-day, _i.e._ disparage the miraculous evidence
+as no evidence at all. 'Go and tell John the things that ye see and
+hear,'--that is His own answer to the question, 'Art Thou He that
+should come?' And though I rejoice to believe that there are far
+loftier and more blessed answers to it than these outward signs and
+tokens, they _are_ signs and tokens; and they are part of the
+whole facts that have to be accounted for.
+
+I would venture to widen the reference of my text for a moment, and
+include not only the actual miracles of our Lord's earthly life, but
+all the beneficent, hallowing, elevating, ennobling, refining
+results which have followed upon the proclamation of His truth in
+the world ever since. I believe, as I think Scripture teaches me to
+believe, that in the world today Christ is working; and that it is a
+mistake to talk about the results of 'Christianity,' meaning thereby
+some abstract system divorced from Him. It is the working of Jesus
+Christ in the world that has brought 'nobler manners, purer laws';
+that has given a new impulse and elevation to art and literature;
+that has lifted the whole tone of society; that has suppressed
+ancient evils; that has barred the doors of old temples of devildom,
+of lust, and cruelty, and vice; and that is still working in the
+world for the elevation and the deifying of humanity. And I claim
+the whole difference between 'B.C. and A.D.'--the whole difference
+between Christendom and Heathendom--as being the measure of the
+continuous power with which Jesus Christ has grappled with and
+throttled the snakes that have fastened on men. That continuous
+operation of His in delivering from the powers of evil has, indeed,
+not yielded such results as might have been expected. But just as on
+earth He was hindered in the exercise of His supernatural power by
+men's unbelief, so that 'He could do no mighty works, save that He
+laid His hands on a few sick folk' here and there, 'and healed
+them,' so He has been thwarted by His Church, and hindered in the
+world, from manifesting the fulness of His power. But yet,
+sorrowfully admitting that, and taking as deserved the scoffs of the
+men that say, 'Your Christianity does not seem to do so very much
+after all,' I still venture to allege that its record is unique; and
+that these are facts which wise men ought to take into account, and
+have some fairly plausible way of explaining.
+
+II. Secondly, note the preposterous explanation.  'This man doth not
+cast out demons, but by Beelzebub, the prince of the demons.' That
+is the last resort of prejudice so deep that it will father an
+absurdity rather than yield to evidence. And Christ has no
+difficulty in putting it aside, as you may remember, by a piece of
+common sense: 'If Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against
+himself, and his kingdom cannot stand.' There is an old play which
+has for its title, _The Devil as an Ass._ He is not such an ass
+as that, to build up with one hand and cast down with the other. As
+the proverb has it, 'Hawks do not pick out hawks' eyes.' But this
+plainly hopeless attempt to account for Christ and His work may be
+turned into a witness for both, and yield not unimportant lessons.
+
+This explanation witnesses to the insufficiency of all explanations
+which omit the supernatural. These men felt that they had to do with
+a Man who was in touch with a whole world of unseen powers; and that
+they had here to deal with something to which ordinary measuring
+lines were palpably inapplicable. And so they fell back upon 'by
+Beelzebub'; and they thereby admitted that humanity without
+something more at the back of it never made such a man as that. And
+I beg you to lay that to heart. It is very easy to solve an
+insoluble problem if you begin by taking all the insoluble elements
+out of it. And that is how a great deal of modern thinking does with
+Christianity. Knock out all the miracles; pooh-pooh all Christ's
+claims; say nothing about Incarnation; declare Resurrection to be
+entirely unhistorical, and you will not have much difficulty in
+accounting for the rest; and it will not be worth the accounting
+for. But here is the thing to be dealt with, that _whole_ life,
+the Christ of the Gospels. And I venture to say that any explanation
+professing to account for Him which leaves out His coming from an
+unseen world, and His possession of powers above this world of sense
+and nature, is ludicrously inadequate. Suppose you had a chain which
+for thousands of years had been winding on to a drum, and link after
+link had been rough iron, and all at once there comes one of pure
+gold, would it be reasonable to say that it had been dug from the
+same mine, and forged in the same fires, as its black and ponderous
+companions? Generation after generation has passed across the earth,
+each begetting sons after its own likeness; and lo! in the midst of
+them starts up one sinless Man. Is it reasonable to say that He is
+the product of the same causes which have produced all the millions,
+and never another like Him? Surely to account for Jesus without the
+supernatural is hopeless.
+
+Further, this explanation may be taken as an instance showing the
+inadequacy of all theories and explanations of Christ and
+Christianity from an unbelieving point of view. It was the first
+attempt of unbelievers to explain where Christ's power came from.
+Like all first attempts, it was crude, and it has been amended and
+refined since. Earlier generations did not hesitate to call the
+Apostles liars, and Christ's contemporaries did not hesitate to call
+Him 'this deceiver.' We have got beyond that; but we still are met
+by explanations of the power of the Gospel and of Christ, its
+subject and Author, which trace these to ignoble elements, and do
+not shrink from asserting that a blunder or a hallucination lies at
+the foundation.
+
+Now, I am not going to enter upon these matters at any length, but I
+would just recall to you our Lord's broad, simple principle: 'A
+corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit, neither doth a good tree
+bring forth evil fruit.' And I would apply that all round. Christian
+teachers have often made great mistakes, as it seems to me, by
+tracing the prevalence of the power of some heathen religions to
+their vices and lies. No system has ever had great moral power in
+this world but by reason of its excellences and truths. Mohammedanism,
+for instance, swept away, and rightly, a mere formal superstition which
+called itself Christianity, because it grasped the one truth: 'There is
+no God but God'; and it had faith of a sort. Monasticism held the
+field in Europe, with all its faults, for centuries, because it enshrined
+the great Christian truth of self-sacrifice and absolute obedience.
+And you may take it as a fixed rule, that howsoever some 'mixture of
+falsehood doth ever please,' as Bacon says, in his cynical way, the
+reason for the power of any great movement has been the truth that was
+in it and not the lie; and the reason why great men have exercised
+influence has been their greatness and their goodness, and not their
+smallnesses and their vices.
+
+I apply that all round, and I ask you to apply it to Christianity;
+and in the light of such plain principles to answer the question:
+'Where did this Man, so fair, so radiant, so human and yet so
+superhuman, so universal and yet so individual--where did He come
+from? and where did the Gospel, which flows from Him, and which has
+done such things in the world as it has done--where did it come
+from? 'Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?' If it
+is true that Jesus Christ is either mistakenly represented in the
+Gospels, or that He made enthusiastic claims which cannot be
+verified; and if it is true that the faith in a Resurrection on
+which Christianity is suspended, and which has produced such fruits
+as we know have been produced, is a delusion; then all I can say is
+that the noblest lives that ever were lived in the world have found
+their impulse in a falsehood or a dream; and that the richest
+clusters that ever have yielded wine for the cup have grown upon a
+thorn. If like produces like, you cannot account for Christ and
+Christianity by anything short of the belief in His Divine mission.
+Serpents' eggs do not hatch out into doves. This Man, when He
+claimed to be God's Son and the world's Saviour, was no brain-sick
+enthusiast; and the results show that the Gospel which His followers
+proclaim rests upon no lie.
+
+Again, this explanation is an instance of the credulity of unbelief.
+Think of the mental condition which could swallow such an
+explanation of such a Worker and such work. It is more difficult to
+believe the explanation than the alternative which it is framed to
+escape. So it is always. The difficulties of faith are small by
+comparison with those of unbelief, gnats beside camels, and that
+that is so is plain from the short duration of each unbelieving
+explanation of Jesus. One can remember in the compass of one's own
+life more than one assailant taking the field with much trumpeting
+and flag-waving, whose attack failed and is forgotten. The child's
+story tells of a giant who determined to slay his enemy, and
+belaboured an empty bed with his club all night, and found his foe
+untouched and fresh in the morning. The Gospel is here; what has
+become of its assailants? They are gone, and the limbo into which
+the scribes' theory has passed will receive all the others. So we
+may be quite patient, and sure that the sieve of time, which is
+slowly and constantly working, will riddle out all the rubbish, and
+cast it on the dunghill where so many exploded theories rot
+forgotten.
+
+III. And now, one word about the last point; and that is--the true
+explanation.
+
+Now, at this stage of my sermon, I must not be tempted to say a word
+about the light which our Lord throws, in these declarations in the
+context, into that dim unseen world. His words seem to me to be too
+solemn and didactic to be taken as accommodations to popular
+prejudice, and a great deal too grave to be taken as mere metaphor.
+And I, for my part, am not so sure that, apart from Him, I know all
+things in heaven and earth, as to venture to put aside these solemn
+words of His--which lift a corner of the veil which hides the
+unseen--and to dismiss them as unworthy of notice. Is it not a
+strange thing that a world which is so ready to believe in spiritual
+communications when they are vouched for by a newspaper editor, is
+so unwilling to believe them when they are in the Bible? And is it
+not a strange thing that scientists, who are always taunting
+Christians with the importance they attach to man in the plan of the
+universe, and ask if all these starry orbs were built for him,
+should be so incredulous of teachings which fill the waste places
+with loftier beings? But that is by the way.
+
+What does Christ say in the context? He tells the secret of His power.
+'I, by the Spirit of God, cast out demons.' And then He goes on to
+speak about a conflict that He wages with a strong man; and about His
+binding the strong man, and spoiling his house. All which, being
+turned into modern language, is just this, that the Lord, by His
+incarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and government at
+the right hand of God, has broken the powers of evil in their central
+hold. He has crushed the serpent's head; and though He may still, as
+Milton puts it, 'swinge the scaly horror of his folded tail,' it is
+but the flurries of the dying brute. The conquering heel is firm on
+his head. So, brethren, evil is conquered, and Christ is the Conqueror;
+and by His work in life and death He has delivered them that were held
+captive of the devil. And you and I may, if we will, pass into 'the
+liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.'
+
+That is the only explanation of Him--in His person, in His character,
+in His work, and in the effects of that work in the world--that
+covers all the facts, and will hold water. All others fail, and they
+mostly fail by boldly eliminating the very facts that need to be
+accounted for. Let us rather look to Him, thankful that our Brother
+has conquered; and let us put our trust in that Saviour. For, if His
+explanation is true, then a very solemn personal consideration arises
+for each of us, 'If I, by the Spirit of God, cast out demons, then
+the Kingdom of God is come unto you,' it stands beside us; it calls
+for our obedience. Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ alone, can cast the
+evils out of our natures. It is the Incarnate Christ, the Divine
+Christ, the crucified Christ, the ascended Christ, the indwelling
+Christ, who will so fill our hearts that there shall be no aching
+voids there to invite the return of the expelled tyrants. If any
+other reformation pass upon us than the thorough one of receiving Him
+by faith into our hearts, then, though they may be swept and garnished,
+they will be empty; and the demons will come back. With Jesus
+inside--they will be outside.
+
+
+
+
+'MAKE THE TREE GOOD'
+
+
+    '... Make the tree good, and his fruit good....'
+    --MATT. xii. 33.
+
+In this Gospel we find that our Lord twice uses this image of a tree
+and its fruit. In the Sermon on the Mount He applies it as a test to
+false teachers, who hide, beneath the wool of the sheep's clothing,
+the fangs and paws of ravening wolves. He says, 'By their deeds ye
+shall know them; for as is the tree so is its fruit.' That is a
+rough and ready test, which applies rather to the teacher than to
+his doctrine, but it applies, to some extent, to the doctrine too,
+on the hypothesis that the teacher's life fairly represents it. Of
+course, it is not the only thing that we have to take into account;
+but it may prick many a bladder, and unmask many an error, and it is
+the way by which the masses generally judge of systems and of their
+apostles. A saintly life has more power than dusty volumes of
+controversy.
+
+But in our text Christ applies the same thoughts in rather a deeper
+fashion. Here the lesson that He would have us draw is of the
+connection between character and conduct; how what we do is
+determined by what we are, and how, not of course with the same
+absolute regularity and constancy, but still somewhat in the same
+fashion as the fruit is true to the tree, so, after all allowance
+made for ups and downs, for the irregular play of will and
+conscience, for the strife that is waged within a man, for the
+temptations of external circumstances, and the like--still, in
+general, as is the inner man, so is the outward manifestation. The
+facts of a life are important mainly as registering and making
+visible the inner condition of the doer. Now, that seems very
+elementary. Everybody believes that 'out of the heart are the issues
+of life,' as a wise man said long ago, but it is one of the truths
+that, if grasped and worked into our consciousness, and out in our
+lives, would do much to revolutionise them. And so, though it is a
+very old story, and though we all admit it, I wish now to come face
+to face with the consequences of this thought, that behind action
+lies character, and that Doing is the second step, and Being is the
+first.
+
+I. I would ask you to notice how here we are confronted with the
+great problem for every man.
+
+'Make the tree good.' It takes a good man to do good things. So how
+shallow is all that talk, 'do, do, do,' this, that, and the other
+thing. All right, but _be_; that is the first thing; or, as
+Christ said, 'Make the tree good, and the fruit' will take care of
+itself. So do you not see how, if that is true about us, we are each
+brought full front up to this, 'Am I trying to make my tree good?
+And what kind of success am I having in the attempt?' The water that
+rises from some spring will bring up with it, in solution, a trace
+of a bed of salt through which it has come, and of all the minerals
+in the soil through which it has passed. And as its sparkling waters
+come out into the light, if one could analyse them completely, one
+might register a geological section of the strata through which it
+has risen. So, our acts bear in them a revelation of all the hidden
+beds through which they have risen; and sometimes they are bitter
+and salt, but they are always true to the self whose apocalypse they
+are to the world, or at all events to God.
+
+Therefore, brethren, I have to urge this, that we shall not be doing
+our true work as men and women, if we are simply trying to better our
+actions, important as these are. By this saying the centre of gravity
+is shifted, and in one aspect, the deeds are made less important. The
+condition of the hidden man of the heart is the all-important thing.
+Christ's word comes to each of us as the briefest statement of all
+that it is our highest duty and truest wisdom to aim at in life--'Make
+the tree good.'
+
+If you have ever tried it honestly, and have not been contented with
+the superficial cleaning up of outsides, which consists in shifting
+the dirt into another place only, not in getting rid of it, I know
+what met you almost as soon as you began, like some great black rock
+that rises in a mountain-pass, and forbids all farther advance--the
+consciousness that you were _not_ good met you. I am not going
+to talk theological technicalities. Never mind about phrases--they
+have been the ruin of a great deal of earnest preaching--call it what
+you like, here is a fact, that whenever a man sets himself, with
+anything like resolute determination and rigid self-examination, to
+the task of getting himself right, he finds that he is wrong. That
+being the case, each of us has to deal with a tremendous problem; and
+the more earnestly and honestly we try to deal with it, the more we
+shall feel how grave it is. You can cure a great deal, I know. God
+forbid that I should say one word that seems to deny a man's power to
+do much in the direction of self-improvement, but after all that is
+done, again you are brought short up on this fact, the testimony of
+conscience. And so I see men labouring at a task as vain as that of
+those who would twist the sands into ropes, according to the old
+fable. I see men seeking after higher perfection of purity than they
+will ever attain. That is the condition of us all, of course, for our
+ideal must always outrun our realisation, else we may as well lie down
+and die. But there is a difference between the imperfect approximation,
+which we feel to be imperfect, and yet feel to be approximation, and
+the despairing consciousness, that I am sure a great many of my
+audience have had, more or less, that I have a task set for me that is
+far beyond my strength. 'Talk about making the tree good! I cannot do
+it.' So men fold their hands, and the foiled endeavour begets despair.
+Or, as is the case with some of you, it begets indifference, and you
+do not care to try any more, because you have tried so often, and have
+made nothing of it.
+
+There is the problem, how 'make the tree good,' the tree being bad,
+or, at all events, if you do not like that broad statement, the tree
+having an element of badness, if I may so say, in and amongst any
+goodness that it has. I do not care which of the two forms of
+statement you take, the fact remains the same.
+
+II. Note the universal failure to solve the problem.
+
+'Make the tree good.'
+
+Yes. And there are a whole set of would-be arboriculturists who tell
+you they will do it if you will trust to them. Let us look at them.
+First comes one venerable personage. He says, 'I am Law, and I
+prescribe this, and I forbid that, and I show reward and punishment,
+and I tell you--be a good man.' Well! what then? It is not for want of
+telling that men are bad. The worst man in the world knows his duty a
+great deal more than the best man in the world does it. And whether it
+is the law of the land, or whether it is the law of society, or the
+law written in Scripture, or the law written in a man's own heart,
+they all come under the same fatal disability. They tell us what to
+do, and they do not put out a finger to help us to do it. A lame man
+does not get to the city because he sees a guide-post at the turning
+which tells him which road to take. The people who do not believe in
+certain modern agitations about the restrictions of the liquor traffic
+say, 'You cannot make people sober by Act of Parliament,' which is
+absolutely true, although it does not bear, I think, the inference that
+they would draw from it, and it just puts into a rough form the fatal
+weakness of this would-be gardener and improver of the nature of the
+trees. He tells us our duty, and there an end.
+
+Do you remember how the Apostle put the weakness of law in words,
+the antique theological terminology of which should not prevent us
+from seeing the large truth in them? 'If there had been a law given
+which could have given life, then righteousness should have been by
+the law,' which being translated into modern English is just this,
+If Law could impart a power to obey its behests, then it is all that
+we want to make us right. But until it can do that it fails in two
+points. It deals with conduct, and we need to have character dealt
+with; and it does not lift the burden that it lays on me with one of
+its fingers. So we may rule Law out of court.
+
+And then comes another, and he says, 'I am Culture, and intellectual
+acquirement; or my name is Education, and I am going to make the
+tree good in the most scientific fashion, because what makes men bad
+is that they do not know, and if they only knew they would do the
+right.' Now, I thoroughly believe that education diminishes crime. I
+believe it weans from certain forms of evil. I believe that, other
+things being equal, an educated man, with his larger interests and
+his cultivated tastes, has a certain fastidiousness developed which
+keeps him from being so much tempted by the grosser forms of
+transgression. I believe that very largely you will empty your gaols
+in proportion as you fill your schools. And let no man say that I am
+an obscurantist, or that I am indifferent to the value of education
+and the benefits of intellectual culture, when I declare that all
+these may be attained, and the nature of the tree remain exactly
+what it was. You may prune, you may train along the wall, you may
+get bigger fruit, you will not get better fruit. Did you ever hear
+the exaggerated line that describes one of the pundits of science as
+'the greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind'? The plain fact is that
+the cultivation of the understanding has little to do with the
+purifying of the depths of the heart.
+
+And then comes another, and says, 'I am the genius of Beauty and Art.
+And my recipe is pictures and statues, and all that will refine the
+mind, and lift the taste.' That is the popular gospel of this day, in
+a great many quarters. Yes, and have we never heard of a period in
+European history which was, as they call it, 'the Renaissance' of art
+and the death of morality? Do we not know that side by side there have
+been cultivated in all ages, and are being cultivated to-day, the most
+exclusive devotion to the beauty that can be expressed by art, and the
+most intense indifference to the beauty of holiness? Ah! brethren, it
+wants something far deeper-going than pictures to purge the souls of
+men. And whilst, as before, I thankfully acknowledge the refining
+influence of this new cult, I would protest against the absurdity of
+putting it upon a pedestal as the guide and elevator of corrupted
+humanity.
+
+And then come others, and they say, 'Environment is the thing that
+is to blame for it all. How can you get decent lives in the slums?'
+No, I know you cannot; and God bless every effort made to get the
+people out of the slums, I say. Only do not let us exaggerate. You
+cannot change a man, as deeply as we need to be changed, by any
+change of his circumstances. 'Take the bitter tree,' as I remember
+an old Jewish saying has it, 'take the bitter tree and plant it in
+Eden, and water it with the rivers there; and let the angel Gabriel
+be the gardener, and the tree will still bear bitter fruit.' Are all
+the people who live in good houses good? Will a 'living wage'--eight
+shillings a day and eight hours' play--will these change a man's
+character? Will these go deep enough down to touch the springs of
+evil? You cannot alter the nature of a set of objects by arranging
+them in different shapes, parallelograms, or squares, or circles, or
+any others. As long as you have the elements that are in human
+nature to deal with, you may do as you like about the distribution
+of wealth, and the relation of Capital to Labour, and the various
+cognate questions which are all included in the vague word Socialism;
+and human nature will be too strong for you, and you will have the
+old mischiefs cropping out again. Brethren, you cannot put out
+Vesuvius by bringing to bear on it the squirts of all the fire
+engines in creation. The water will go up in steam, and do little or
+nothing to extinguish the fire. And whilst I would thankfully help
+in all these other movements, and look for certain limited results
+of good from them, I, for my part, believe, and therefore I am bound
+to declare, that neither singly, nor all of them in combination,
+will they ever effect the change on human nature which Jesus Christ
+regarded as the only possible means for securing that human nature
+should bear good fruit.
+
+For, if there were no other reason, there are two plain ones which I
+only touch. God is the source of all good, of all creatural purity
+as well as all creatural blessedness. And if a life has a blank wall
+turned to Him, and has cut itself off from Him, I do not care how
+you educate it, fill it full of science, plunge it into an
+atmosphere of art, make the most perfect arrangements for social and
+economical and political circumstances, that soul is cut off from
+the possibility of good, because it is cut off from the fontal
+source of all good. And there is another reason which is closely
+connected with this, and that is that the true bitter tang in us all
+is self-centring regard. That is the mother-tincture that, variously
+coloured and compounded, makes in all the poisonous element that we
+call sin, and until you get something that will cast that evil out
+of a man's heart, you may teach and refine and raise him and arrange
+things for him as you like, and you will not master the source of
+all wrong and corrupt fruit.
+
+III. Lastly, let me say a word about the triumphant solution.
+
+Law says, 'Make the tree good,' and does not try to do it. Christ
+said, 'Make the tree good,' and proceeds to do it. And how does He
+do it?
+
+He does it by coming to us; to every soul of man on the earth, and
+offering, first, forgiveness for all the past. I do not know that
+amongst all the bonds by which evil holds a poor soul that struggles
+to get away from it, there is one more adamantine and unyielding
+than the consciousness that the past is irrevocable, and that 'what
+I have written I have written,' and never can blot out. But Jesus
+Christ deals with that consciousness. It is true that 'whatsoever a
+man soweth that shall he also reap,' and the Christian doctrine of
+forgiveness does not contradict that solemn truth, but it assures us
+that God's heart is not turned away from us, notwithstanding the
+past, and that we can write the future better, and break altogether
+the fatal bond that decrees, apart from Him, that 'to-morrow shall
+be as this day, and much more abundant,' and that past sin shall
+beget a progeny of future sins. That fruitfulness of sin is at an
+end, if we take Christ for our Saviour.
+
+He makes the tree good in another fashion still; for the very
+centre, as it seems to me, of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that
+into our spirits He will breathe a new life kindred with His own, a
+new nature which is free from the law and bonds of past sin, and of
+present and future death. The tree is made good because He makes
+those who believe in Him 'new creatures in Christ Jesus.' Now, do
+not turn away and say that that is mysticism. Be it mysticism or
+not, it is God's truth. It is the truth of the Christian Revelation,
+that faith in Jesus Christ puts a new nature into any man, however
+sinful he may have been, and however deep the marks of the fetters
+may have been upon his limbs.
+
+Christ makes the tree good in yet another fashion, because He brings to
+the reinforcement of the new life which He imparts the mightiest
+motives, and sways by love, which leads to the imitation of the Beloved,
+which leads to obedience to the Beloved, which leads to shunning as the
+worst of evils anything that would break the communion with the Beloved,
+and which is in itself the decentralising of the sinful soul from its
+old centre, and the making of Christ the Beloved the centre round which
+it moves, and from which it draws radiance and light and motion. By all
+these methods, and many more that I cannot dwell upon now, the problem
+is triumphantly solved by Christianity. The tree is made good, and
+'instead of the briar shall come up the myrtle tree.'
+
+You may say, 'That is all very well in theory. What about the
+practice? I do not see such a mighty difference between you
+Christians and us.' Well, for myself and my brethren, I accept the
+rebuke. There is not such a difference as there ought to be. But do
+you know why? Not because our great Gardener cannot change the
+nature of the plant, but because we do not submit ourselves to His
+power as we ought to do. Debit us with as many imperfections and
+inconsistencies as you like, do not lay them to the charge of
+Christ.
+
+And yet we are willing to accept the test of Christianity which lies
+in its power to change men. I point to the persecutor on the road to
+Damascus. I point to the Bedfordshire tinker, to him that wrote
+_Pilgrim's Progress_. I point to the history of the Christian
+Church all down through the ages. I point to our mission fields to-day.
+I point to every mission hall, where earnest, honest men are working,
+and where, if you go and ask them, they will let you see people
+lifted from the very depths of degradation and sin, and made honest,
+sober, respectable, hard-working, though not very intelligent or
+refined, Christian people. I suppose that there is no man in an
+official position like mine who cannot look back over his ministry
+and remember, some of them dozens, some of them scores, some of them
+hundreds, of cases in which the change was made on the most hopeless
+people, by the simple acceptance of the simple gospel, 'Christ died
+for me, and Christ lives in me.' I know that I can recall such, and
+I am sure that my brethren can.
+
+People who are not Christians talk glibly about the failure of
+Christianity to transform men. They have never seen the
+transformations because they have never put themselves in the way of
+seeing them. They are being worked to-day; they might be worked here
+and now.
+
+Try the power of the Gospel for yourselves. You cannot make the tree
+good, but you can let Jesus Christ do it. The Ethiopian cannot
+change his skin, nor the leopard his spots, but Jesus can do both.
+'The lion shall eat straw like the ox.' It is weary work to be
+tinkering at your acts. Take the comprehensive way, and let Him
+change your character. I believe that in some processes of dyeing, a
+piece of cloth, prepared with a certain liquid, is plunged into a
+vat full of dye-stuffs of one colour, and is taken out tinged of
+another. The soul, wet with the waters of repentance, and plunged
+into the 'Fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness,' the crimson
+fountain of the blood of Christ, emerges 'whiter than snow.' Let Him
+'make the tree good and fruit will be good,' for if not we shall be
+'hewn down and cast into the fire,' because we cannot bear any fruit
+unto holiness, nor can the end be everlasting life.
+
+
+
+
+'A GREATER THAN JONAS'
+
+
+    'A greater than Jonas is here.'--MATT. xii. 41.
+
+There never was any man in his right mind, still more of influence
+on his fellows, who made such claims as to himself in such
+unmistakable language as Jesus Christ does. To say such things of
+oneself as come from His lips is a sign of a weak, foolish nature.
+It is fatal to all influence, to all beauty of character. It is not
+only that He claims official attributes as a fanatical or dishonest
+pretender to inspiration may do. He does that, but He does more--He
+declares Himself possessed of virtues which, if a man said he had
+them, it would be the best proof that he did not possess them and
+did not know himself. 'I am the way and the truth and the life.' 'I
+am the light of the world'--a 'greater than the temple,' a greater
+than Jonah, a 'greater than Solomon,' and then withal 'I am meek and
+lowly of heart.' And the world believes Him, and says, Yes! it is
+true.
+
+These three comparisons of Jesus with Temple, Jonas, and Solomon,
+carry great claims and great lessons. By the first Jesus asserts
+that He is in reality all that the Temple was in shadowy symbol, and
+sets Himself above ritual, sacrifices, and priests. By the second he
+asserts His superiority not only to one prophet but to them all. By
+the third He asserts His superiority to Solomon, whom the Jews
+reverenced as the bright, consummate flower of kinghood.
+
+Now we may take this comparison as giving us positive thoughts about
+our Lord. The points of comparison may be taken to be three, with
+Jonah as one of an order, with Jonah in his personal character as a
+servant of God, with Jonah as a prophet charged with a special work.
+
+I. The prophets and the Son.
+
+The whole prophetic order may fairly be taken as included here. And
+over against all these august and venerable names, the teachers of
+wisdom, the speakers of the oracles of God, this Nazarene peasant
+stands there before Pharisees and Scribes, and asserts His superiority.
+It is either the most insane arrogance of self-assertion, or it is a
+sober truth. If it be true that self-consciousness is ever the disease
+of the soul, and that the religious teacher who begins to think of
+himself is lost, how marvellous is this assertion!
+
+Compare it with Paul's, 'Unto me who am less than the least of all
+saints'--'I am not a whit behind the chief of the Apostles'--'though
+I be nothing'--'Not I, but Christ in me.' And yet this is meekness,
+for it is infinite condescension in Him to compare Himself with any
+son of man.
+
+(_a_) The contrast is suggested between the prophets and the
+theme of the prophets.
+
+'The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.' Though undoubtedly
+the prophet order had other work than prediction to do, yet the soul
+of their whole work was the announcement of the Messiah.
+
+In testimony whereof, Elijah, who was traditionally the chief of the
+prophets, stood beside Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration, and
+passed away as lost in His light.
+
+(_b_) The contrast is suggested between the recipients of the
+word of God and the Word of God.
+
+The relation of the prophets to their message is contrasted with His
+who was the Truth, who not merely received, but was, the Word of
+God.
+
+There is nothing in Christ's teaching to show that He was conscious
+of standing in a human relation to the truths which He spoke. His
+own personality is ever present in His teaching instead of being
+suppressed--as in all the prophets. His own personality is His
+teaching, for His revelation is by being as much as by saying.
+Similarly, His miracles are done by His own power.
+
+(_c_) The contrast is suggested between the partial teacher of
+God's Name and the complete revealer of it.
+
+The foundation was laid by the prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being
+the chief corner stone (Hebrews i. 1).
+
+II. The disobedient prophet and the perfect Son.
+
+Jonah stands as the great example of human weakness in the chosen
+instruments of God's hand.
+
+Take the story--his shrinking from the message given him. We know
+not why; but perhaps from faint-hearted fear, or from a sense of his
+unworthiness and unfitness for the task. His own words about God as
+long-suffering seem to suggest another reason, that he feared to go
+with a message of judgment which seemed to him so unlikely to be
+executed by the long-suffering God. If so, then what made him
+recreant was not so much fear from personal motives as intellectual
+perplexity and imperfect comprehension of the ways of God. Then we
+hear of his pitiable flight with its absurdity and its wickedness.
+Then comes the prayer which shows him to have been right and true at
+bottom, and teaches us that what makes a good man is not the absence
+of faults, but the presence of love and longing after God. Then we
+see the boldness of his mission. Then follows the reaction from that
+lofty height, the petulance or whatever else it was with which he
+sees the city spared. Even the mildest interpretation cannot acquit
+him of much disregard for the poor souls whom he had brought to
+repentance, and of dreadful carelessness for the life and happiness
+of his fellows.
+
+Now Jonah's behaviour is but a specimen of the vacillations, the
+alternations of feeling which beset every man; the loftiest, the
+truest, the best. Moses, David, Solomon, Elijah, John the Baptist,
+Peter, Luther, Cranmer. And it is full of instruction for us.
+
+Then we turn to the contrast in Christ's perfect obedience and
+faithfulness in His prophetic office. In Him is no trace of
+shrinking even when the grimness of the Cross weighed most on His
+heart. No confusion of mind as to the Father's will, or as to the
+union in Him of perfect righteousness and infinite mercy, ever
+darkened His clear utterances or cast a shadow over his own soul. He
+was never weakened by the collapse that follows on great effort or
+strong emotion. He never failed in his mission through lack of pity.
+
+But there is no need to draw out the comparison. We look on all
+God's instruments, and see them all full of faults and flaws. Here
+is one stainless name, one life in which is no blot, one heart in
+which are no envy, no failings--one obedience which never varied. He
+says of Himself, 'I do always those things which please Him,' and
+we, thinking of all the noblest examples of virtue that the world
+has ever seen, and seeing in them all some speck, turn to this whole
+and perfect chrysolite and say, Yes! 'a greater than they!'
+
+III. The bearer of a transitory message of repentance to one Gentile
+people, and the bearer of an eternal message of grace and love to
+the whole earth.
+
+Jonah is remarkable as having had the sphere of his activity wholly
+outside Israel.
+
+The nature of his message; a preaching of punishment; a call to
+repentance.
+
+The sphere of it--one Gentile city. The effect of it--transitory. We
+know what Nineveh became.
+
+Jesus is greater than Jonah or any prophet in this respect, that His
+message is to the world, and in this, that what He preaches and
+brings far transcends even the loftiest and most spiritual words of
+any of them.
+
+His voice is sweetest, tenderest, clearest and fullest of all that
+have ever sounded in men's ears. And just because it is so, the
+hearing of it brings the most solemn responsibility that was ever
+laid on men, and to us still more gravely and truly may it be said
+than to those who heard Jesus speak on earth, 'The men of Nineveh
+shall rise in judgment with this generation and condemn it.'
+
+
+
+
+'A GREATER THAN SOLOMON'
+
+
+    'A greater than Solomon is here.'--MATT. xii. 42.
+
+It is condescension in Him to compare Himself with any; yet if any
+might have been selected, it is that great name. To the Jews Solomon
+is an ideal figure, who appealed so strongly to popular imagination
+as to become the centre of endless legends; whose dominion was the
+very apex of national glory, in recounting whose splendours the
+historical books seem to be scarce able to restrain their triumph
+and pride.
+
+I. The Man. The story gives us a richly endowed and many-sided
+character. It begins with lovely, youthful enthusiasm, with a
+profound sense of his own weakness, with earnest longings after
+wisdom and guidance. He lived a pure and beautiful youth, and all
+his earlier and middle life was adorned with various graces. There
+is a certain splendid largeness about the character. He had a rich
+variety of gifts: he was statesman, merchant, sage, physicist,
+builder, one of the many-sided men whom the old world produced. And
+on this we may build a comparison and contrast.
+
+The completeness of Christ's Humanity transcends all other men, even
+the most various, and transcends all gathered together. Every type
+of excellence is in Him. We cannot say that His character is any one
+thing in special, it falls under no classification. It is a pure
+white light in which all rays are blended. This all-comprehensiveness
+and symmetry of character are remarkably shown in four brief records.
+
+But we have to take into account the dark shadows that fell on
+Solomon's later years. He clearly fell away from his early
+consecration and noble ideals, and let his sensuous appetites gain
+power. He countenanced, if he did not himself practise, idolatry. As
+a king he became an arbitrary tyrant, and his love of building led
+him to oppress his subjects, and so laid the foundation for the
+revolt under Jeroboam which rent the kingdom. So his history is
+another illustration of the possible shipwreck of a great character.
+It is one more instance of the fall of a 'son of the morning.' We
+need not elaborate the contrast with Christ's character. In Him is
+no falling from a high ideal, no fading of morning glory into a
+cloudy noon or a lurid evening. There is no black streak in that
+flawless white marble. Jesus draws the perfect circle, like Giotto's
+O, while all other lives show some faltering of hand, and consequent
+irregularity of outline. Greater than Solomon, with his over-clouded
+glories and his character worsened by self-indulgence, is Jesus,
+'the Sun of righteousness,' the perfect round of whose lustrous
+light is broken by no spots on the surface, no indentations in the
+circumference, nor obscured by any clouds over its face.
+
+II. The Teacher.
+
+Solomon was traditionally regarded as the author of much of the Book
+of Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes was written as by him. Possibly the
+attribution to him of some share in the former book may be correct,
+but at any rate, his wisdom was said to have drawn the Queen of
+Sheba to hear him, and that is the point of the comparison of our
+text.
+
+If we take these two books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes into
+account, as popularly attributed to him, they suggest points of
+comparison and contrast with Jesus as a teacher, which we may
+briefly point out. Now, Proverbs falls into two very distinct
+portions, the former part being a connected fatherly admonition to
+the pursuit of wisdom, and the latter a collection of prudential
+maxims, in which it is rare for any two contiguous verses to have
+anything to do with each other. In the former part Wisdom is set
+forth as man's chief good, and the Wisdom which is so set forth is
+mainly moral wisdom, the right disposition of will and heart, and
+almost identical with what the Old Testament elsewhere calls
+righteousness. But it is invested, as the writer proceeds, with more
+and more august and queenly attributes, and at last stands forth as
+being, if not a divine person, at least a personification of a
+divine attribute.
+
+Bring that ancient teaching and set it side by side with Jesus, and
+what can we say but that He is what the old writer, be he Solomon or
+another, dimly saw? He is the 'wisdom' which was traditionally
+called the 'wisdom of Solomon,' and which the Queen came from far to
+hear. Jesus is greater, as the light is more than the eye, or as the
+theme is more than the speaker. 'The power of God and the wisdom of
+God' is greater than the sage or seer who celebrates it. What is
+true of Solomon or whoever wrote that praise of Wisdom, is true of
+all teachers and wise men, they are 'not that light,' they are 'sent
+to bear witness of that light.' Jesus is Wisdom, other men are wise.
+Jesus is the greatest teacher, for He teaches us Himself. He is
+lesson as well as teacher. Unless He was a great deal more than
+Teacher, He could not be the perfect Teacher for whom the world
+groans.
+
+The second half of Proverbs is, as I have said, mostly a collection
+of prudential and moral maxims, with very little reference to God or
+high ideals of duty in them. They may represent to us the impotence
+of wise saws to get themselves practised. A guide-post is not a
+guide. It stretches out its gaunt wooden arms towards the city, but
+it cannot bend them to help a lame man lying at its foot. Men do not
+go wrong for lack of knowing the road, nearly so often as for lack
+of inclination to walk in it. We have abundant voices to tell us
+what we ought to do. But what we want is the swaying of inclination
+to do it, and the gift of power to do it. And it is precisely
+because Jesus gives us both these that He is what no collection of
+the wisest sayings can ever be, the efficient teacher of all
+righteousness, and of the true wisdom which is 'the principal
+thing.'
+
+As for Ecclesiastes, though not his, it represents not untruly the
+tone which we may suppose to have characterised his later days in
+its dwelling on the vanity of life. The sadness of it may be
+contrasted with the light thrown by the Gospel on the darkest
+problems. Solomon cries, 'All is vanity'--Jesus teaches His scholars
+to sing, 'All things work together for good.'
+
+III. The Temple builder.
+
+In this respect 'a greater than Solomon is here,' inasmuch as Jesus
+is Himself the true Temple, being for all men, which Solomon's
+structure only shadowed, the meeting-place of God and man, in whom
+God dwells and through whom we can draw near to Him, the place where
+the true Sacrifice is once for all offered, by which Sacrifice sin
+is truly put away. And, further, Jesus is greater than Solomon in
+that He is, through the ages, building up the great Temple of His
+Church of redeemed men, the eternal temple of which not one stone
+shall ever be taken down.
+
+IV. The peaceful King.
+
+There were no wars in Solomon's reign. But a dark shadow brooded
+over it in its later years, which were darkened by oppression,
+luxury, and incipient revolt.
+
+Contrast with that merely external and sadly imperfect peacefulness,
+the deep, inward peace of spirit which Jesus breathes into every man
+who trusts and obeys Him, and with the peace among men which the
+acceptance of His rule brings, and will one day bring perfectly, to
+a regenerated humanity dwelling on a renewed earth. He is King of
+righteousness, and after that also King of peace.
+
+Surely from all these contrasts it is plain that 'a greater than
+Solomon is here.'
+
+
+
+
+FOUR SOWINGS AND ONE RIPENING
+
+
+    'The same day went Jesus out of the house, and sat by
+    the sea side. 2. And great multitudes were gathered
+    together unto Him, so that He went into a ship, and
+    sat; and the whole multitude stood on the shore. 8. And
+    He spake many things unto them in parables, saying,
+    Behold, a sower went forth to sow; 4. And when he
+    sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls
+    came and devoured them up: 6. Some fell upon stony
+    places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith
+    they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth:
+    6. And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and
+    because they had no root, they withered away. 7. And
+    some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and
+    choked them: 8. But other fell into good ground, and
+    brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some
+    sixtyfold, some thirtyfold. 9. Who hath ears to hear,
+    let him hear.'--MATT. xiii. 1-9.
+
+The seven parables of the kingdom, in this chapter, are not to be
+regarded as grouped together by Matthew. They were spoken
+consecutively, as is obvious from the notes of time in verses 36 and
+53. They are a great whole, setting forth the 'mystery of the
+kingdom' in its method of establishment, its corruption, its outward
+and inward growth, the conditions of entrance into it, and its final
+purification. The sacred number seven, impressed upon them, is the
+token of completeness. They fall into two parts: four of them being
+spoken to the multitudes from the boat, and presenting the more
+obvious aspects of the development of the kingdom; three being
+addressed to the disciples in the house, and setting forth truths
+about it more fitted for them.
+
+The first parable, which concerns us now, has been generally called
+the Parable of the Sower, but he is not the prominent figure. The
+subject is much rather the soils; and the intention is, not so much
+to declare anything about him, as to explain to the people, who
+were looking for the kingdom to be set up by outward means,
+irrespective of men's dispositions, that the way of establishing it
+was by teaching which needed receptive spirits. The parable is both
+history and prophecy. It tells Christ's own experience, and it
+foretells His servants'. He is the great Sower, who has 'come forth'
+from the Father. His present errand is not to burn up thorns or to
+punish the husbandmen, but to scatter on all hearts the living seed,
+which is here interpreted, in accordance with the dominant idea of
+this Gospel, as being 'the word of the kingdom' (ver. 19). All who
+follow Him, and make His truth known, are sowers in their turn, and
+have to look for the same issue of their work. The figure is common
+to all languages. Truth, whether intellectual, moral, or spiritual,
+is seminal, and, deposited in the heart, understanding, or
+conscience, grows. It has a mysterious vitality, and its issue is
+not a manufacture, but a fruit. If all teachers, especially
+religious teachers, would remember that, perhaps there would be
+fewer failures, and a good deal of their work would be modified. We
+have here four sowings and one ripening--a sad proportion! We are
+not told that the quantity of seed was in each case the same. Rather
+we may suppose that much less fell on the wayside, and on the rocky
+soil, and among the thorns, than on the good ground. So we cannot
+say that seventy-five per cent, of it was wasted; but, in any case,
+the proportion of failure is tragically large. This Sower was under
+no illusion as to the result of His work.
+
+It is folly to sow on the hard footpath, or the rocky ground, or
+among thorns; but Christ and His servants have to do that, in
+endless hope that these unreceptive hearts may become good soil. One
+lesson of the parable is, Scatter the seed everywhere, on the most
+unlikely places.
+
+I. Our Lord begins with the case in which the seed remains quite
+outside the soil, or, without metaphor, in which the word finds
+absolutely no entrance into the heart or mind. A beaten path runs by
+the end, or perhaps through the middle, of the cornfield. It is of
+exactly the same soil as the rest, but many passengers have trodden
+it hard, and the very foot of the sower, as he comes and goes in his
+work, has helped. Some of the seed, sown broadcast, of course falls
+there, and lies where it falls, having no power to penetrate the
+hard surface. As in our own English cornfields, a flock of bold,
+hungry birds watch the sower; and, as soon as his back is turned,
+they are down with a swift-winged swoop, and away goes the exposed
+grain. So there is an end of it; and the path is as bare as ever,
+five minutes after it has been strewed with seeds.
+
+The explanation is too plain to be mistaken, but we may briefly
+touch its main features. Notice, then, that our Lord begins with the
+case in which there is least contact between His word and the soul,
+and that, as the contact is least in degree, so it is shortest in
+duration. A minute or two finishes it. Notice especially that the
+path has been made hard by external pressure. It is not rock, but
+soil like the other parts of the field. It represents the case of
+men whose insensibility to the word is caused by outward things
+having made a thoroughfare of their natures, and trodden them into
+incapacity to receive the message of Christ's love. The heavy
+baggage-wagons of commerce, the light cars of pleasure, merry
+dancers, and sad funeral processions, have all used that way, and
+each footfall has beaten the once loose soil a little firmer. We are
+made insensitive to the gospel by the effect of innocent and
+necessary things, unless we take care to plough up the path along
+which they travel, and to keep our spirits susceptible by a distinct
+effort. How many hearers of every teacher are there, who never take
+in his words at all, simply because they are so completely
+preoccupied!
+
+Notice what becomes of the seed that lies thus bare. 'Immediately,'
+says Mark, 'Satan cometh.' His agents are these light-winged
+thoughts that flutter round the hearer as soon as the sermon or the
+lesson is over. Talk of the weather, criticism of the congregation,
+or of the sower's attitude as he flung the seed, or politics, or
+business, drive away the remembrance of even the text, before many
+of our hearers are out of sight of the church. Then the whirl of
+traffic begins again, and the path is soon beaten a little harder.
+If the seed had got ever so little way into the ground, the sharp
+beaks of the thieves would not have carried it off so easily.
+Impressions so slight as Christ's word makes on busy men are quickly
+rubbed out. But if the seed sown vanishes thus swiftly, the fault is
+not in it, but in ourselves. Satan may seek to snatch it away, but
+we can hinder him.
+
+Our Lord uses a singular expression, 'This is he that was sown by
+the way side,' which appears to identify the man with the seed
+rather than with the soil. It has been suggested by some
+commentators that this expression is to be regarded as conveying the
+truth that the seed sown in the heart and growing up there becomes
+the life-spring of the individual, and that therefore we may speak
+of him or of it as bearing the fruit. But this explanation will not
+avail for the case where there is no entrance of the word into the
+heart, and so no new birth by the word. More probably we are to
+regard the expression simply as a conversational shorthand form of
+speech, not strictly accurate, but quite intelligible.
+
+II. The next variety of soil differs from the preceding in having its
+hindrance deep seated. Many a hillside in Galilee--as in Scotland or
+New England--would show a thin surface of soil over rock, like skin
+stretched tightly on a bone. No roots could get through the rock nor
+find nourishment in it; while the very shallowness of earth and the
+heat of the underlying stone would accelerate growth. Such premature
+and feeble shoots perish as quickly as they spring up; the fierce
+Eastern sun makes a speedy end of them, and a few days sees their
+springing and withering. It is a case of 'lightly come, lightly go.'
+Quick-sprouting herbs are soon-dying herbs. A shallow pond is up in
+waves under a breeze which raises no sea on the Atlantic, and it is
+calm again in a few minutes. Readily stirred emotion is transient.
+Brushwood catches fire easily, and burns itself out quickly. Coal
+takes longer to kindle, and is harder to put out.
+
+The persons meant are those of excitable temperament, whose feelings lie
+on the surface, and can be got at without first passing through the
+understanding or the conscience. Such people are easily played on by
+the epidemic influence of any prevalent enthusiasm or emotion, as every
+revival of religion shows. Their very 'joy' in hearing the word is
+suspicious; for a true reception of it seldom begins with joy, but
+rather with 'the sorrow which worketh repentance not to be repented of.'
+Their immediate reception of it is suspicious, for it suggests that
+there has been no time to consult the understanding or to form a
+deliberate purpose; stable resolutions are slowly formed. It is the
+sunny side of religion which, has attracted them. They know nothing of
+its difficulties and depths. Hence, as soon as they find out the
+realities of the course which they have embraced so lightly, they
+desert, like John Mark running away as soon as home comforts at Cyprus
+were left behind. The Christian life means self-denial, toil, hard
+resistance to many fascinations. It means sweat and blood, or it means
+nothing. Whether there be 'persecution' or no, there will be affliction,
+'because of the word,' and all the joyful emotion will ooze out at the
+man's finger-ends. The same superficial excitability which determined
+his swift reception of the word will determine his hasty casting of it
+aside, and immediately he stumbles. All his acts will be done in a
+hurry, and none of his moods will last. Feeling is in its place down
+in the engine-room, but it makes a poor pilot. Very significant is
+that phrase, 'No root in himself.' His roots are in the accidents of
+the moment. His religion has never really struck root in him, but only
+in the superficial layer of him. His conscience, will, understanding,
+are unpenetrated by its fibres. So it is easily pulled up, as well as
+soon withered.
+
+There is another profound truth in this picture. The hard,
+impenetrable rock lies right under the thin skin of soil. The nature
+which is over-emotional on its surface is utterly hard at its core.
+The most heartless people are those whose feelings are always ready
+to gush; the most unimpressible are those who are most easily
+brought to a certain degree of emotion by the sound of the word.
+This class is an advance on the former, in that there has been a
+real contact with the word, which has lain longer in their hearts,
+and has had some growth. We may regard it as either better or worse
+than the former, according as we consider that it is better to
+accept and feel than not to accept at all, or that it is worse to
+have in some measure possessed and felt than not to have received
+the word of the kingdom.
+
+III. In one part of the field was a patch where the soil was neither
+rammed solid, as on the footpath, nor thin, as where the rock
+cropped out, but where there had been a tangle of thorns, which grow
+luxuriantly in Palestine. These had been cut down, but not stubbed
+up, as is plain from the very fact that the seed reached the ground,
+as also from the description of them as 'springing up.' The two
+growths advance together. In this case, the seed has a longer life
+than in the former. It roots and grows, and even, according to the
+other evangelist's version, fruits, though it does not mature its
+fruit. There is no question of 'falling away' here. Only the
+hardier growth, which had the advantage of previous possession, and
+which pushes up its shoots above ground all round the more tender
+plant, gets the start of it, and smothers its green blades,
+overtopping it, and keeping it from sun and air, as well as drawing
+to itself the nourishment from the soil. The main point here is
+simultaneousness of the two growths. This man is, as James calls
+him, a 'double-minded man.' He is trying to grow both corn and thorn
+on the same soil. He has some religion, but not enough to make
+thorough work of it. He is endeavouring to ride on two horses at
+once. Religion says 'either--or'; he is trying 'both--and.' The
+human heart has only a limited amount of love and trust to give, and
+Christ must have it all. It has enough for one--that is, for Him;
+but not enough for two,--that is, for Him and the world. This man's
+religion has not been powerful enough to grub up the roots of the
+thorns. They were cut down when the seed was sown, for a little
+while, at the beginning of his course; the new life in him seemed to
+conquer, but the roots of the old lay hid, and, in due time, showed
+again above ground. 'Ill weeds grow apace'; and these, as is their
+nature, grow faster than the good seed. So the only thing to do is
+to get them out of the ground to the last fibre.
+
+Christ specifies what He deems thorns. We can all understand care
+being so called; but riches? Yes, they too have sharp prickles, as
+anybody will find who stuffs a pillow with them. But our Lord
+chooses His words to point the lesson that not outward things, but
+our attitude to them, make the barrenness of this soil. It is not
+'this world,' but 'the care of this world,' not 'riches,' but 'the
+deceitfulness of riches,' that choke the word. These two seem
+opposites, but they are really the same thing on two opposite sides.
+The man who is burdened with the cares of poverty, and the man who
+is deceived by the false promises of wealth, are really the same
+man. The one is the other turned inside out. We make the world our
+god, whether we worship it by saying, 'I am desolate without thee,'
+or by fancying that we are secure with it. Note that the issue in
+this case is--unfruitfulness. The man may, and I suppose usually
+does, keep up a profession of Christianity all his life. He very
+likely does not know that the seed is choked, and that he has become
+unfruitful. But he is a stunted, useless Christian, with all the sap
+and nourishment of his soul given to his worldly position, and his
+religion is a poor pining growth, with blanched leaves and abortive
+fruit. How much of Christ's field is filled with plants of that
+sort!
+
+IV. The parable tells us nothing about the comparative acreage of
+the path and the rocky and thorny soils on the one hand, and of the
+fertile soil on the other. It is not meant to teach the proportion
+of success to failure, but to exhibit the fact that the reception of
+the word depends on men's dispositions. The good soil has none of
+the faults of the rest of the field. It is loose, and thus unlike
+the path; deep, and thus unlike the rocky bit; clean, and thus
+unlike the thorn brake. The interpretation given of it by our Lord
+seems at first sight incomplete. It is all summed up in one word,
+'understandeth.' Then, did not the second and third classes, at all
+events, understand? They received the word, and it had some growth
+in them. The distinction between them and the good-soil hearer is
+surely of a moral nature, rather than of so purely intellectual a
+kind as 'understanding' suggests. Hence, Luke's keep fast 'in an
+honest and good heart' may seem a more adequate statement. But
+Biblical usage does not regard 'understanding' as a purely
+intellectual process, but rather as the action of the whole moral
+and spiritual nature. It knows nothing of dividing a man up into
+water-tight compartments, one of which may be full of evil, and the
+other clean and receptive of good. According to it, we 'understand'
+religious truth by our hearts and moral nature in conjunction with
+the dry light of intellect. So the word here is used in a pregnant
+sense, and includes the grasp of the truth with the whole being, the
+complete reception of the word of the kingdom not merely into the
+intellect, but into the central self which is the undivided fountain
+from which flow the issues of life, whether these be called
+intellect, or affection, or conscience, or will. Only he who has
+thus become one with the word, and housed it deep in his inmost
+soul, 'understands' it, in the sense in which our Lord here uses
+that expression. 'Thy word have I hid in mine heart' exactly
+corresponds to the 'understanding' which is here given as the
+distinctive mark of the good soil.
+
+The result of that reception into the depths of the spirit is that
+he 'verily beareth fruit.' The man who receives the word is
+identified with the plant that springs from the seed which he
+receives. The life of a Christian is the result of the growth in him
+of a supernatural seed. He bears fruit, yet the fruit comes not from
+him, but from the seed sown. 'I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth
+in me.' Fruitfulness is the aim of the sower, and the test of the
+reception of the seed. If there is not fruit, manifestly there has
+been no real understanding of the word. A touchstone, that, which
+will produce surprising results in detecting spurious Christianity,
+if it be honestly applied!
+
+There is variety in the degree of fruitfulness, according to the
+goodness of the soil; that is to say, according to the thoroughness
+and depth of the reception of the word. The great Husbandman does
+not demand uniform fertility. He is glad when He gets an
+hundredfold, but He accepts sixty, and does not refuse thirty, only
+He arranges them in descending order, as if He would fain have the
+highest rate from all the plants, and, not without disappointment,
+gradually stretches His merciful allowance to take in even the
+lowest. He will accept the scantiest fruitage, and will lovingly
+'purge' the branch 'that it may bring forth more fruit.'
+
+No parable teaches everything. Paths, rocks, and thorns cannot
+change. But men can plough up the trodden ways, and blast away the
+rock, and root out the thorns, and, with God's help, can open the
+door of their hearts, that the Sower and His seed may enter in. We
+are responsible for the nature of the soil, else His warning were
+vain, 'Take heed, therefore, how ye hear.'
+
+
+
+
+EARS AND NO EARS
+
+
+    'Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.--MATT. xiii. 8.
+
+This saying was frequently on our Lord's lips, and that in very
+various connections. He sometimes, as in the instance before us,
+appended it to teaching which, from its parabolic form, required
+attention to disentangle the spiritual truth implied. He sometimes
+used it to commend some strange, new revolutionary teaching to men's
+investigation--as, for instance, after that great declaration of the
+nullity of ceremonial worship, how that nothing could defile a man
+except what came from his heart. In other connections, which I need
+not now enumerate, we find it. Like printing a sentence in italics,
+or underscoring it, this saying calls special attention to the thing
+uttered. It is interesting to notice that our Lord, like the rest of
+us, had to use such means of riveting and sharpening the attention
+of His hearers. There is also a striking reappearance of the
+expression in the last book of Scripture. The Christ who speaks to
+the seven churches, from the heavens, repeats His old word spoken on
+earth, and at the end of each of the letters says once more, as if
+even the Voice that spoke from heaven might be listened to
+listlessly, 'He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith
+to the churches.'
+
+I. We all have ears.
+
+Now, it is a very singular instance of the superficial, indolent way
+in which people are led away by sound rather than by sense, that
+this saying of my text has often been taken to mean that there is a
+certain class that can listen, and that it is their business to
+listen, and there is another class that cannot, and so they are
+absorbed from all responsibility. The opposite conclusion is the
+correct one. Everybody has ears, therefore everybody is bound to
+hear. Which being translated, is that there is not a man or woman
+among us that has not the capacity of hearing in the sense of
+understanding, and of hearing in the sense of obeying the word that
+Jesus Christ speaks to us all. Every one of us, whatever may be our
+diversities of education, temperament, natural capacity in regard to
+other subjects of study and apprehension, has the ears that are
+capable of receiving the message that comes to us all in Jesus
+Christ.
+
+For what is it that He addresses? Universal human nature, the
+universal human wants, and mainly and primarily, as I believe, the
+sense of sin which lies dormant indeed, but capable of being
+awakened, in all men, because the fact of sin attaches to all men.
+There is no man but has the needs to which Christ addresses Himself,
+and no man but has the power of apprehending, of accepting, and of
+living by, the great Incarnate Word and His message to the world. So
+that instead of there being a restriction implied in the words
+before us, there is the broadest implication of the universality of
+Christ's message. And just as every man comes into the world with a
+pair of ears on his head, so every man comes into the world with the
+capacity of listening to, and accepting, that gracious Lord. That is
+the first thing that our Master distinctly declares here, that we
+all have ears.
+
+II. If we have ears we are bound to use them.
+
+'Let him hear.' In all regions, as I need not remind you, capacity
+and responsibility go together; and the power that we possess is the
+measure of the obligation under which we come. All our natural
+faculties, for instance, are given to us with the implied command,
+'See that you make the best use of them.' So that even these bodily
+organs of ours, much more the higher faculties and capacities of the
+spirit of which the body is partly the symbol and partly the
+instrument, are intrusted to us on terms of stewardship. And just as
+it is criminal for a man to go through life with a pair of ears on
+his head, and a pair of eyes in his forehead, neither of which he
+educates and cultivates, so is it criminal for a man having the
+capacity of grasping the great Revelation of God, who 'at sundry
+times and in divers manners hath spoken unto the Fathers by the
+prophets, but in these last days hath spoken unto us by the Son,' to
+turn away from that Voice, and pay no heed to it.
+
+It is universally true that obligation goes with capacity. It is
+especially true with regard to our relation to Jesus Christ. We are
+all bound to 'hear Him,' as the great Voice said on the Mount of
+Transfiguration. The upshot of all that manifestation of the divine
+glory welling up from the depths of Christ's nature, and
+transfiguring His countenance, the upshot of all that solemn and
+mysterious communion with the mighty dead, Moses and Elias, the end
+of all that encompassing glory that wrapped Him, was the Voice from
+Heaven which proclaimed, 'This is My beloved Son; hear ye Him.'
+Moses with his Law, Elijah with his Prophecy, faded away and were
+lost. But there stood forth singly the one Figure, relieved against
+the background of the glory-cloud, the Christ to whom we are all
+bound to turn with the vision of longing eyes, with the listening of
+docile ears, with the aspiration of yearning affection, with the
+submission of absolute obedience.
+
+'Hear ye Him.' For just as truly as light is meant for the eye, so
+truly are the words of the Incarnate Word, and the life which is
+speech and revelation, meant to be the supreme objects of our
+attention, of our contemplative regard, and of our practical
+submission. We are bound to hear because we have ears; and of all
+the voices that are candidates for our attention, and of all the
+music that sounds through the universe, no voice is so sweet and
+weighty, no words so fundamental and all-powerful, no music so
+melodious, so deep and thunderous, so thrilling and gracious, as are
+the words of that Word who was made flesh and dwelt among us. We are
+bound to hear, and we hear to most profit when it is Him that we
+hear.
+
+III. We shall not hear without an effort.
+
+Christ says in my text, 'Let him hear,' as if the possession of the
+ear did not necessarily involve that there should be hearing. And so
+it is; 'Having ears, they hear not,' is a description verified in a
+great many other walks of life than in regard to religious matters.
+But it is verified there in the most conspicuous and in the most
+tragic fashion. I wonder how many of us there are who, though we
+have heard with the hearing of the outward ear, have not heard in
+the sense of attending, have scarcely heard in the sense of
+apprehending, and have not heard at all in the sense of obeying?
+Friend, what is it that keeps you from hearing, if you do not hear?
+Let me run over two or three of the things that thus are like wax in
+a man's ears, making him deaf to the message of life in Jesus
+Christ, in order to bring out how needful it is that these should be
+counteracted by an effort of will, and the vigorous concentration of
+thought and heart upon that message.
+
+What is it that keeps men from hearing? Being busy with other things
+is one hindrance. There is an old story of St. Bernard riding along
+by a lake on his way to a Council, and being so occupied with
+thoughts and discussions, that after the day's travel he lifted up
+his eyes and said, 'Where is the lake?' And so we, many of us, go
+along all our days on the banks of the great sea of divine love, and
+we are so busy thinking about other things, or doing other things,
+that at the end of the journey we do not know that we have been
+travelling by the side of the flashing waters all the day long.
+Everybody knows how possible it is to be so engrossed with one's
+occupations or thoughts as that when the clock strikes in the next
+steeple, we hear it and do not hear it. We have read of soldiers
+being so completely absorbed in the fury of the fight that a
+thunderstorm has rattled over their heads, and no man heard the
+roll, and no man saw the flash. Many of us are so swallowed up in
+our trade, in our profession, in our special branch of study, in our
+occupations and desires, that all the trumpets of Sinai might be
+blown into our ears, and we should hear them as though we heard them
+not; and what is worse, that the pleading voice of that great Lord
+who is ever saying to each of us, 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour,
+and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,' passes us by, and
+produces no effect, any more than does the idle wind whistling
+through an archway. Brethren, you have the need, the sin, the
+weakness, the transiency, to which the Gospel appeals. You have the
+faculties to which it addresses itself. Jesus Christ is speaking to
+every one of us. I beseech you to ask yourselves, 'Do I hear Him?'
+If not, is it not because the clatter of the world's business, or
+the more refined sounds of some profession or study, have so taken
+up your attention that you have none to spare for that which
+requires and repays it most?
+
+Then there is another thing that makes attention, and concentration,
+and a dead lift of resolution necessary, if you are rightly to hear,
+and that is the very fact that, superficially, you have heard all
+your days. You do not know the despair that sometimes comes over men in
+my position when we face our congregations of people that are familiar
+to weariness with everything that we have to say, and because they are
+superficially so familiar with it, fancy that there is no need for
+them to give heed any more. What can a poor man like me do to get
+through that crust of familiarity with the mere surface of Christian
+truth and teaching which is round many of you? You come and listen to
+me, and say, 'Oh! he has nothing original to say. We have heard it all
+before.' Yes, your ears have heard it. Have _you_ heard? 'Jesus Christ
+died for me,' you have been told that ever since you were a little
+child; and so the thousand-and-first, the million-and-first, repetition
+of it has little power over you. If once, just once, that truth could
+get through the crust of familiarity, and touch your heart, your bare
+heart, with its quick naked point of fire-shod love, I think there
+might be a wound made that would mean healing. But some of you will
+go away presently, just as you have gone away a thousand times before,
+and my words will rebound from you like an india-rubber ball from a
+wall, or run off you like water from the sea-bird's plumes, just
+because you think you have heard it all before--and you have never
+heard it all your days. 'He that hath ears to hear, let him _hear_.'
+
+Then there is another hindrance. A man may put his fingers in his
+ears. And some of you, I am afraid, are not ignorant of what it is
+to have made distinct and conscious efforts to get rid of the
+impressions of religion, and of Christ's voice to us.
+
+And then there are some of us who, out of sheer listlessness, do not
+hear. It is not because we are too busy. It is not because we have
+any intellectual objection to the message. It is not because we have
+made any definite effort to get away from it. It is not even because
+we have been so accustomed to hear it, that it is impossible to make
+an impression on our listless indifference. Go down into Morecambe
+Bay when the tide is making; and, as the water is beginning to
+percolate through the sand, try to make an impression with a stick
+upon the tremulous jelly. As soon as you take out the point the
+impression is lost. And there are many of us like that, who, out of
+sheer stolid listlessness, retain no fragment of the truth that is
+sounding in our ears. Dear friends, 'If the word spoken by angels
+was steadfast, how shall we escape if we'--what? Reject? Deny? Fight
+against? Angrily repel? No;--'if we _neglect_ so great salvation?' That
+is the question for you negligent people, for you people who think you
+know all about it and there an end, for you people who are so busy
+with your daily lives that, amidst the hubbub of earth, heaven's silent
+voice is inaudible to your ears. Neglect stops the ears and ruins the
+man. But you will not hear, though you have ears, unless you make an
+effort of will and concentration of attention.
+
+IV. And now the last thing that I have to say is:--If we do not
+hear, we shall become deaf.
+
+That is what Christ said in the context. The sentence which I have
+taken as my text was spoken at the close of the Parable of the
+Sower; and when His disciples came and asked Him why He spake in
+parables, His answer was in effect that the people to whom He spoke
+had not profited by what they had heard, 'hearing, they heard not,'
+and therefore He spoke in parables which veiled as well as revealed
+the truth. It was not given to them to know the mysteries of the
+Kingdom, because they had not given heed to what had been made known
+to them. The great law was taking effect which gives to him that has
+and takes from him that has not; and that law applied not only to
+the form of Christ's teaching, but also to the faculty of receiving
+it. That diminished capacity is sometimes represented as men's own
+act, and sometimes as the divinely inflicted penalty of not hearing,
+but in either case the same fact is in view--namely, the loss of
+susceptibility by neglect, the dying out of faculties by disuse.
+
+Just as in the bodily life capacities untrained and unexercised
+become faint and disappear; just as the Indian _fakir_, who
+holds his arm up above his head for years, never using the muscles,
+has the muscles atrophied, and at last cannot bring his arm down to
+his side;--so the people who neglect to use the ears that God has
+given them by degrees will lose the capacity of hearing at all.
+Which, being put into plain English, just comes to this: that if we
+do not listen to Jesus Christ when He calls to us in His love, we
+shall gradually have the capacity of hearing diminished until--I do
+not know if it ever reaches that point here--until its ultimate
+extinction.
+
+Dear friends, this word of the love and pity and pardon and
+purifying power of God manifest in Jesus Christ for us all, which I
+am trying to preach to you now, is not without an effect even on the
+men by whom it is most superficially and perfunctorily heard. It
+either softens or hardens. As the old mystics used to say, the same
+heat that melts wax hardens clay into brick. The same light that
+brings blessing to one eye brings pain to another. You have heard,
+and hearing you have not heard; and you will cease to be able to
+hear at all; and then the thunders may rattle over your heads, and
+be inaudible to you; and that Voice which is as loud as the sound of
+many waters, and sweet as harpers harping on their harps, and which
+says to each of us, 'Come to Me, and I will be thy peace and thy
+rest and thy strength,' will no more be audible in your atrophied
+ears. Dear friends! I do not know, as I have said, whether that
+ultimate tragic result is ever wholly reached in this world. I am
+sure that it is not reached with some of you as yet. And I beseech
+you to obey that voice which says, 'This is My beloved Son; hear
+Him,' and to let there not be only outward hearing, but to let there
+be inward acceptance, attention, apprehension, and obedience. And
+then we shall be able to say, 'Blessed are our ears, for they hear;
+blessed are our eyes, for they see.' 'Many prophets and righteous
+men desired to hear the things that ye hear, and heard them not,
+take care that, since you are thus advanced in the outward
+possession of the perfect word of God, there be also the yielding
+to, and reception of it.
+
+
+
+
+'TO HIM THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN'
+
+
+    'Whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall
+    have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him
+    shall be taken away even that he hath.'-- MATT. xiii. 12.
+
+There are several instances in the Gospels of our Lord's repetition
+of sayings which seem to have been, if we may use the expression,
+favourites with Him; as, for instance, 'There are first which shall
+be last, and there are last which shall be first'; or, again, 'The
+servant is not greater than his master, nor the disciple than his
+lord.' My text is one of these. It is here said as part of the
+explanation why He chose to speak in parables, in order that the
+truth, revealed to the diligent and attentive, might be hidden from
+the careless. Again, we find it in two other Gospels, in a somewhat
+similar connection, though with a different application, where Jesus
+enunciates it as the basis of His warning, 'Take heed how'--or, in
+another version, 'what'--'ye hear.' Again He employs it in this
+Gospel in the parable of the talents, as explaining the principle on
+which the retribution to the slothful servant was meted out. And we
+find it yet once more in the parable of the pounds in Luke's Gospel,
+which, though entirely different in conception and purpose from that
+of the talents, is identical in the portion connected with the
+slothful servant.
+
+So there are two very distinct directions in which this saying
+looks, as it was used by our Lord--one in reference to the attitude
+of men towards the Revelation of God, and one in reference to the
+solemn subject of future retribution. I wish, now, mainly to try and
+illustrate the great law which is set forth here, and to follow out
+the various spheres of its operation, and estimate the force of its
+influence. For I think that large and very needful lessons for us
+all may be drawn therefrom. The principle of my text shapes all
+life. It is a paradox, but it is a deep truth. It sounds harsh and
+unjust, but it contains the very essence of righteous retribution.
+The paradox is meant to spur attention, curiosity, and inquiry. The
+key to it lies here--to use is to have. There is a possession which
+is no possession. That I have rights of property in a thing, as
+contradistinguished to your rights, does not make it in any deep and
+real sense mine. What I use I have; and all else is, as one of the
+other evangelists has it, but 'seeming' to have.
+
+So much, then, by way of explanation of our text. Now, let me ask
+you to look with me into two or three of the regions where we shall
+find illustrations of its working.
+
+I. Take the application of this principle to common life.
+
+The lowest instance is in regard to material possessions. It is a
+complaint that is made against the present social arrangements and
+distribution of wealth, that money makes money; that wealth has a
+tendency to clot; the rich man to get richer, and the poor man to
+get poorer. Just as in a basin of water when the plug is out, and
+circular motion is set up, the little bits of foreign matter that
+may be there all tend to get together, so it is in regard to these
+external possessions. 'To him that hath shall be given'; and people
+grumble about that and say, 'It never rains but it pours, and the
+man that needs more money least gets it most easily.' Of course.
+Treasure used grows; treasure hoarded rusts and dwindles. The
+millionaire will double his fortune by a successful speculation. The
+man with half a dozen large shops drives the poor little tradesman
+out of the field. So it is all round: 'To him that hath shall be
+given; but from him that hath not shall be taken even that he hath.'
+
+Next, go a step higher. Look at how this law works in regard to
+powers of body. That is a threadbare old illustration. The
+blacksmith's arm we have all heard about; the sailor's eye, the
+pianist's wrist, the juggler's fingers, the surgeon's deft hand--all
+these come by use. 'To him that hath shall be given.' And the same
+man who has cultivated one set of organs to an almost miraculous
+fineness or delicacy or strength will, by the operation of the other
+half of the same principle, have all but atrophied another set. So
+with the blacksmith's arm, which has grown muscular at the expense
+of his legs. Part of the physical frame has monopolised what might
+have been distributed throughout the whole. Use is strength; use
+makes growth. We have what we employ. And even in regard to our
+bodily frame the organs that we do not use we carry about with us
+rather as a weight attached to us than as a possession.
+
+Again, come a little higher. This great principle largely goes to
+determine our position in the world and our work. The man that can do
+a thing gets it to do. In the long run the tools come to the hand that
+can use them. So here is one medical man's consulting-room crammed
+full of patients, and his neighbour next door has scarcely one. The
+whole world runs to read A's, B's, or C's books. The briefless
+barrister complains that there is no middle course between having
+nothing to do and being overwhelmed with briefs. 'To him that hath
+shall be given'--the man can do a thing, and he gets it to do--'and
+from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath,'
+That law largely settles every man's place in the world.
+
+Let us come still higher. The same law has much--not all, but much--to
+do in making men's characters. For it operates in its most intense
+fashion, and with results most blessed or most disastrous, in the
+inner life. The great example that I would adduce is conscience. Use
+it, obey it, listen for its voice, never thwart it, and it grows and
+grows and grows, and becomes more and more sensitive, more and more
+educated, more and more sovereign in its decisions. Neglect it, still
+more, go in its teeth, and it dwindles and dwindles and dwindles; and
+I suppose it is possible--though one would fain hope that it is a very
+exceptional case--for a man, by long-continued indifference to the
+voice within that says 'Thou shalt' or 'Thou shalt not,' to come at
+last to never hearing it at all, or to its never speaking at all. It
+is 'seared as with a hot iron,' says one of the Apostles; and in
+seared flesh there is no feeling any more. Are any of you, dear
+friends, bringing about such a state? Are you doing what you know you
+ought not to do? Then you will be less and less troubled as the days
+go on; and, by neglecting the voice, you will come at last to be like
+the profligate woman in the book of Proverbs, who, after her sin,
+'wipes her mouth and says, I have done no harm.' Do you think _that_
+is a desirable state--to put out the eyes of your soul, to stifle
+what is the truest echo of God's voice that you will ever hear? Do
+you not think that it would be wiser to get the blessed half of this
+law on your side, instead of the dreadful one? Listen to that voice.
+Never, as you value yourselves, neglect it. Cultivate the habit of
+waiting for its monitions, its counsels prohibitory or commendatory,
+and then you will have done much to secure that your spirit shall be
+enriched by the operations of this wide-spread law.
+
+Take another illustration. People who, by circumstances, are placed
+in some position of dependence and subordination, where they have
+seldom to exercise the initiative of choice, but just to do what
+they are bid, by degrees all but lose the power of making up their
+minds about anything. And so a slave set free is proverbially a
+helpless creature, like a bit of driftwood; and children who have
+been too long kept in a position of pupilage and subordination, when
+they are sent into the world are apt to turn out very feeble men,
+for want of a good, strong backbone of will in them. So, many a
+woman that has been accustomed to leave everything in her husband's
+hands, when the clods fall on his coffin finds herself utterly
+helpless and bewildered, just because in the long, happy years she
+never found it necessary to exercise her own judgment or her own
+will about practical matters.
+
+So do not get into the habit of letting circumstances settle what
+you are to do, or you will lose the power of dominating them, before
+very long. And if a man for years leaves himself, as it were, to be
+guided by the stream of circumstances, like long green weeds in a
+river, he will lose the power of determining his own fate, and the
+Will will die clean out of him. Cultivate it, and it will grow.
+
+Again, this same principle largely settles our knowledge, our
+convictions, the operations and the furniture of our understandings.
+If a man holds any truth slackly, or in the case of truths that are
+meant to influence life and conduct, does not let it influence these,
+then that is a kind of having truth that is sure to end in losing it.
+If you want to lose your convictions grasp them loosely--do not act
+upon them, do not take them for guides of your life--and they will
+soon relieve you of their unwelcome presence. If you wish mind and
+knowledge to grow, grip with a grip of iron what you do know, and
+let it dominate you, as it ought. He that truly _has_ his
+learning will learn more and pile by slow degrees stone upon stone,
+until the building is complete.
+
+So, dear friends, here, in these illustrations, which might have
+been indefinitely enlarged, we see the working of a principle which
+has much to do in making men what they are. What you use you
+increase, what you leave unused you lose. There are grey heads in my
+present audience who, when they were young men, had dreams and
+aspirations that they bitterly smile at now. There are men here who
+began life with possibilities that have never blossomed or fruited,
+but have died on the stem. Why? Because they were so much occupied
+with the vulpine craft of making their position and their 'pile'
+that generous emotions and noble sympathies and lofty aspirations,
+intellectual or otherwise, were all neglected, and so they are dead;
+and the men are the poorer incalculably, because of what has thus
+been shed away from them. You make your characters by the parts of
+yourselves that you choose to cultivate and employ. Do you think
+that God gave us whatever of an intellectual and emotional and moral
+kind is in us, in order that it might be all used up in our daily
+business? A very much scantier outfit would have done for all that
+is wanted for that. But there are abortive and dormant organs in
+your spiritual nature, as there are in the corporeal, which tell you
+what you were meant for, and which it is your sin to leave
+undeveloped. Brethren, the law of my text shapes us in the two ways,
+that whatever we cultivate, be it noble or be it bestial, will grow,
+and whatever we repress or neglect will die. Choose which of the two
+halves of yourselves you will foster, and on which you will frown.
+
+So much, then, for the first general application of these words. Now
+let me turn for a moment to another.
+
+II. I would note, secondly, the application of this two-fold law in
+regard to God's revelation of Himself.
+
+That is the bearing of it in the immediate context from which our
+text is taken. Our Lord explains that teaching by parable--a
+transparent veil over a truth--was adopted in order that the veiled
+truth might be a test as well as a revelation. And although I do not
+believe that the Christian revelation has been made in any degree
+less plain and obvious than it could have been made, I cannot but
+recognise the fact that the necessities of the case demand that,
+when God speaks to us, He should speak in such a fashion as that it
+is possible to say, 'Tush! It is not God that is speaking; it is
+only Eli!' and so to turn about the young Samuel's mistake the other
+way. I do not believe that God has diminished the evidence of His
+Revelation in order to try us; but I do maintain that the Revelation
+which He has made does come to us, and must come to us, in such a
+form as that, not by mathematical demonstration but by moral
+affinity, we shall be led to recognise and to bow to it. He that
+will be ignorant, let him be ignorant, and he that will come asking
+for truth, it will flood his eyeballs with a blessed illumination.
+The veil will but make more attractive to some eyes the outlines of
+the fair form beneath it, whilst others are offended at it and say,
+'Unless we see the truth undraped, we will not believe that it is
+truth at all.'
+
+So, brethren, let me remind you--what is really but a repetition in
+reference to another subject of what I have already said,--that in
+regard to God's speech to men, and especially in regard to what I,
+for my part, believe to be the complete and ultimate and perfect
+speech of God to men, in Jesus Christ our Saviour, the principle of
+my text holds good.
+
+'To him that hath shall be given.' If you will make that truth your
+own by loyal faith and honest obedience, if you will grapple it to
+your heart, then you will learn more and more. Whatever tiny corner
+of the great whole you have grasped, hold on by that and draw it
+into yourselves, and you will by degrees get the entire, glorious,
+golden web to wrap round you. 'If any man wills to do His will he
+shall know.' That is Christ's promise; and it will be fulfilled to
+us all. 'To him that hath shall be given.'
+
+If, on the other hand, you 'have' Christian truth and Christ, who is
+the Truth, in the fashion in which so many of us have it and Him, as
+a form, as a mere intellectual possession, so that we can, when we
+go to church, repeat the creed without feeling that we are telling a
+lie, but that when we go to market we do not carry the Commandments
+with us--if that is our Christianity, then it will dribble away into
+nothing. We shall not be much the poorer for the loss of such a sham
+possession, but it will go. It drops out of the hands that are not
+clasped to hold it. It is just that a thing so neglected shall some
+day be a thing withdrawn. So in regard to Revelation and a man's
+perception and reception of it, my text holds good in both its
+halves.
+
+III. Lastly, look at the application of these words in the future.
+
+That is our Lord's own application of them, twice out of the five
+times in which the saying appears in the three Gospels: in the
+parable of the talents and in the parallel portion of the parable of
+the pounds. I do not venture into the regions of speculation about
+that future, but from the words before us there come clearly enough
+two aspects of it. The man with the ten talents received more; the
+man that had hid the talent or the pound in the ground was deprived
+of that which he had not used.
+
+Now, with regard to the former there is no difficulty in translating
+the representations of the parables, sustained as they are by
+distinct statements of other portions of Scripture. They come to
+this, that, for the life beyond, indefinite progress in all that is
+noble and blessed and Godlike in heart and character, in intellect
+and power, are certain; that faith, hope, love, here cultivated but
+putting forth few blossoms and small fruitage, there, in that higher
+house where these be planted, will flourish in the courts of the
+Lord, and will bear fruit abundantly; that here the few things
+faithfully administered will be succeeded yonder by the many things
+royally ruled over; that here one small coin, as it were, is put
+into our palm--namely the present blessedness and peace and strength
+and purity of a Christian life; and that yonder we possess the
+inheritance of which what we have here is but the earnest. It used
+to be the custom when a servant was hired for the next term-day to
+give him one of the smallest coins of the realm as what was called
+'arles'--wages in advance, to seal the bargain. Similarly, in buying
+an estate a bit of turf was passed over to the purchaser. We get the
+earnest here of the broad acres of the inheritance above. 'To him
+that hath shall be given.'
+
+And the other side of the same principle works in some terrible ways
+that we cannot speak about. 'From him that hath not shall be taken
+away even that which he hath.' I have spoken of the terrible analogy
+to this solemn prospect which is presented us by the imperfect
+experiences of earth. And when we see in others, or discover in
+ourselves, how it is possible for unused faculties to die entirely
+out, I think we shall feel that there is a solemn background of very
+awful truth, in the representation of what befell the unfaithful
+servant. Hopes unnourished are gone; opportunities unimproved are
+gone, capacities undeveloped are gone; fold after fold, as it were,
+is peeled off the soul, until there is nothing left but the naked
+self, pauperised and empty-handed for evermore. 'Take it from him';
+he never was the better for it; he never used it; he shall have it
+no longer.
+
+Brethren, cultivate the highest part of yourselves, and see to it that,
+by faith and obedience, you truly have the Saviour, whom you have by
+the hearing of the ear and by outward profession. And then death will
+come to you, as a nurse might to a child that came in from the fields
+with its hands full of worthless weeds and grasses, to empty them in
+order to fill them with the flowers that never fade. You can choose
+whether Death--and Life too, for that matter--shall be the porter
+that will open to you the door of the treasure-house of God, or the
+robber that will strip you of misused opportunities and unused talents.
+
+
+
+
+SEEING AND BLIND
+
+
+    'They seeing, see not.'--MATT. xiii, 13.
+
+This is true about all the senses of the word 'seeing'; there is
+not one man in ten thousand who sees the things before his eyes. Is
+not this the distinction, for instance, of the poet or painter, and
+man of science--just that they do see? How true is this about the
+eye of the mind, what a small number really understand what they
+know! But these illustrations are of less moment than the saddest
+example--religious indifference. I wish to speak about this now,
+and to ask you to consider--
+
+    I. The extent to which it prevails.
+    II. The causes from which it springs.
+    III. The fearful contrasts it suggests.
+    IV. The end to which it conducts.
+
+I. The extent to which it prevails.
+
+I have no hesitation in saying that it is the condition of by far
+the largest proportion of our nation. It is the true enemy of souls.
+I do not believe that any large proportion of Englishmen are actual
+disbelievers, who reject Christianity as unworthy of credence, or
+attach themselves to any of the innumerable varieties of deistical
+and pantheistical schools. I am not saying at present whether it
+would be a more or less hopeful state if it were so, but only that
+it is not so, and that a complacent taking for granted of religious
+truth, a torpor of soul, an entire carelessness about God and
+Christ, and the whole mighty scheme of the Gospel, is the
+characteristic of many in all classes of English society. We have it
+here in our churches and chapels as the first foe we have to fight
+with. Disbelief slays its thousands, and dissipation its tens of
+thousands, but this sleek, well-to-do carelessness, its millions. As
+some one says, it is as if an opium sky had rained down soporifics.
+
+II. The causes from which it springs.
+
+Of course, the great cause of this condition is man's evil heart of
+alienation, the spirit of slumber--but we may find proximate and
+special causes.
+
+There is the indifference springing from the absorbing interests of
+the present. A man has only a certain quantity of interest to put
+forth. If he expends it all on small things, he has none for great.
+This overmastering, overshadowing present draws us all to itself,
+and we have no power of attention or interest to spare for anything
+else, or for reflection upon Christian truth in connection with our
+own conduct.
+
+Then there is the indifference caused by fear of what the results of
+attention might be. It is sometimes broken in upon, and men are in
+danger of having their eyes opened, then with an effort they fling
+themselves into some distraction, and sleep again. As the text says,
+'Their eyes have they closed; lest they should see with their eyes.'
+
+Then there is the indifference fed by an indolent acquiescence in
+the truth. That is a favourite way of breaking the force of all
+unwelcome moral truth, and especially of the Gospel. A man says, 'Oh
+yes, it is true,' and because it is, therefore he thinks he has done
+enough when he has acknowledged it. Many do not seem to dream that
+the Word has any personal application to them at all.
+
+Then there is the indifference which comes from long familiarity
+with the truth. It is this which haunts our congregations and makes
+it so impossible to get at many who know all our message already.
+You can tell them nothing they do not know. As with men who live by
+a forge, the sound of the blow of the hammer only lulls them to
+sleep. The Gospel is so familiar to them that there is no longer any
+power about it. The vulgar emotion of wonder is not excited, and the
+other of love and admiration has not taken its place.
+
+Men who live in mountain scenery do not know its beauties, and as
+with all other operations of the listless eye so with this, the old
+is deemed to be uninteresting, and the common is the commonplace. As
+even in the piece of earth that you have trodden on longest, you
+would find marvels that you do not dream of if you would look, so
+here. You have heard too much and reflected too little. Oh,
+brethren, it oppresses a man who has to speak to you when he
+reflects how often you have heard it all, how the flow of the river
+only seems to have worn your souls smooth enough to let it glide
+past without one stoppage.
+
+III. The contrasts it suggests.
+
+Contrast the indolence here with the earnestness in life. The same
+men who sit with faces stolid and expressionless over a sermon--meet
+them on Monday morning! They go to sleep at prayer or over a Bible,
+but see them in a bargain or over a ledger. Think of what powers of
+intense love, yea, of almost fearful devotion and energy, lie in us,
+ay and come out of us, and then think how poor, how cold we are
+here, and we may well be ashamed. It is as if a burning mountain
+with its cataract of fire were suddenly quenched and locked in
+everlasting frost, and all the flaming glory running down its
+heaving sides turned into a slow glacier. There comes ice instead of
+fire, frost instead of flame, snow instead of sparks. It is as if
+some magician waved a wand and stiffened men into a paralysis.
+Religion seems to numb men instead of inspiring them. It is an awful
+thought of how they serve themselves and the world, how they can
+love one another, how they can be stirred to noble enthusiasm, and
+how little of all this ever comes to God.
+
+Contrast the indifference of the men and the awfulness of the things
+they are indifferent about. God--Christ--their souls--heaven--hell.
+The grandest things men can think about, the mightiest realities in
+the universe, the eternal, the most powerful, these it is which some
+of you, seeing, see not.
+
+Contrast men's indifference and the earnestness of the rest of the
+creation. God rose early and sent His prophets. He so loved the
+world that He gave His Son. Christ died, lives, works, rules,
+expects, beseeches. Angels desire to look into the wonders that you
+'seeing, see not'. What makes heaven fill with rapture, and flash
+through all her golden glories with light, what makes hell look on
+with the lurid scowl of baffled malignity, that is what _you_
+are careless about. My friend, you and other men like you are the
+only beings in the universe careless about the salvation of your
+souls.
+
+IV. The end to which it conducts.
+
+That end is certain ruin. Ah, dear friends, you do not need to do
+much to ruin your own souls. You have only to continue indifferent
+and you will do it effectually. Negligence is quite enough. Ruin is
+what it will certainly end in.
+
+And remember that when the possibility of salvation ends, your
+indifference will end too. The poor toad that is fascinated by the
+serpent, and drops powerless into the cruel jaws, wakes from the
+stupor when it feels the pang. And the lifelong torpor will be
+dissolved for you when you pass into another world. What an awful
+awaking that will be when men look back and see by the light of
+eternity what they were doing here! Oh! friends, would to God that
+any poor word of mine could rouse you from this drugged and opiate
+sleep! Believe me, it is merciful violence which would rouse you.
+Anything rather than that the poison should work on till the heavy
+slumber darkens into death. Let me implore you, as you value your
+own souls, as you would not fling away your most precious jewel to
+'awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ
+shall give thee light.' Beware of the treacherous indifference which
+creeps on, till, like men in the Arctic regions, the sleepers die.
+
+
+
+
+MINGLED IN GROWTH, SEPARATED IN MATURITY
+
+
+    'Another parable put He forth unto them, saying, The
+    kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed
+    good seed in his field: 25. But while men slept, his
+    enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went
+    his way. 26. But when the blade was sprung up, and
+    brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also.
+    27. So the servants of the householder came and said
+    unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy
+    field? from whence then hath it tares? 28. He said
+    unto them, An enemy hath done this. The servants said
+    unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up?
+    29. But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the
+    tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. 80. Let
+    both grow together until the harvest: and in the time
+    of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye
+    together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to
+    burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.'
+    --MATT. xiii. 24-30.
+
+The first four parables contained in this chapter were spoken to a
+miscellaneous crowd on the beach, the last three to the disciples in
+the house. The difference of audience is accompanied with a diversity
+of subject. The former group deals with the growth of the kingdom, as
+it might be observed by outsiders, and especially with aspects of the
+growth on which the multitude needed instruction; the latter, with
+topics more suited to the inner circle of followers. Of these four,
+the first three are parables of vegetation; the last, of assimilation.
+The first two are still more closely connected, inasmuch as the person
+of the sower is prominent in both, while he is not seen in the others.
+The general scenery is the same in both, but with a difference. The
+identification of the seed sown with the persons receiving it, which
+was hinted at in the first, is predominant in the second. But while
+the former described the various results of the seed, the latter
+drops out of sight the three failures, and follows its fortunes in
+honest and good hearts, showing the growth of the kingdom in the
+midst of antagonistic surroundings. It may conveniently be considered
+in three sections: the first teaching how the work of the sower is
+counter-worked by his enemy; the second, the patience of the sower
+with the thick-springing tares; and the third, the separation at the
+harvest.
+
+I. The work of the sower counter-worked by his enemy, and the
+mingled crops.
+
+The peculiar turn of the first sentence, 'The kingdom of heaven is
+likened unto a man that sowed,' etc., suggests that the main purpose
+of the parable is to teach the conduct of the king in view of the
+growth of the tares. The kingdom is concentrated in Him, and the
+'likening' is not effected by the parable, but, as the tenses of
+both verbs show, by the already accomplished fact of His sowing. Our
+Lord veils His claims by speaking of the sower in the third person;
+but the hearing ear cannot fail to catch the implication throughout
+that He Himself is the sower and the Lord of the harvest. The field
+is 'his field,' and His own interpretation tells us that it means
+'the world.' Whatever view we take of the bearing of this parable on
+purity of communion in the visible Church, we should not slur over
+Christ's own explanation of 'the field,' lest we miss the lesson
+that He claims the whole world as His, and contemplates the sowing
+of the seed broadcast over it all. The Kingdom of Heaven is to be
+developed on, and to spread through, the whole earth. The world
+belongs to Christ not only when it is filled with the kingdom, but
+before the sowing. The explanation of the good seed takes the same
+point of view as in the former parable. What is sown is 'the word';
+what springs from the seed is the new life of the receiver. Men
+become children of the kingdom by taking the Gospel into their
+hearts, and thereby receive a new principle of growth, which in
+truth becomes themselves.
+
+Side by side with the sower's beneficent work the counter-working of
+'his enemy' goes on. As the one, by depositing holy truth in the
+heart, makes men 'children of the kingdom,' the other, by putting
+evil principles therein, makes men 'children of evil.' Honest
+exposition cannot eliminate the teaching of a personal antagonist of
+Christ, nor of his continuous agency in the corruption of mankind.
+It is a glimpse into a mysterious region, none the less reliable
+because so momentary. The sulphurous clouds that hide the fire in
+the crater are blown aside for an instant, and we see. Who would
+doubt the truth and worth of the unveiling because it was short and
+partial? 'The devil is God's ape.' His work is a parody of Christ's.
+Where the good seed is sown, there the evil is scattered thickest.
+False Christs and false apostles dog the true like their shadows.
+Every truth has its counterfeit. Neither institutions, nor
+principles, nor movements, nor individuals, bear unmingled crops of
+good. Not merely creatural imperfection, but hostile adulteration,
+marks them all. The purest metal oxidises, scum gathers on the most
+limpid water, every ship's bottom gets foul with weeds. The history
+of every reformation is the same: radiant hopes darkened, progress
+retarded, a second generation of dwarfs who are careless or
+unfaithful guardians of their heritage.
+
+There are, then, two classes of men represented in the parable, and
+these two are distinguishable without doubt by their conduct. Tares
+are said to be quite like wheat until the heads show, and then there
+is a plain difference. So our Lord here teaches that the children of
+the kingdom and those of evil are to be discriminated by their
+actions. We need not do more than point in a sentence to His
+distinct separation of men (where the seed of the kingdom has been
+sown) into two sets. Jesus Christ holds the unfashionable, 'narrow'
+opinion that, at bottom, a man must either be His friend or His
+enemy. We are too much inclined to weaken the strong line of
+demarcation, and to think that most men are neither black nor white,
+but grey.
+
+The question has been eagerly debated whether the tares are bad men
+in the Church, and whether, consequently, the mingled crop is a
+description of the Church only. The following considerations may
+help to an answer. The parable was spoken, not to the disciples, but
+to the crowd. An instruction to them as to Church discipline would
+have been signally out of place; but they needed to be taught that
+the kingdom was to be 'a rose amidst thorns,' and to grow up among
+antagonisms which it would slowly conquer, by the methods which the
+next two parables set forth. This general conception, and not
+directions about ecclesiastical order, was suited to them. Again,
+the designation of the tares as 'the children of evil' seems much
+too wide, if only a particular class of evil men--namely, those who
+are within the Church--are meant by it. Surely the expression
+includes all, both in and outside the Church, who 'do iniquity.'
+Further, the representation of the children of the kingdom, as
+growing among tares in the field of the world, does not seem to
+contemplate them as constituting a distinct society, whether pure or
+impure; but rather as an indefinite number of individuals,
+intermingled in a common soil with the other class. 'The kingdom of
+heaven' is not a synonym for the Church. Is it not an anachronism to
+find the Church in the parable at all? No doubt, tares are in the
+Church, and the parable has a bearing on it; but its primary lesson
+seems to me to be much wider, and to reveal rather the conditions of
+the growth of the kingdom in human society.
+
+II. We have the patience of the husbandman with the quick-springing
+tares.
+
+The servants of the householder receive no interpretation from our
+Lord. Their question is silently passed by in His explanation.
+Clearly then, for some reason, He did not think it necessary to say
+any more about them; and the most probable reason is, that they and
+their words have no corresponding facts, and are only introduced to
+lead up to the Master's explanation of the mystery of the growth of
+the tares, and to His patience with it. The servants cannot be
+supposed to represent officials in the Church, without hopelessly
+destroying the consistency of the parable; for surely all the
+children of the kingdom, whatever their office, are represented in
+the crop. Many guesses have been made,--apostles, angels, and so on.
+It is better to say 'The Lord hath not showed it me.'
+
+The servant's first question expresses, in vivid form, the sad, strange
+fact that, where good was sown, evil springs. The deepest of all
+mysteries is the origin of evil. Explain sin, and you explain everything.
+The question of the servants is the despair of thinkers in all ages.
+Heaven sows only good; where do the misery and the wickedness
+come from? That is a wider and sadder question than, How are churches
+not free from bad members? Perhaps Christ's answer may go as far
+towards the bottom of the bottomless as those of non-Christian thinkers,
+and, if it do not solve the metaphysical puzzles, at any rate gives
+the historical fact, which is all the explanation of which the question
+is susceptible.
+
+The second question reminds us of 'Wilt Thou that we command fire...
+from heaven, and consume them?' It is cast in such a form as to put
+emphasis on the householder's will. His answer forbidding the
+gathering up of the tares is based, not upon any chance of mistaking
+wheat for them, nor upon any hope that, by forbearance, tares may
+change into wheat, but simply on what is best for the good crop.
+There was a danger of destroying some of it, not because of its
+likeness to the other, but because the roots of both were so
+interlaced that one could not be pulled up without dragging the
+other after it.
+
+Is this prohibition, then, meant to forbid the attempt to keep the
+Church pure from un-Christian members? The considerations already
+adduced are valid in answering this question, and others may be
+added. The crowd of listeners had, no doubt, many of them, been
+influenced by John the Baptist's fiery prophecies of the King who
+should come, fan in hand, to 'purge His floor,' and were looking for
+a kingdom which was to be inaugurated by sharp separation and swift
+destruction. Was not the teaching needed then, as it is now, that
+that is not the way in which the kingdom of heaven is to be founded
+and grow? Is not the parable best understood when set in connection
+with the expectations of its first hearers, which are ever floating
+anew before the eyes of each generation of Christians? Is it not
+Christ's _apologia_ for His delay in filling the _role_ which John had
+drawn out for him? And does that conception of its meaning make it
+meaningless for us? Observe, too, that the rooting up which is forbidden
+is, by the proprieties of the emblem, and by the parallel which it
+must necessarily afford to the final burning, something very solemn
+and destructive. We may well ask whether excommunication is a
+sufficiently weighty idea to be taken as its equivalent. Again, how
+does the interpretation which sees ecclesiastical discipline here
+comport with the reason given for letting the tares grow on? By the
+hypothesis in the parable, there is no danger of mistake; but is there
+any danger of casting out good men from the Church along with the
+bad, except through mistake? Further, if this parable forbids casting
+manifestly evil men out of the Church, it contradicts the divinely
+appointed law of the Church as administered by the apostles. If it
+is to be applied to Church action at all, it absolutely forbids the
+separation from the Church of any man, however notoriously un-Christian,
+and that, as even the strongest advocates of comprehension admit,
+would destroy the very idea of the Church. Surely an interpretation
+which lands us in such a conclusion cannot be right. We conclude,
+then, that the intermingling which the parable means is that of good
+men and bad in human society, where all are so interwoven that
+separation is impossible without destroying its whole texture; that
+the rooting up, which is declared to be inconsistent with the growth
+of the crop, means removal from the field, namely, the world; that
+the main point of the second part of the parable is to set forth the
+patience of the Lord of the harvest, and to emphasise this as the
+law of the growth of His kingdom, that it advances amidst antagonism;
+and that its members are interlaced by a thousand rootlets with those
+who are not subjects of their King. What the interlacing is for, and
+whether tares may become wheat, are no parts of its teaching. But
+the lesson of the householder's forbearance is meant to be learned
+by us. While we believe that the scope of the parable is wider than
+instruction in Church discipline, we do not forget that a fair inference
+from it is that, in actual churches, there will ever be a mingling of
+good and evil; and, though that fact is no reason for giving up the
+attempt to make a church a congregation of faithful men, and of such
+only, it is a reason for copying the divine patience of the sower in
+ecclesiastical dealings with errors of opinion and faults of
+conduct.
+
+III. The final separation at the harvest.
+
+The period of development is necessarily a time of intermingling, in
+which, side by side, the antagonistic principles embodied in their
+representatives work themselves out, and beneficially affect each
+other. But each grows towards an end, and, when it has been reached,
+the blending gives place to separation. John's prophecy is plainly
+quoted in the parable, which verbally repeats his 'gather the wheat
+into his barn,' and alludes to his words in the other clause about
+burning the tares. He was right in his anticipations; his error was
+in expecting the King to wield His fan at the beginning, instead of
+at the end of the earthly form of His kingdom. At the consummation
+of the allotted era, the bands of human society are to be dissolved,
+and a new principle of association is to determine men's place.
+Their moral and religious affinities will bind them together or
+separate them, and all other ties will snap. This marshalling
+according to religious character is the main thought of the solemn
+closing words of the parable and of its interpretation, in which our
+Lord presents Himself as directing the whole process of judgment by
+means of the 'angels' who execute His commands. They are 'His
+angels,' and whatever may be the unknown activity put forth by them
+in the parting of men, it is all done in obedience to Him. What
+stupendous claims Jesus makes here! What becomes of the tares is
+told first in words awful in their plainness, and still more awful
+in their obscurity. They speak unmistakably of the absolute
+separation of evil men from all society but that of evil men; of a
+close association, compelled, and perhaps unwelcome. The tares are
+gathered out of 'His kingdom,'--for the field of the world has then
+all become the kingdom of Christ. There are two classes among the
+tares: men whose evil has been a snare to others (for the 'things
+that offend' must, in accordance with the context, be taken to be
+persons), and the less guilty, who are simply called 'them that do
+iniquity.'
+
+Perhaps the 'bundles' may imply assortment according to sin, as in
+Dante's circles. What a bond of fellowship that would be!
+'_The_ furnace,' as it is emphatically called by eminence,
+burns up the bundles. We may freely admit that the fire is part of
+the parable, but yet let us not forget that it occurs not only in
+the parable, but in the interpretation; and let us learn that the
+prose reality of 'everlasting destruction,' which Christ here
+solemnly announces, is awful and complete. For a moment He passes
+beyond the limits of that parable, to add that terrible clause about
+'weeping and gnashing of teeth,' the tokens of despair and rage. So
+spoke the most loving and truthful lips. Do we believe His warnings
+as well as His promises?
+
+The same law of association according to character operates in the
+other region. The children of the kingdom are gathered together in
+what is now 'the kingdom of My Father,' the perfect form of the
+kingdom of Christ, which is still His kingdom, for 'the throne of
+God and of the Lamb,' the one throne on which both sit to reign, is
+'in it.' Freed from association with evil, they are touched with a
+new splendour, caught from Him, and blaze out like the sun; for so
+close is their association, that their myriad glories melt as into a
+single great light. Now, amid gloom and cloud, they gleam like tiny
+tapers far apart; then, gathered into one, they flame in the
+forehead of the morning sky, 'a glorious church, not having spot,
+nor wrinkle, nor any such thing.'
+
+
+
+
+LEAVEN
+
+
+    'The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a
+    woman took, and bid to three measures of meal, till
+    the whole was leavened.'--MATT. xiii. 33.
+
+How lovingly and meditatively Jesus looked upon homely life, knowing
+nothing of the differences, the vulgar differences, between the
+small and great! A poor woman, with her morsel of barm, kneading it
+up among three measures of meal, in some coarse earthenware pan,
+stands to Him as representing the whole process of His work in the
+world. Matthew brings together in this chapter a series of seven
+parables of the kingdom, possibly spoken at different times, and
+gathered here into a sequence and series, just as he has done with
+the great procession of miracles that follows the Sermon on the
+Mount, and just as, perhaps, he has done with that sermon itself.
+The two first of the seven deal with the progress of the Gospel in
+individual minds and the hindrances thereto. Then there follows a
+pair, of which my text is the second, which deal with the
+geographical expansion of the kingdom throughout the world, in the
+parable of the grain of mustard-seed growing into the great herb,
+and with the inward, penetrating, diffusive influence of the
+kingdom, working as an assimilating and transforming force in the
+midst of society.
+
+I do not purpose to enter now upon the wide and difficult question
+of the relation of the kingdom to the Church. Suffice it to say that
+the two terms are by no means synonymous, but that, at the same
+time, inasmuch as a kingdom implies a community of subjects, the
+churches, in the proportion in which they have assimilated the
+leaven, and are holding fast by the powers which Christ has lodged
+within them, are approximate embodiments of the kingdom. The
+parable, then, suggests to us, in a very striking and impressive
+form, the function and the obligations of Christian people in the
+world.
+
+Let me deal, in a purely expository fashion, with the emblem before
+us.
+
+'The kingdom of heaven is like leaven.' Now of course, leaven is
+generally in Scripture taken as a symbol of evil or corruption. For
+example, the preliminary to the Passover Feast was the purging of
+the houses of the Israelites of every scrap of evil ferment, and the
+bread which was eaten on that Feast was prescribed to be unleavened.
+But fermentation works ennobling as well as corruption, and our Lord
+lays hold upon the other possible use of the metaphor. The parable
+teaches that the effect of the Gospel, as ministered by, and
+residing in, the society of men, in whom the will of God is supreme,
+is to change the heavy lump of dough into light, nutritious bread.
+There are three or four points suggested by the parable which I
+could touch upon; and the first of them is that significant
+disproportion between the apparent magnitude of the dead mass that
+is to be leavened, and the tiny piece of active energy which is to
+diffuse itself throughout it.
+
+We get there a glimpse into our Lord's attitude, measuring Himself
+against the world and the forces that were in it. He knows that in
+Him, the sole Representative, at the moment, of the kingdom of
+heaven upon earth--because in Him, and in Him alone, the divine will
+was, absolutely and always, supreme--there lie, for the time
+confined to Him, but never dormant, powers which are adequate to the
+transformation of humanity from a dead, lumpish mass into an
+aggregate all-penetrated by a quickening influence, and, if I might
+so say, fermented with a new life that He will bring. A tremendous
+conception, and the strange thing about it is that it looks as if
+the Nazarene peasant's dream was going to come true! But He was
+speaking to the men whom He was charging with a delegated task, and
+to them He says, 'There are but twelve of you, and you are poor,
+ignorant men, and you have no resources at your back, but you have
+Me, and that is enough, and you may be sure that the tiny morsel of
+yeast will penetrate the whole mass.' Small beginnings characterise
+the causes which are destined to great endings; the things that are
+ushered into the world large, generally grow very little further,
+and speedily collapse. 'An inheritance may be gotten hastily at the
+beginning, but the end shall not be blessed.' The force which is
+destined to be worldwide, began with the one Man in Nazareth, and
+although the measures of meal are three, and the ferment is a scrap,
+it is sure to permeate and transform the mass.
+
+Therefore, brethren, let us take the encouragement that our Lord
+here offers. If we are adherents of unpopular causes, if we have to
+'stand alone with two or three,' do not let us count heads, but
+measure forces. 'What everybody says must be true,' is a cowardly
+proverb. It may be a correct statement that an absolutely universal
+opinion is a true opinion, but what most people say is usually
+false, and what the few say is most generally true. So if we have to
+front--and if we are true men we shall sometimes have to front--an
+embattled mass of antagonism, and we be in a miserable minority,
+never mind! We can say, 'They that be with us are more than they
+that be with them.' If we have anything of the leaven in us, we are
+mightier than the lump of dough.
+
+But there is another point here, and that is the contact that is
+necessary between the leaven and the dough. We have passed from the
+old monastic idea of Religion being seclusion from life. But that
+mistake dies hard, and there are many very Evangelical and very
+Protestant--and in their own notions superlatively good--people, who
+hold a modern analogue of the old monastic idea; and who think that
+Christian men and women should be very tepidly interested in
+anything except what they call the preaching of the Gospel, and the
+saving of men's souls. Now nobody that knows me, and the trend of my
+preaching, will charge me with undervaluing either of these things,
+but these do not exhaust the function of the Church in the world,
+nor the duty of the Church to society. We have to learn from the
+metaphor in the parable. The dough is not kept on one shelf and the
+leaven on another; the bit of leaven is plunged into the heart of
+the mass, and then the woman kneads the whole up in her pan, and so
+the influence is spread. We Christians are not doing our duty, nor
+are we using our capacities, unless we fling ourselves frankly and
+energetically into all the currents of the national life,
+commercial, political, municipal, intellectual, and make our
+influence felt in them all. The 'salt of the earth' is to be rubbed
+into the meat in order to keep it from putrefaction; the leaven is
+to be kneaded up into the dough in order to raise it. Christian
+people are to remember that they are here, not for the purpose of
+isolating themselves, but in order that they may touch life at all
+points, and at all points bring into contact with earthly life the
+better life and the principles of Christian morality.
+
+But in this contact with all phases of life and forms of activity,
+Christian men are to be sure that they take the leaven with them.
+There are professing Christians that say: 'Oh! I am not strait-laced
+and pharisaical. I do not keep myself apart from any movements of
+humanity. I count nothing that belongs to men alien to a Christian.'
+All right! but when you go into these movements, when you go into
+Parliament, when you become a city Councillor, when you mingle with
+other men in commerce, when you meet other students in the walks of
+intellect, do you take your Christianity there, or do you leave it
+behind? The two things are equally necessary, that Christians should
+be in all these various spheres of activity, and that they should be
+there, distinctly, manifestly, and, when need be, avowedly, as
+Christian men.
+
+Further, there is another thought here, on which I just say one
+word, and that is the effect of the leaven on the dough.
+
+It is to assimilate, to set up a ferment. And that is what
+Christianity did when it came into the world, and
+
+  'Cast the kingdoms old
+   Into another mould.'
+
+And that is what it ought to do to-day, and will do, if Christian
+men are true to themselves and to their Lord. Do you not think that
+there would be a ferment if Christian principles were applied, say,
+for instance, to national politics? Do you not think there would be
+a ferment if Christian principles were brought to bear upon all the
+transactions on the Exchange? Is there any region of life into which
+the introduction of the plain precepts of Christianity as the
+supreme law would not revolutionise it? We talk about England as a
+Christian country. Is it? A Christian country is a country of
+Christians, and Christians are not people that only say 'I have
+faith in Jesus Christ.' but people that do His will. That is the
+leaven that is to change, and yet not to change, the whole mass; to
+change it by lightening it, by putting a new spirit into it, leaving
+the substance apparently unaffected except in so far as the
+substance has been corrupted by the evil spirit that rules.
+Brethren, if we as Christians were doing our duty, it would be true
+of us as it was of the early preachers of the Cross, that we are men
+who turn the world upside down.
+
+But there is one more point on which I touch. I have already
+anticipated some of what I would say upon it, but I must dwell upon
+it for a little longer; and that is, the manner in which the leaven
+is to work.
+
+Here is a morsel of barm in the middle of a lump of dough. It works
+by contact, touches the particles nearest it, and transforms them
+into vehicles for the further transmission of influence. Each
+particle touched by the ferment becomes itself a ferment, and so the
+process goes on, outwards and ever outwards, till it permeates the
+whole mass. That is to say, the individual is to become the
+transmitter of the influence to him who is next him. The
+individuality of the influence, and the track in which it is to
+work, viz. upon those in immediate contiguity to the transformed
+particle which is turned from dough into leaven, are taught us here
+in this wonderful simile.
+
+Now that carries a very serious and solemn lesson for us all. If you
+have received, you are able, and you are bound, to transmit this
+quickening, assimilating, transforming, lightening influence, and
+you need never complain of a want of objects upon which to exercise
+it, for the man or woman that is next you is the person that you
+ought to affect.
+
+Now I have already said, in an earlier portion of these remarks,
+that some good people, taking an erroneous view of the function and
+obligations of the Church in the world, would fain keep its work to
+purely evangelistic effort upon individual souls in presenting to
+them the Gospel of Jesus Christ the Saviour. But whilst I vehemently
+protest against the notion that that is the whole function of the
+Christian Church, I would as vehemently protest against the notion
+that the so-called social work of the Church can ever be efficiently
+done except upon the foundation laid of this evangelistic work.
+First and foremost amongst the ways in which this great obligation
+of leavening humanity is to be discharged, must ever stand, as I
+believe, the appeal to the individual conscience and heart, and the
+presentation to single souls of the great Name in which are stored
+all the regenerative and quickening impulses that can ever alleviate
+and bless humanity. So that, first and foremost, I put the preaching
+of the Gospel, the Gospel of our salvation, by the death and in the
+life of the Incarnate Son of God.
+
+But then, besides that, let me remind you there are other ways,
+subsidiary but indispensable ways, in which the Church has to
+discharge its function; and I put foremost amongst these, what I
+have already touched upon, and therefore need not dilate on now, the
+duty of Christians as Christians to take their full share in all the
+various forms of national life. I need not dwell upon the evils
+rampant amongst us, which have to be dealt with, and, as I believe,
+may best if not only, be dealt with, upon Christian principles.
+Think of drink, lust, gambling, to name but three of them, the
+hydra-headed serpent that is poisoning the English nation. Now it
+seems to me to be a deplorable, but a certainly true thing, that not
+only are these evils not attacked by the Churches as they ought to
+be, but that to a very large extent the task of attacking them has
+fallen into the hands of people who have little sympathy with the
+Church and its doctrines. They are fighting the evils on principles
+drawn from Jesus Christ, but they are not fighting the evils to the
+extent that they ought to do, with the Churches alongside. I beseech
+you, in your various spheres, to see to it that, as far as you can
+make it so, Christian people take the place that Christ meant them
+to take in the conflict with the miseries, the sorrows, the sins
+that honeycomb England to-day, and not to let it be said that the
+Churches shut themselves up and preach to people, but do not lift a
+finger to deal with the social evils of the nation.
+
+
+
+
+TREASURE AND PEARL
+
+
+    The kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a
+    field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and
+    for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and
+    buyeth that field. 45. Again, the kingdom of heaven is
+    like unto a merchantman, seeking goodly pearls: 46. Who,
+    when he had found one pearl of great price, went and
+    sold all that he had, and bought it.'--MATT. xiii. 44-46.
+
+In this couple of parables, which are twins, and must be taken
+together, our Lord utilises two very familiar facts of old-world
+life, both of them arising from a similar cause. In the days when
+there were no banks and no limited liability companies, it was
+difficult for a man to know what to do with his little savings. In
+old times government meant oppression, and it was dangerous to seem
+to have any riches. In old days war stalked over the land, and men's
+property must be portable or else concealed. So, on the one hand we
+find the practice of hiding away little hoards in some suitable
+place, beneath a rock, in the cleft of a tree, or a hole dug in the
+ground, and then, perhaps, the man died before he came back for his
+wealth. Or, again, another man might prefer to carry his wealth
+about with him. So he went and got jewels, easily carried, not
+easily noticed, easily convertible into what he might require.
+
+And, says our Lord, these two practices, with which all the people
+to whom He was speaking were very much more familiar than we are,
+teach us something about the kingdom of God. Now, I am not going to
+be tempted to discuss what our Lord means by that phrase, so
+frequent upon His lips, 'the kingdom of God' or 'of heaven.' Suffice
+it to say that it means, in the most general terms, a state or order
+of things in which God is King, and His will supreme and sovereign.
+Christ came, as He tells us, to found and to extend that kingdom
+upon earth. A man can go into it, and it can come into a man, and
+the conditions on which he enters into it, and it into him, are laid
+down in this pair of parables. So I ask you to notice their
+similarities and their divergences. They begin alike and they run on
+alike for a little way, and then they diverge. There is a fork in
+the road, and they reunite at the end again. They agree in their
+representation of the treasure; they diverge in their explanation of
+the process of discovering it, and they unite at last in the final
+issue. So, then, we have to look at these three points.
+
+I. Let me ask you to think that the true treasure for a man lies in
+the kingdom of God.
+
+It is not exactly said that the treasure is the kingdom, but the
+treasure is found in the kingdom, and nowhere else. Let us put away
+the metaphor; it means that the only thing that will make us rich is
+loving submission to the supreme law of the God whom we love because
+we know that He loves us.  You may put that thought into half a
+dozen different forms. You may say that the treasure is the blessing
+that comes from Christianity, or the inward wealth of a submissive
+heart, or may use various modes of expression, but below them all
+lies this one great thought, that it is laid on my heart, dear
+brethren, to try and lay on yours now, that, when all is said and
+done, the only possession that makes us rich is--is what? God
+Himself. For that is the deepest meaning of the treasure. And
+whatever other forms of expression we may use to designate it, they
+all come back at last to this, that the wealth of the human soul is
+to have God for its very own.
+
+Let me run over two or three points that show us that. That treasure
+is the only one that meets our deepest poverty. We do not all know
+what that is, but whether you know it or not, dear friend, the thing
+that you want most is to have your sins dealt with, in the double
+way of having them forgiven as guilt, and in having them taken away
+from you as tyrants and dominators over your wills. And it is only
+God who can do that, 'God in Christ reconciling the world unto
+Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them,' and giving them,
+by a new life which He breathes into dead souls, emancipation from
+the tyrants that rule over them, and thus bringing them 'into the
+liberty of the glory of the sons of God.' 'Thou sayest that Thou art
+rich and increased with goods ... and knowest not that thou art poor
+... and naked.' Brother, until you have found out that it is only God
+who will save you from being bankrupt, and enable you to pay your
+debts, which are your duties, you do not know where your true riches
+are. And if you have all that men can acquire of the lower things of
+life, whether of what is generally called wealth or of other material
+benefits, and have that great indebtedness standing against you, you
+are but an insolvent after all. Here is the treasure that will make
+you rich, because it will pay your debts, and endow you with capacity
+enough to meet all future expenditure--viz. the possession of the
+forgiving and cleansing grace of God which is in Jesus Christ. If
+you have that, you are rich; if you do not possess it, you are poor.
+Now you believe that, as much as I do, most of you. Well, what do you
+do in consequence?
+
+Further, the possession of God, who belongs to all those that are
+the subjects of the kingdom of God, is our true treasure, because
+that wealth, and that alone, meets at once all the diverse wants of
+the human soul. There is nothing else of which that can be said.
+There are a great many other precious things in this world--human
+loves, earthly ambitions of noble and legitimate kinds. No one but a
+fool will deny the convenience and the good of having a competency
+of this world's possessions. But all these have this miserable
+defect, or rather limitation, that they each satisfy some little
+corner of a man's nature, and leave all the rest, if I may so say,
+like the beasts in a menagerie whose turn has not yet come to be
+fed, yelping and growling while the keeper is at the den of another
+one. There is only one thing that, being applied, as it were, at the
+very centre, will diffuse itself, like some fragrant perfume,
+through the whole sphere, and fill the else scentless air with its
+rich and refreshing fragrance. There is but one wealth which meets
+the whole of human nature. You, however small you are, however
+insignificant people may think you, however humbly you may think of
+yourselves, you are so great that the whole created Universe, if it
+were yours, would be all too little for you. You cannot fill a
+bottomless bog with any number of cartloads of earth. And you know
+as well as I can tell you that 'he that loveth silver shall not be
+satisfied with silver, nor he that loveth abundance with increase,'
+and that none of the good things here below, rich and precious as
+many of them are, are large enough to fill, much less to expand, the
+limitless desires of one human heart. As the ancient Latin father
+said, 'Lord, Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is unquiet
+till it attains to Thee.'
+
+Closely connected with that thought, but capable of being dealt with
+for a moment apart, is the other, that this is our true treasure,
+because we have it all in one.
+
+You remember the beautiful emphasis of one of the parables in our
+text about the man that dissipated himself in seeking for many
+goodly pearls? He had secured a whole casket full of little ones.
+They were pearls, they were many; but then he saw one Orient pearl,
+and he said, 'The one is more than the many. Let me have unity, for
+there is rest; whereas in multiplicity there is restlessness and
+change.' The sky to-night may be filled with galaxies of stars.
+Better one sun than a million twinkling tininesses that fill the
+heavens, and yet do not scatter the darkness. Oh, brethren, to have
+one aim, one love, one treasure, one Christ, one God--there is the
+secret of blessedness. 'Unite my heart to fear Thy name'; and then
+all the miseries of multiplicity, and of drawing our supplies from a
+multitude of separate lakes, will be at an end, when our souls are
+flooded from the one fountain of life that can never fail or be
+turbid. Thus, the unity of the treasure is the supreme excellence of
+the treasure.
+
+Nor need I remind you in more than a word of how this is our true
+treasure, because it is our permanent one. Nothing that can be taken
+from me is truly mine. Those of you who have lived in a great
+commercial community as long as I have done, know that it is not for
+nothing that sovereigns are made circular, for they roll very
+rapidly, and 'riches take to themselves wings and fly away.' We can
+all go back to instances of men who set their hearts upon wealth,
+and flaunted their little hour before us as kings of the Exchange,
+and were objects of adoration and of envy, and at last were left
+stranded in poverty. Nothing that can be stripped from you by the
+accidents of life, or by inevitable death, is worth calling your
+'good.' You must have something that is intertwined with the very
+fibres of your being. And I, unworthy as I am, come to you, dear
+friends, now, with this proffer of the great gift of wealth from
+which 'neither life, nor death, nor angels, nor principalities, nor
+powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor
+depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us.' And I
+beseech you to ask yourselves, Is there anything worth calling
+wealth, except that wealth which meets my deepest need, which
+satisfies my whole nature, which I may have all in one, and which,
+if I have, I may have for ever? That wealth is the God who may be
+'the strength of your hearts and your heritage for ever.'
+
+II. Now notice, secondly, the concealment of the treasure.
+
+According to the first of our parables, the treasure was hid in a
+field. That is very largely local colouring, which gives veracity
+and vraisemblance to the fact of the story. And there has been a
+great deal of very unnecessary and misplaced ingenuity spent in
+trying to force interpretations upon every feature of the parable,
+which I do not intend to imitate, but I just wish to suggest one
+thing. Here was this man in the story, who had plodded across that
+field a thousand times, and knew every clod of it, and had never
+seen the wealth that was lying six inches below the surface. Now,
+that is very like some of my present hearers. God's treasure comes
+to the world in a form which to a great many people veils, if it
+does not altogether hide, its preciousness. You have heard sermons
+till you are sick of sermons, and I do not wonder at it, if you have
+heard them and never thought of acting on them. You know all that I
+can tell you, most of you, about Jesus Christ, and what He has done
+for you, and what you should do towards Him, and your familiarity
+with the Word has blinded you to its spirit and its power. You have
+gone over the field so often that you have made a path across it,
+and it seems incredible to you that there should be anything worth
+your picking up there. Ah! dear friends, Jesus Christ, when He was
+here, 'in whom were hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,'
+had to the men that looked upon Him 'neither form nor comeliness
+that they should desire Him,' and He was to them a stumbling-block
+and foolishness. And Christ's Gospel comes among busy men, worldly
+men, men who are under the dominion of their passions and desires,
+men who are pursuing science and knowledge, and it looks to them
+very homely, very insignificant; they do not know what treasure is
+lying in it. You do not know what treasure is lying--may I venture
+to say it?--in these poor words of mine, in so far as they truly
+represent the mind and will of God. Dear brethren, the treasure is
+hid, but that is not because God did not wish you to see it; it is
+because you have made yourselves blind to its flashing brightness.
+'If our Gospel be hid, it is hid to them ... in whom the god of this
+world hath blinded their eyes.' If your whole desires are passionately
+set on that which Manchester recognises as the _summum bonum_, or,
+if you are living without a thought beyond this present, how can you
+expect to see the treasure, though it is lying there before your eyes?
+You have buried it, or, rather, you have made that which is its
+necessary envelope to be its obscuration. I pray you, look through the
+forms, look beneath the words of Scripture, and try and clear your
+eyesight from the hallucinations of the dazzling present, and you will
+see the treasure that is hid in the field.
+
+III. Again, let me ask you to notice, further, the two ways of
+finding.
+
+The rustic in the first story, who, as I said, had plodded across
+the field a hundred times, was doing it for the hundred and first,
+or perhaps was at work there with his mattock or his homely plough.
+And, perchance, some stroke of the spade, or push of the coulter,
+went a little deeper than usual, and there flashed the gold, or some
+shower of rain came on, and washed away a little of the
+superincumbent soil, and laid bare the bag. Now, that is what often
+happens, for you have to remember that though you are not seeking
+God, God is always seeking you, and so the great saying comes to be
+true, 'I am found of them that sought Me not.' There have been many
+cases like the one of the man who, breathing out threatenings and
+slaughter, with no thought in his mind except to bind the disciples
+and bring them captive to Jerusalem, saw suddenly a light from
+heaven flashing down upon him, and a Voice that pulled him up in the
+midst of his career. Ah! it would be an awful thing if no one found
+Christ except those who set out to seek for Him. Like the dew on the
+grass 'that waiteth not for men, nor tarrieth for the sons of men,'
+He often comes to hearts that are thinking about nothing less than
+about Him.
+
+There are men and women listening to me now who did not come here
+with any expectation of being confronted with this message to their
+souls; they may have been drawn by curiosity or by a hundred other
+motives. If there is one such, to whom I am speaking, who has had no
+desires after the treasure, who has never thought that God was his
+only Good, who has been swallowed up in worldly things and the
+common affairs of life, and who now feels as if a sudden flash had
+laid bare the hidden wealth in the familiar Gospel, I beseech such a
+one not to turn away from the discovered treasure, but to make it
+his own. Dear friend, you may not be looking for the wealth, but
+Christ is looking for His lost coin. And, though it has rolled away
+into some dusty corner, and is lying there all unaware, I venture to
+say that He is seeking you by my poor words to-night, and is saying
+to you: 'I counsel thee to buy of Me gold tried in the fire.'
+
+But then another class is described in the other parable of the
+merchantman who was seeking many goodly pearls. I suppose he may
+stand as a representative of a class of whom I have no doubt there
+are some other representatives hearing me now, namely, persons who,
+without yielding themselves to the claims of Christ, have been
+searching, honestly and earnestly, for 'whatsoever things are lovely
+and of good report.' Dear brethren, if you have been smitten by the
+desire to live noble lives, if you have been roused
+
+  'To follow knowledge, like a sinking star,
+   Beyond the furthest bounds of human thought,'
+
+or if in any way you are going through the world with your eyes
+looking for something else than the world's gross good, and are
+seeking for the many pearls, I beseech you to lay this truth to
+heart, that you will never find what you seek, until you understand
+that the many have not it to give you, and that the One has. And
+when Christ draws near to you and says, 'Whatsoever things are
+lovely and of good report, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever
+things are venerable, if thou seekest them, take Me, and thou wilt
+find them all,' I beseech you, accept Him. There are two ways of
+finding the treasure. It is flashed on unexpectant eyes, and it is
+disclosed to seeking souls.
+
+III. And now, lastly, let us look at the point where the parables
+converge.
+
+There are two ways of finding; there is only one way of getting. The
+one man went and sold all that he had and bought the field. Never
+mind about the morality of the transaction: that has nothing to do
+with our Lord's purpose. Perhaps it was not quite honest of this man
+to bury the treasure again, and then to go and buy the field for
+less than it was worth, but the point is that, however a soul is
+brought to see that God in Christ is all that he needs, there is
+only one way of getting Him, and that is, 'sell all that thou hast.'
+
+'Then it is barter, is it? Then it is salvation by works after all?'
+No! To 'sell all that thou hast' is first, to abandon all hope of
+acquiring the treasure by anything that thou hast. We buy it when we
+acknowledge that we have nothing of our own to buy it with. Buy it
+'without money and without price'; buy it by yielding your hearts;
+buy it by ceasing to cling to earth and creatures, as if they were
+your good. That trust in Jesus Christ, which is the condition of
+salvation is selling 'all that thou hast.' Self is 'all that thou
+hast.' Abandon self and clutch Him, and the treasure is thine. But
+the initial act of faith has to be carried on through a life of
+self-denial and self-sacrifice, and the subjection of self-will,
+which is the hardest of all, and the submission of one's self
+altogether to the kingdom of God and to its King.  If we do thus we
+shall have the treasure, and if we do not thus we shall not.
+
+Surely it is reasonable to fling away paste pearls for real ones.
+Surely it is reasonable to fling away brass counters for gold coins.
+Surely, in all regions of life, we willingly sacrifice the second
+best in order to get the very best. Surely if the wealth which is in
+God is more precious than all besides, you have the best of the
+bargain, if you part with the world and yourselves and get Him. And
+if, on the other hand, you stick to the second best and cleave to
+yourselves and to this poor diurnal sphere and what it contains,
+then I will tell you what your epitaph will be. It is written in one
+of the Psalms, 'He shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at
+his latter end shall be a fool.'
+
+And there is a more foolish fool still--the man who, when he has
+seen the treasure, flings another shovelful of earth upon it, and
+goes away and does _not_ buy it, nor think anything more about
+it. Dear brother, do not do that, but if, by God's help, any poor
+words of mine have stirred anything in your hearts of recognition of
+what your true wealth is, do not rest until you have done what is
+needful to possess it, given away yourselves, and in exchange
+received Christ, and in Him wealth for evermore.
+
+
+
+
+THE MARTYRDOM OF JOHN
+
+
+    'At that time Herod the tetrarch heard of the fame of
+    Jesus, 2. And said unto his servants, This is John the
+    Baptist; he is risen from the dead; and therefore
+    mighty works do shew forth themselves in him. 3. For
+    Herod had laid hold on John, and bound him, and put him
+    in prison for Herodias' sake, his brother Philip's wife.
+    4. For John said unto him, It is not lawful for thee to
+    have her. 5. And when he would have put him to death,
+    he feared the multitude, because they counted him as a
+    prophet. 6. But when Herod's birthday was kept, the
+    daughter of Herodias danced before them, and pleased
+    Herod. 7. Whereupon he promised with an oath to give
+    her whatsoever she would ask. 8. And she, being before
+    instructed of her mother, said, Give me here John
+    Baptist's head in a charger. 9. And the king was sorry:
+    nevertheless for the oath's sake, and them which sat
+    with him at meat, he commanded it to be given her.
+    10. And he sent, and beheaded John in the prison.
+    11. And his head was brought in a charger, and given to
+    the damsel: and she brought it to her mother. 12. And
+    his disciples came, and took up the body, and buried it,
+    and went and told Jesus.'--MATT. xiv. 1-12.
+
+The singular indifference of the Bible to the fate of even its
+greatest men is exemplified in the fact that the martyrdom of John
+is only told incidentally, in explanation of Herod's alarm. But for
+that he would apparently have dropped out of the narrative, as a man
+sinks in the sea, without a bubble or a ripple. Christ is the sole
+theme of the Gospels, and all others are visible only as His light
+falls on them.
+
+It took a long time for news of Christ to reach the ears of Herod.
+Peasants hear of Him before princes, whose thick palace walls and
+crowds of courtiers shut out truth. The first thing to note is the
+alarm of the conscience-stricken king. We learn from the other
+evangelists that there was a difference of opinion among the
+attendants of Herod--not very good judges of a religious teacher--as
+to who this new miracle-working Rabbi might be, but the tetrarch has
+no hesitation. There is no proof that Herod was a Sadducee; but he
+probably thought as little about a resurrection as if he had been,
+and, in any case, did not expect dead men to be starting up again,
+one by one, and mingling with the living. His conscience made a
+coward of him, and his fear made that terrible which would else have
+been thought impossible. In his terror he makes confidants of his
+slaves, overleaping the barriers of position, in his need of some
+ears to pour his fears into. He was right in believing that he had
+not finished with John, and in expecting to meet him again with
+mightier power to accuse and condemn. 'If 'twere done when 'tis
+done,' says Macbeth; but it is not done. There is a resurrection of
+deeds as well as of bodies, and all our buried badnesses will front
+us again, shaking their gory locks at us, and saying that we did
+them.
+
+Instead of following closely the narrative, we may best gather up
+its lessons by considering the actors in the tragedy.
+
+I. We see in Herod the depths of evil possible to a weak character.
+The singular double which he, Herodias and John present to Ahab,
+Jezebel and Elijah, has been often noticed. In both cases a weak
+king is drawn in opposite directions by the stronger-willed
+temptress at his side, and by the stern ascetic from the desert. How
+John had found his way into 'kings' houses' we do not know; but, as
+he carried thither his undaunted boldness of plain-spoken preaching
+of morality and repentance, it was inevitable that he should soon
+find his way from the palace to the dungeon. There must have been
+some intercourse between Herod and him before his imprisonment, or
+he could not have shaken the king's conscience with his blunt
+denunciations. From the account in Mark, it would appear that, after
+his imprisonment, he gained great influence over the tetrarch, and
+led him some steps on the way of goodness. But Herod was 'infirm of
+purpose,' and a beautiful fiend was at his side, and she had an iron
+will sharpened to an edge by hatred, and knew her own mind, which
+was murder. Between them, the weaker nature was much perplexed, and
+like a badly steered boat, yawed in its course, now yielding to the
+impulse from John, now to that from Herodias. Matthew attributes his
+hesitation as to killing John to his fear of the popular voice,
+which, no doubt, also operated. Thus he 'let I dare not wait upon I
+would,' and had not strength of mind enough to hold to the one and
+despise the other of his discordant counsellors. He was evidently a
+sensual, luxurious, feeble-willed, easily frightened, superstitious
+and cunning despot; and, as is always the case with such, he was
+driven farther in evil than he meant or wished. He was entrapped
+into an oath, and then, instead of saying, 'Promises which should
+not have been made should not be kept,' he weakly consents, from
+fantastic fear of what his guests will say of him, and unwillingly,
+out of pure imbecility, stains his soul for ever with blood. In this
+wicked world, weak men will always be wicked men; for it is less
+trouble to consent than to resist, and there are more sirens to
+whisper 'Come' than prophets to thunder, 'It is not lawful.'
+Strength of will is needful for all noble life.
+
+We may learn from Herod, also, how far we may go on the road of
+obedience to God's will, and yet leave it at last. What became of
+all his eager listening, of his partial obedience, of his care to
+keep John safe from Herodias's malice? All vanished like early dew.
+What became of his conscience-stricken alarms on hearing of Christ?
+Did they lead to any deep convictions?  They faded away, and left
+him harder than before. Convictions not followed out ossify the
+heart. If he had sent for Christ, and told Him his fears, all might
+have been well. But he let them pass, and, so far as we know, they
+never returned. He did meet Jesus at last, when Pilate sent him the
+Prisoner, as a piece of politeness, and in what mood?--childish
+pleasure at the chance of seeing a miracle. How did Jesus answer his
+torrent of frivolous questions? 'He answered him nothing.' That sad
+silence speaks Christ's knowledge that now even His words would be
+vain to create one ripple of interest on the Dead Sea of Herod's
+soul. By frivolity, lust, and neglect he had killed the germ of a
+better life, and silence was the kindest answer which perfect love
+could give him.
+
+He shows us, too, the intimate connection of all sins. The common
+root of every sin is selfishness, and the shapes which it takes are
+protean and interchangeable. Lust dwells hard by hate. Sensual
+crimes and cruelty are closely akin. The one vice which Herod would
+not surrender, dragged after it a whole tangle of other sins. No sin
+dwells alone. There is 'none barren among them.' They are
+gregarious, and a solitary sin is more seldom seen than a single
+swallow. Herod is an illustration, too, of a conscience
+fantastically sensitive while it is dead to real crimes. He has no
+twinges for his sin with Herodias, and no effective ones at killing
+John, but he thinks it would be wrong to break his oath. The two
+things often go together; and many a brigand in Calabria, who would
+cut a throat without hesitation, would not miss mass, or rob without
+a little image of the Virgin in his hat. We often make compensation
+for easy indulgence in great sins by fussy scrupulosity about little
+faults, and, like Herod, had rather commit murder than not be polite
+to visitors.
+
+II. The next actors in the tragedy are Herodias and her daughter. What
+a miserable destiny to be gibbeted for ever by half a dozen sentences!
+One deed, after which she no doubt 'wiped her mouth, and said, I have
+done no harm,' has won for the mother an immortality of ignominy. Her
+portrait is drawn in few strokes, but they are enough. In strength of
+will and unscrupulous carelessness of human life, she is the sister of
+Jezebel, and curiously like Shakespeare's awful creation, Lady Macbeth;
+but she adds a stain of sensuous passion to their vices, which
+heightens the horror. Her first marriage was with her full uncle; and
+her second, if marriage it can be called when her husband and Herod's
+wife were both living, was with her step-uncle, and thus triply
+unlawful. John's remonstrance awoke no sense of shame in her, but only
+malignant and murderous hate. Once resolved, no failures made her
+swerve from her purpose. Hers was no passing fury, but cold-blooded,
+deliberate determination. Her iron will and unalterable persistence
+were accompanied by flexibility of resource. When one weapon failed,
+she drew another from a full quiver. And the means which were finally
+successful show not only her thorough knowledge of the weak man she
+had to deal with, but her readiness to stoop to any degradation for
+herself and her child to carry her point. 'A thousand claims to'
+abhorrence 'meet in her, as mother, wife, and queen.' Many a shameless
+woman would have shrunk from sullying a daughter's childhood, by
+sending her to play the part of a shameless dancing-girl before a
+crew of half-tipsy revellers, and from teaching her young lips to
+ask for murder. But Herodias sticks at nothing, and is as insensible
+to the duty of a mother as to that of a wife. If we put together these
+features in her character, her hot animal passions, her cool inflexible
+revenge, her cynical disregard of all decency, her deadness to natural
+affection for her child, her ferocity and her cunning, we have a
+hideous picture of corrupted womanhood. We cannot but wonder
+whether, in after days, remorse ever did its merciful work upon
+Herodias. She urged Herod to his ruin at last by her ambition, which
+sought for him the title of king, and, with one redeeming touch of
+faithfulness, went with him into dreary exile in Gaul. Perhaps
+there, among strangers, and surrounded by the wreck of her projects,
+and when the hot fire of passion had died down, she may have
+remembered and repented her crime.
+
+The criminality of the daughter largely depends upon her age, of
+which we have no knowledge. Perhaps she was too mere a child to
+understand the degradation of the dance, or the infamy of the
+request which her, we hope, innocent and panting lips were tutored
+to prefer. But, more probably, she was old enough to be her mother's
+fellow-conspirator, rather than her tool, and had learned only too
+well her lessons of impurity and cruelty. What chance had a young
+life in such a sty of filth? When the mother becomes the devil's
+deputy, what can the daughter grow up to be, but a worse edition of
+her? This poor girl, so sinning, and so sinned against, followed in
+Herodias's footsteps, and afterwards married, according to the
+custom of the Herods, her uncle, Philip the tetrarch. She inherited
+and was taught evil; that was her misfortune. She made it her own;
+that was her crime. As she stands there, shameless and flushed, in
+that hideous banqueting-hall, with her grim gift dripping red blood
+on the golden platter, and wicked triumph gleaming in her dark eyes,
+she suggests grave questions as to parents' responsibility for
+children's sins, and is a living symbol of the degradation of art to
+the service of vice, and of the power of an evil soul to make
+hideous all the grace of budding womanhood.
+
+III. There is something dramatically appropriate in the silent death
+in the dungeon of the lonely forerunner.  The faint noise of revelry
+may have reached his ears, as he brooded there, and wondered if the
+coming King would never come for his enlargement. Suddenly a gleam
+of light from the opened door enters his cell, and falls on the
+blade of the headsman's sword. Little time can be wasted, for
+Herodias waits. With short preface the blow falls. The King has
+come, and set His forerunner free, sending him to prepare His way
+before Him in the dim regions beyond. A world where Herod sits in
+the festal chamber, and John lies headless in the dungeon, needs
+some one to set it right. When the need is sorest, the help is
+nearest. Truth succeeds by the apparent failure of its apostle.
+Herodias may stab the dead tongue, as the legend tells that she did,
+but it speaks louder after death than ever. Herod kept his birthday
+with drunken and bloody mirth; but it was a better birthday for his
+victim.
+
+IV. It needed some courage for John's disciples to come to that
+gloomy, blood-stained fortress, and bear away the headless trunk
+which scornful cruelty had flung out to rot unburied. When reverent
+love and sorrow had finished their task, what was the little flock
+without a shepherd to do? The possibility of their continued
+existence as a company of disciples was at an end. They show by
+their action that their master had profited from his last message to
+Jesus. At once they turn to Him, and, no doubt, the bulk of them
+were absorbed in the body of His followers. Sorrowful and bereaved
+souls betake themselves naturally to His sweet sympathy for
+soothing, and to His gentle wisdom for direction. The wisest thing
+that any of us can do is to 'go and tell Jesus' our loneliness, and
+let it bind us more closely to Him.
+
+
+
+
+THE GRAVE OF THE DEAD JOHN AND THE GRAVE OF THE LIVING JESUS
+
+
+    'And John's disciples came, and took up the body, and
+    buried it, and went and told Jesus.'--MATT. xiv. 12.
+
+    'And they departed quickly from the sepulchre with fear
+    and great joy.'--MATT. xxviii. 8.
+
+There is a remarkable parallel and still more remarkable contrast
+between these two groups of disciples at the graves of their
+respective masters. John the Baptist's followers venture into the
+very jaws of the lion to rescue the headless corpse of their
+martyred teacher from a prison grave. They bear it away and lay it
+reverently in its unknown sepulchre, and when they have done these
+last offices of love they feel that all is over. They have no longer
+a centre, and they disintegrate. There was nothing to hold them
+together any more. The shepherd had been smitten, and the flock were
+scattered. As a 'school' or a distinct community they cease to be,
+and are mostly absorbed into the ranks of Christ's followers. That
+sorrowful little company that turned from John's grave, perhaps
+amidst the grim rocks of Moab, perhaps in his native city amongst
+the hills of Judah, parted then, to meet no more, and to bear away
+only a common sorrow that time would comfort, and a common memory
+that time would dim.
+
+The other group laid their martyred Master in His grave with as
+tender hands and as little hope as did John's disciples. The bond
+that held them together was gone too, and the disintegrating process
+began at once. We see them breaking up into little knots, and soon
+they, too, will be scattered. The women come to the grave to perform
+the woman's office of anointing, and they are left to go alone.
+Other slight hints are given which show how much the ties of
+companionship had been relaxed, even in a day, and how certainly and
+quickly they would have fallen asunder. But all at once a new
+element comes in, all is changed. The earliest visitors to the
+sepulchre leave it, not with the lingering sorrow of those who have
+no more that they can do, but with the quick, buoyant step of people
+charged with great and glad tidings. They come to it wrapped in
+grief--they leave it with great joy. They come to it, feeling that
+all was over, and that their union with the rest who had loved Him
+was little more than a remembrance. They go away, feeling that they
+are all bound together more closely than ever.
+
+The grave of John was the end of a 'school.' The grave of Jesus was
+the beginning of a Church. Why? The only answer is the message which
+the women brought back from the empty sepulchre on that Easter day:
+'The Lord is risen.' The whole history of the Christian Church, and
+even its very existence, is unintelligible, except on the
+supposition of the resurrection. But for that, the fate of John's
+disciples would have been the fate of Christ's--they would have
+melted away into the mass of the nation, and at most there would
+have been one more petty Galilean sect that would have lived on for
+a generation and died out when the last of His companions died. So
+from these two contrasted groups we may fairly gather some thoughts
+as to the Resurrection of Christ, as attested by the very existence
+of a Christian Church, and as to the joy of that resurrection.
+
+I. Now the first point to be considered is, that the conduct of
+Christ's disciples after His death was exactly the opposite of what
+might have been expected.
+
+They held together. The natural thing for them to do would have been
+to disband; for their one bond was gone; and if they had acted
+according to the ordinary laws of human conduct, they would have
+said to themselves, Let us go back to our fishing-boats and our
+tax-gathering, and seek safety in separation, and nurse our sorrow
+apart. A few lingering days might have been given to weep together
+at His grave, and to assuage the first bitterness of grief and
+disappointment; but when these were over, nothing could have
+prevented Christianity and the Church from being buried in the same
+sepulchre as Jesus. As certainly as the stopping up of the fountain
+would empty the river's bed, so surely would Christ's death have
+scattered His disciples. And that strange fact, that it did not
+scatter them, needs to be looked well into and fairly accounted for
+in some plausible manner. The end of John's school gives a parallel
+which brings the singularity of the fact into stronger relief; and
+looking at these two groups as they stand before us in these two
+texts, the question is irresistibly suggested, Why did not the one
+fall away into its separate elements, as the other did? The keystone
+of the arch was in both cases withdrawn--why did the one structure
+topple into ruin while the other stood firm?
+
+Not only did the disciples of Christ keep united, but their
+conceptions of Jesus underwent a remarkable change, after His death.
+We might have expected, indeed, that, when memory began to work, and
+the disturbing influence of daily association was withdrawn, the
+same idealising process would have begun on their image of Him,
+which reveals and ennobles the characters of our dear ones who have
+gone away from us. Most men have to die before their true worth is
+discerned. But no process of that sort will suffice to account for
+the change and heightening of the disciples' thoughts about their
+dead Lord. It was not merely that, when they remembered, they said,
+Did not our hearts burn within us by the way while He talked with
+us?--but that His death wrought exactly the opposite effect from
+what it might have been expected to do. It ought to have ended their
+hope that He was the Messiah, and we know that within forty-eight
+hours it was beginning to do so, as we learn from the plaintive
+words of disappointed and fading hope: 'We _trusted_ that it
+had been He which should have redeemed Israel.' If, so early, the
+cold conviction was stealing over their hearts that their dearest
+expectation was proved by His death to have been a dream, what could
+have prevented its entire dominion over them, as the days grew into
+months and years? But somehow or other that process was arrested,
+and the opposite one set in. The death that should have shattered
+Messianic dreams confirmed them. The death that should have cast a
+deeper shadow of incomprehensibleness over His strange and lofty
+claims poured a new light upon them, which made them all plain and
+clear. The very parts of His teaching which His death would have
+made those who loved Him wish to forget, became the centre of His
+followers' faith. His cross became His throne. Whilst He lived with
+them they knew not what He said in His deepest words, but, by a
+strange paradox, His death convinced them that He was the Son of
+God, and that that which they had seen with their eyes, and their
+hands had handled, was the Eternal Life. The cross alone could never
+have done that. Something else there must have been, if the men were
+sane, to account for this paradox.
+
+Nor is this all. Another equally unlikely sequel of the death of
+Jesus is the unmistakable moral transformation effected on the
+disciples. Timorous and tremulous before, something or other touched
+them into altogether new boldness and self-possession. Dependent on
+His presence before, and helpless when He was away from them for an
+hour, they become all at once strong and calm; they stand before the
+fury of a Jewish mob and the threatenings of the Sanhedrim, unmoved
+and victorious. And these brave confessors and saintly heroes are
+the men who, a few weeks before, had been petulant, self-willed,
+jealous, cowardly. What had lifted them suddenly so far above
+themselves? Their Master's death? That would more naturally have
+taken any heart or courage out of them, and left them indeed as
+sheep in the midst of wolves. Why, then, do they thus strangely
+blaze up into grandeur and heroism? Can any reasonable account be
+given of these paradoxes? Surely it is not too much to ask of people
+who profess to explain Christianity on naturalistic principles, that
+they shall make the process clear to us by which, Christ being dead
+and buried, His disciples were kept together, learned to think more
+loftily of Him, and sprang at once to a new grandeur of character.
+Why did not they do as John's disciples did, and disappear? Why was
+not the stream lost in the sand, when the head-waters were cut off?
+
+II. Notice then, next, that the disciples' immediate belief in the
+Resurrection furnishes a reasonable, and the only reasonable,
+explanation of the facts.
+
+There is no better historical evidence of a fact than the existence
+of an institution built upon it, and coeval with it. The Christian
+Church is such evidence for the fact of the Resurrection; or, to put
+the conclusion in the most moderate fashion, for the belief in the
+Resurrection. For, as we have shown, the natural effect of our
+Lord's death would have been to shatter the whole fabric: and if
+that effect were not produced, the only reasonable account of the
+force that hindered it is, that His followers believed that He rose
+again. Since that was their faith, one can understand how they were
+banded more closely together than ever. One can understand how their
+eyes were opened to know Him who was 'declared to be the Son of God
+with power by the resurrection from the dead.' One can understand
+how, in the enthusiasm of these new thoughts of their Lord, and in
+the strength of His victory over death, they put aside their old
+fears and littlenesses and clothed themselves in armour of light.
+'The Lord is risen indeed' was the belief which made the continuous
+existence of the Church possible. Any other explanation of that
+great outstanding fact is lame and hopelessly insufficient.
+
+We know that that belief was the belief of the early Church. Even if
+one waived all reference to the Gospels, we have the means of
+demonstrating that in Paul's undisputed epistles. Nobody has
+questioned that he wrote the First Epistle to the Corinthians. The
+date most generally assumed to that letter brings it within about
+five-and-twenty years of the crucifixion. In that letter, in
+addition to a multitude of incidental references to the Lord as
+risen, we have the great passage in the fifteenth chapter, where the
+apostle not only declares that the Resurrection was one of the two
+facts which made his 'gospel,' but solemnly enumerates the witnesses
+of the risen Lord, and alleges that this gospel of the Resurrection
+was common to him and to all the Church. He tells us of Christ's
+appearance to himself at his conversion, which must have taken place
+within six or seven years of the crucifixion, and assures us that at
+that early period he found the whole Church believing and preaching
+Christ's resurrection. Their belief rested on their alleged
+intercourse with Him a few days after His death, and it is
+inconceivable that within so short a period such a belief should
+have sprung up and been universally received, if it had not begun
+when and as they said that it did.
+
+But we are not left even to inferences of this kind to show that,
+from the beginning, the Church witnessed to the Resurrection of
+Jesus. Its own existence is the great witness to its faith. And it
+is important to observe that, even if we had not the documentary
+evidence of the Pauline epistles as the earliest records, of the
+Gospels, and of the Acts of the Apostles, we should still have
+sufficient proof that the belief in the Resurrection is as old as
+the Church. For the continuance of the Church cannot be explained
+without it. If that faith had not dawned on their slow, sad hearts
+on that Easter morning, a few weeks would have seen them scattered;
+and if once they had been scattered, as they inevitably would have
+been, no power could have reunited them, any more than a diamond
+once shattered can be pieced together again. There would have been
+no motive and no actors to frame a story of resurrection, when once
+the little company had melted away. The existence of the Church
+depended on their belief that the Lord was risen. In the nature of
+the case that belief must have followed immediately on His death.
+It, and it only, reasonably accounts for the facts. And so, over and
+above Apostles, and Gospels, and Epistles, the Church is the great
+witness, by its very being, to its own immediate and continuous
+belief in the Resurrection of our Lord.
+
+III. Again, we may remark that such a belief could not have
+originated or maintained itself unless it had been true.
+
+Our previous remarks have gone no farther than to establish the
+belief in the Resurrection of Christ, as the basis of primitive
+Christianity. It is vehemently alleged, and we may freely admit that
+the step is a long one from subjective belief to objective reality.
+But still it is surely perfectly fair to argue that a given belief
+is of such a nature that it cannot be supposed to rest on anything
+less solid than a fact; and this is eminently the case in regard to
+the belief in Christ's Resurrection. There have been many attempts
+on the part of those who reject that belief to account for its
+existence, and each of them in succession has 'had its day, and
+ceased to be.' Unbelief devours its own children remorselessly, and
+the succession to the throne of antichristian scepticism is won, as
+in some barbarous tribes, by slaying the reigning sovereign. The
+armies of the aliens turn their weapons against one another, and
+each new assailant of the historical veracity of the Gospels
+commences operations by showing that all previous assailants have
+been wrong, and that none of their explanations will hold water.
+
+For instance, we hear nothing now of the coarse old explanation that
+the story of the Resurrection was a lie, and became current through
+the conscious imposture of the leaders of the Church. And it was
+high time that such a solution should be laid aside. Who, with half
+an eye for character, could study the deeds and the writings of the
+apostles, and not feel that, whatever else they were, they were
+profoundly honest, and as convinced as of their own existence, that
+they had seen Christ 'alive after His passion, by many infallible
+proofs'? If Paul and Peter and John were conspirators in a trick,
+then their lives and their words were the most astounding anomaly.
+Who, either, that had the faintest perception of the forces that
+sway opinion and frame systems, could believe that the fair fabric
+of Christian morality was built on the sand of a lie, and cemented
+by the slime of deceit bubbling up from the very pit of hell? Do men
+gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? That insolent
+hypothesis has had its day.
+
+Then when it was discredited, we were told that the mythical
+tendency would explain everything. It showed us how good men could
+tell lies without knowing it, and how the religious value of an
+alleged fact in an alleged historical revelation did not in the
+least depend on its being a fact. And that great discovery, which
+first converted solid historical Christianity into a gaseous
+condition, and then caught the fumes in some kind of retort, and
+professed to hand us them back again improved by the sublimation,
+has pretty well gone the way of all hypotheses. Myths are not made
+in three days, or in three years, and no more time can be allowed
+for the formation of the myth of the Resurrection. What was the
+Church to feed on while the myth was growing? It would have been
+starved to death long before.
+
+Then, the last new explanation which is gravely put forward, and is
+the prevailing one now, sustains itself by reference to undeniable
+facts in the history of religious movements, and of such abnormal
+attitudes of the mind as modern spiritualism. On the strength of
+which analogy we are invited to see in the faith of the early
+Christians in the Resurrection of the Lord a gigantic instance of
+'hallucination.' No doubt there have been, and still are,
+extraordinary instances of its power, especially in minds excited by
+religious ideas. But we have only to consider the details of the
+facts in hand to feel that they cannot be accounted for on such a
+ground. Do hallucinations lay hold on five hundred people at once?
+Does a hallucination last for a long country walk, and give rise to
+protracted conversation? Does hallucination explain the story of
+Christ eating and drinking before His disciples? The uncertain
+twilight of the garden might have begotten such an airy phantom in
+the brain of a single sobbing woman; but the appearances to be
+explained are so numerous, so varied in character, embrace so many
+details, appeal to so many of the senses--to the ear and hand as
+well as to the eye--were spread over so long a period, and were
+simultaneously shared by so large a number, that no theory of such a
+sort can account for them, unless by impugning the veracity of the
+records. And then we are back again on the old abandoned ground of
+deceit and imposture. It sounds plausible to say, Hallucination is a
+proved cause of many a supposed supernatural event--why not of this?
+But the plausibility of the solution ceases as soon as you try it on
+the actual facts in their variety and completeness. It has to be
+eked out with a length of the fox's skin of deceit before it covers
+them; and we may confidently assert that such a belief as the belief
+of the early Church in the Resurrection of the Lord was never the
+product either of deceit or of illusion, or of any amalgam of the
+two.
+
+What new solutions the fertility of unbelief may yet bring forth,
+and the credulity of unbelief may yet accept, we know not; but we
+may firmly hold by the faith which breathed new hope and strange joy
+into that sad band on the first Easter morning, and rejoice with
+them in the glad, wonderful fact that He is risen from the dead.
+
+IV. For that message is a message to us as truly as to the heavy-hearted
+unbelieving men that first received it. We may think for a moment of the
+joy with which we ought to return from the empty sepulchre of the risen
+Saviour.
+
+How little these women knew that, as they went back from the grave
+in the morning twilight, they were the bearers of 'great joy which
+should be to all people'! To them and to the first hearers of their
+message there would be little clear in the rush of glad surprise,
+beyond the blessed thought, Then He is not gone from us altogether.
+Sweet visions of the resumption of happy companionship would fill
+their minds, and it would not be until calmer moments that the
+stupendous significance of the fact would reveal itself.
+
+Mary's rapturous gesture to clasp Him by the feet, when the
+certainty that it was in very deed He flooded her soul with dazzling
+light, reveals her first emotion, which no doubt was also the first
+with them all, 'Then we shall have Him with us again, and all the
+old joy of companionship will be ours once more.' Nor were they
+wrong in thinking so, however little they as yet understood the
+future manner of their fellowship, or anticipated His leaving them
+again so soon. Nor are we without a share even in that phase of
+their joy; for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ gives us a living
+Lord for our love, an ever present Companion and Brother for our
+hearts to hold, even if our hands cannot clasp Him by the feet. A
+dead Christ might have been the object of faint historical
+admiration, and the fair statue might have stood amidst others in
+the galleries of history; but the risen, living Christ can love and
+be loved, and we too may be glad with the joy of those who have
+found a heart to rest their hearts upon, and a companionship that
+can never fail.
+
+As the early disciples learned to reflect upon the fact of Christ's
+Resurrection, its riches unfolded themselves by degrees, and the
+earliest aspect of its 'power' was the light it shed on His person
+and work. Taught by it, as we have seen, they recognised Him for the
+Messiah whom they had long expected, and for something more--the
+Incarnate Son of God. That phase of their joy belongs to us too. If
+Christ, who made such avowals of His nature as we know that He did,
+and hazarded such assertions of His claims, His personality and His
+office, as fill the Gospels, were really laid in the grave and saw
+corruption, then the assertions are disproved, the claims
+unwarranted, the office a figment of His imagination. He may still
+remain a great teacher, with a tremendous deduction to be made from
+the worth of His teaching, but all that is deepest in His own words
+about Himself and His relation to men must be sorrowfully put on one
+side. But if He, after such assertions and claims, rose from the
+dead, and rising, dieth no more, then for the last time, and in the
+mightiest tones, the voice that rent the heavens at His baptism and
+His transfiguration proclaims: 'This is My beloved Son; hear ye
+Him.' Our joy in His Resurrection is the joy of those to whom He is
+therein declared to be the Son of God, and who see in Christ risen
+their accepted Sacrifice, and their ever-living Redeemer.
+
+Such was the earliest effect of the Resurrection of Jesus, if we
+trust the records of apostolic preaching. Then by degrees the joyful
+thought took shape in the Church's consciousness that their Shepherd
+had gone before them into the dark pen where Death pastured his
+flocks, and had taken it for His own, for the quiet resting-place
+where He would make them lie down by still waters, and whence He
+would lead them out to the lofty mountains where His fold should be.
+The power of Christ's Resurrection as the pattern and pledge of ours
+is the final source of the joy which may fill our hearts as we turn
+away from that empty sepulchre.
+
+The world has guessed and feared, or guessed and hoped, but always
+guessed and doubted the life beyond. Analogies, poetic adumbrations,
+probabilities drawn from consciousness and from conscience, from
+intuition and from anticipation, are but poor foundations on which
+to build a solid faith. But to those to whom the Resurrection of
+Christ is a fact their own future life is a fact. Here we have a
+solid certainty, and here alone. The heart says as we lay our dear
+ones in the grave, 'Surely we part not for ever.' The conscience
+says, as it points us to our own evil deeds, 'After death the
+judgment.' A deep indestructible instinct prophesies in every breast
+of a future. But all is vague and doubtful. The one proof of a life
+beyond the grave is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Therefore let
+us be glad with the gladness of men plucked from a dark abyss of
+doubt and planted on the rock of solid certainty; and let us rejoice
+with joy unspeakable, and laden with a prophetic weight of glory, as
+we ring out the ancient Easter morning's greeting, 'The Lord is
+risen indeed!'
+
+
+
+
+THE FOOD OF THE WORLD
+
+
+    'He gave the loaves to the disciples, and the disciples
+    to the multitude. 20. And they did all eat, and were
+    filled; and they took up of the fragments that remained
+    twelve baskets full.'--MATT. xiv. 19, 20.
+
+The miracles of Scripture are not merely wonders, but signs. It is
+one of their most striking characteristics that they are not, like
+the pretended portents of false faiths, mere mighty deeds standing
+in no sort of intellectual relation to the message of which they
+claim to be the attestation, but that they have themselves a
+doctrinal significance. Our Lord's miracles have been called 'the
+great bell before the sermon,' but they are more than that. They are
+themselves no unimportant part of the sermon. In fact, it would not
+be difficult to construct from them a revelation of His nature,
+person, and work, scarcely less full and explicit than that
+contained in His words, or even than that more systematic and
+developed one which we receive in the writings of His apostles.
+
+This miracle, for instance, of the feeding of the five thousand with
+five barley loaves and two small fishes, is one of the few which the
+Apostle John relates in his Gospel, and his reason for selecting it
+seems to be the commentary with which our Lord followed it, and
+which John alone has preserved. That commentary is all the wonderful
+discourse about Christ as the bread of life, and eating His flesh as
+our means of receiving His life into ourselves. We are warranted,
+then, in regarding this miracle as a symbolic revelation of Christ
+as supplying all the wants of this hungry world. If so, we may
+perhaps venture to take one more step, and regard the manner in
+which He dispenses His gifts as also significant. His agents are His
+disciples, or as would appear probable from the twelve baskets full
+of fragments, the twelve apostles, the nucleus and representatives
+of His Church. Thus we come to the point from which we wish to
+regard this narrative now. There are three stages in the words of
+our text--the distribution, the meal, and the gathering up of the
+abundance that was left. These three stages may guide us to some
+thoughts regarding the work to which Christ calls His Church, the
+success which attends it, and the results to the distributors
+themselves.
+
+I. Christ feeds the famishing world by means of His Church.
+
+'He gave the loaves to the disciples, and the _disciples_ to
+the multitude.' One very striking feature in all our Lord's miracles
+is economy of power. The miraculous element being admitted for some
+good and sufficient reason, it is kept down to the lowest possible
+point. Precisely so much of it as is needed is permitted, and not
+one hairsbreadth more. It does not begin to make its appearance at
+any point in the process where ordinary human agency can be used. It
+does not produce a result beyond the actual necessity. It does not
+last one instant longer than is required. It inosculates closely
+with the natural order of things.
+
+Take an illustration from the beginning of miracles where Jesus
+manifested forth His glory, at the marriage in Cana of Galilee--that
+great miracle in which our Lord hallowed the ties of human
+affection, and consecrated the joy of united hearts. The necessity
+is felt before He supplies it. The servants fill the waterpots. The
+water is used as the material on which the miraculous power
+operates. Only so much as is drawn for present use becomes wine. The
+servants are used as the agents for the distribution, and all is
+done so unostentatiously, though it be the manifesting of His glory,
+that no man knows but they.
+
+Take another illustration from the other great contrasted miracle at
+the grave of Lazarus, where our Lord hallowed the breaking of
+earthly bonds by death, and sanctified the sorrows of parted love.
+He does not work His wonder from the other side Jordan, but comes.
+He does not avert the death which He will conquer, nor prevent the
+grief which He shares. He goes to the side of the grave--true human
+tears are wet upon His cheek. They have to roll away the stone.
+Then, there is flung into the darkness of the tomb the mighty word,
+'Lazarus! come forth.' The inconceivable miraculous act is done, and
+life stirs in the sheeted dead. But there the miraculous ceases. The
+man with his restored life has himself to come out of the grave, and
+human hands have tremblingly to lift the napkin from the veiled face
+(how they must have thrilled as they did it, wondering what nameless
+horror they might see in the eyes that had looked on the inner
+chamber of death), and human help has to unfold the grave-clothes
+from the tightly swathed and stumbling limbs, 'Loose him, and let
+him go.'
+
+This marked characteristic of all our Lord's miracles is full of
+instruction, which it would lead us too far from our present purpose to
+indicate at any length. But we may just observe in passing, that it
+brings these into striking parallel with the divine creative act, where
+there is ever the same precise adaptation of power employed to result
+contemplated, the same background of veiled omnipotence, the same
+emergence of proportioned, adequate, but not superfluous force, so
+that, in fact, economy of power may be said to be the very signature
+and broad arrow of divinity stamped on all His works. Again, it
+presents a broad contrast to the wild, reckless miracle-mongering of
+false faiths, and is at once a test of the genuineness of all 'lying
+signs and wonders,' and an indication of the self-restraint of the
+Worker, and of the fine sanity and truthfulness of the narrators, of
+these Gospel miracles. And yet, again, it is one phase of the
+disciplinary character of the whole revelation of God in Christ--not
+obtrusive, though obvious, capable of being overlooked if men will.
+There was the hiding of His power. 'If any man wills to be ignorant,
+let him be ignorant.'
+
+But coming more immediately to the narrative before us, we find this
+same characteristic in full prominence in it. The people are allowed
+to hunger. The disciples are permitted to feel themselves at their
+wits' end. They are bid to bring their poor resources to Christ. The
+lad who had come with his little store, perhaps a fisherman's boy
+from some of the lake villages who hoped to sell his loaves and
+fishes in the crowd, supplies the material on which Christ wills to
+exercise His miraculous power. The disciples' agency is pressed into
+the service. Each man separately receives his portion, and when all
+are supplied, the fragments are carefully preserved for the use of
+those who had been fed by miracle, and of Him who had fed them!
+
+Besides the general lessons already referred to, as naturally
+arising from this feature of the miracle, there is that one which
+belongs to it especially, namely, that Christ feeds the famishing
+world by means of His Church.
+
+Precisely as in the miracles in general, so in the work of Christ as a
+whole, the field of supernatural intervention is rigidly confined, and
+fits in with the established order of things. The Incarnation and
+Sacrifice of our Lord are the purely supernatural work of the divine
+Power and Mercy. He comes, enters into our human conditions, assumes
+our humanity, dies the death for us all. 'I have trodden the wine-press
+alone.' There is no question of any human agency co-operating there,
+any more than there is in the word 'Lazarus, come forth,' or in the
+multiplication of the loaves. There, by Christ alone, is brought to
+us and is finished for us an eternal redemption, with which the whole
+race of man have nothing to do but to receive it, to eat and be filled.
+But this having been done by the solitary work of Jesus Christ, this
+new power having been introduced into the world, human agency is
+henceforth called into operation to diffuse it, just as the servants
+at Cana had to draw the wine which He had made, just as the disciples
+at the Sea of Tiberias have to give to the multitude the bread which
+was blessed and broken by His hands.
+
+The supernaturally given Bread of Life is to be carried over the
+world in accordance with the ordinary laws by which all other truth
+is diffused and all other gifts that belong to one man are held by
+him in stewardship for all his fellows. True, there is ever in and
+with that word of life a divine Spirit, which is the real cause of
+its progress, which guards it from destruction though all men were
+faithless, and keeps it alive though all Israel bowed the knee to
+Baal. But, however easy it may be for us to confuse ourselves with
+metaphysical puzzles about the relation between the natural and the
+supernatural elements--the human agency and the divine energiser--in
+the successful discharge of the Church's work, practically the
+matter is very plain.
+
+The truth that it behoves us all to lay to heart is just this--that
+Christian people are Christ's instruments for effecting the
+realisation of the purposes of His death. Not without them shall He
+see of the travail of His soul. Not without them shall the preaching
+be fully known. Not without the people willing in the day of His
+power, and clothed in priestly beauty, shall the Priest King set His
+feet upon His enemies. Not without the armies of heaven following
+Him, shall the 'Word of God' ride forth to victory. Neither the
+divine decree, nor the expansive power of the Truth, nor the crowned
+expectancy of the waiting Lord, nor the mighty working of the
+Comforter, are the complete means for the accomplishment of the
+divine promise that all nations shall be blessed in Him. Could all
+these be conceived of as existing without the service and energies
+of God's Church proclaiming the name of Christ, they were not
+enough. He has willed that to us, less than the least of all saints,
+should this grace be given, that we should make known the
+unsearchable riches of Christ. God reveals His truth, that men who
+believe it may impart it. God gives the word, that, caught up by
+those who receive it into an honest and good heart, it may be poured
+forth, in mighty chorus from the lips of the 'great company of them
+that publish it.' 'He gave the loaves to the disciples, and the
+_disciples_ to the multitude.'
+
+Christian men! learn your high vocation, and your solemn
+responsibilities. 'What! came the word of God out from you, or came
+it _unto_ you only?' For what did you receive it? For the same
+reason for which you have received everything else which you
+possess--that you might share it with your brethren. How did you
+receive it? As a gift, unmerited, the result of a miracle of divine
+mercy, that you might feel bound to give as ye have received, and
+spread the free divine gift by cheerful human work of distribution.
+From whom did you receive it? From Christ, who in the very act of
+giving binds you to live for Him and not for yourselves, and to
+mould your lives after the pattern of His. What a multitude of
+motives converge on the solemn duty of work for Christ, if we read
+in the light of this deeper meaning the simple words of our text,
+'He gave the loaves to the disciples!' What manner of servant is he
+who can bear to have no part in the blessed work that follows--'and
+the disciples to the multitude'?
+
+It is further noticeable how these apostles were prepared for the
+work which they had to do. The first lesson which they had to learn
+was the almost ludicrous disproportion between the resources at
+their command and the necessities of the crowd. 'How many loaves
+have ye? go and see.' And this is the first lesson that we have to
+learn in all our work for Christ and for our brethren, that in
+ourselves we have nothing fit for the task before us. Think of what
+that task is as measured by the necessities and sorrows of men.
+Think of all the sighs that go up at every moment from burdened
+hearts, of the tears that run down so many blanched and anxious
+cheeks. Think of '_all_ the misery that is done under the sun!'
+If it could be made visible, what a dark pall would swathe the
+world, an atmosphere of sorrow rolling ever with it through space.
+The sight is too sad to be seen by any but by Him who cures it all,
+and it wrung from His heart the sigh with which ere He cured one
+poor sufferer--a drop in the ocean--He looked up to heaven, as in
+mute appeal against all these heaped miseries of suffering man.
+
+And we, what can we do in ourselves? On what comparison of our
+resources do we not feel utterly inadequate to the work? If we think
+of the proportion in numbers, we have to say, like the narrator of
+the wars in Israel, 'The children of Israel pitched before them like
+two little flocks of kids, but the Syrians filled the country.' If
+we think of the strength that we ourselves possess and look at our
+own tremulous faith, at our own feeble love, at the uncertain hold
+which we ourselves have on the Gospel that we profess, at the mists
+and darkness which cover so much of God's revelation from our own
+understandings, at the sins and faults of our own lives, must we not
+cry out, Send whom Thou wilt send, O Lord, but take not me, so
+sinful, so little influenced by Thy grace, to be the messenger of
+Thy grace? 'Who is sufficient for these things?'
+
+And such contemplations, when they drive home to our hearts the
+wholesome lesson of our own weakness, are the beginning, and the only
+possible beginning, of divine strength. The only temper in which we
+can serve God and bless man is that of lowliest self-abasement. God
+works with bruised reeds, and out of them makes polished shafts,
+pillars in His house. Only when we are low on our faces before God,
+crying out,' Unclean, unclean,' does the purifying coal touch our
+lips and the prophet strength flow into our souls.
+
+Be humble and self-distrustful, and then learn the further lesson of
+this narrative, and carry your poor inadequate resources to Christ.
+'Bring them hither to Me.' In His hands they become sufficient. He
+multiplies them. He gives wisdom, strength, and all that fits for
+the task to which He calls us. Bring your little faith to Him and He
+will increase it. Bring your feeble love to Him, and ask Him to
+kindle it from the pure flame of His own, and He will make your
+heart burn within you. Bring your partial understanding of His will
+and way to Him, and He will be to you wisdom. Bring all the poverty
+of your natures, all the insufficiency of your religious character,
+all the inadequacy of your poor work, to your Lord. Feel it all. Let
+the conviction of your nothingness sink into your soul. Then wait
+before Him in simple faith, in lowly obedience, and power will come
+to you equal to your desire and to your duties, and He will put His
+spirit upon you, and will anoint you to proclaim liberty to the
+captives and to give bread to all the hungry. 'Who is sufficient for
+these things?' must ever precede, and will ever be followed by, 'our
+sufficiency is of God.'
+
+Mark again that the disciples seem themselves to have partaken of
+the bread before they parted it among the multitudes. That is our
+true preparation for the work of feeding the hungry. The Church
+which feeds the world is able to do so, only because, and in
+proportion as, it has found in Christ its own sustenance and life.
+It is only they who can say 'we have tasted and felt and handled of
+the word of life' who can declare it to others. Personal participation
+in the bread of life makes any man able to offer it to some fainting
+spirit. Nothing else makes him able. Ability involves responsibility.
+'Power to its last particle is duty.' You, dear friends, who have
+'tasted that the Lord is gracious,' have thereby come under weighty
+obligations. Your own personal experience of that precious bread has
+fitted you to do something in offering it to others. The manner in
+which you do so must be determined by your character and circumstances.
+Every one has his proper walk; but something you can do. To some lips
+you can commend the food for all the world. Somewhere your word is
+a power. See that you do what you can do. Remember that Christ feeds
+the world by His Church, and that every man who has himself eaten of
+the bread of life is thereby consecrated to carry it to those who yet
+are perishing in the far-off hunger-ridden land, and trying to fill
+their bellies with the husks that the swine eat.
+
+II. The Bread is enough for all the world.
+
+'They did all eat and were filled.' One can fancy how doubtingly and
+grudgingly the apostles doled out the supplies at first, and how the
+portion of each was increased, as group after group was provided,
+and no diminution appeared in Christ's full hands, until, at last,
+all the five thousand, of all ages, of both sexes, of every sort,
+were fed, and the fragments lying uncared for proved how sufficient
+had been the share of each.
+
+May we not see in that scene a picture of the full supply for all
+the wants of the whole world which there is in that Bread of Life
+which came down from heaven? The Gospel proclaims a full feast,
+which is enough for all mankind, which is intended for all mankind,
+which shall one day satisfy all mankind.
+
+This universal adaptation of the message of the Gospel to the whole
+world arises from the obvious fact that it addresses itself to
+universal wants, to the great rudimentary, universally diffused
+characteristics of human nature, and that it provides for all these,
+in the grand simplicity of its good tidings, the one sufficing word.
+It entangles itself with no local or historical peculiarities of the
+time and place of its earthly origin, which can hinder it in its
+universal diffusion. It commits itself to no transient human
+opinions. It addresses itself to no sectional characteristics of
+classes of men. It brushes aside all the surface distinctions which
+separate us from one another, and goes right down to the depths of
+the central identities in which we are all alike. However we may
+differ from one another, in training, in habits, in cast of thought,
+in idiosyncrasies of character, in circumstances, in age--all these
+are but the upper strata which vary locally. Beneath all these there
+lie everywhere the solid foundations of the primeval rocks, and
+beneath these, again, the glowing central mass, the flaming heart of
+the world. Christianity sends its shaft right down through all these
+upper and local beds, till it reaches the deepest depths which are
+the same in every man--the obstinate wilfulness of a nature averse
+from God, and the yet deeper-lying longings of a soul that flames
+with the consciousness of God, and yearns for rest and peace. To the
+sense of sin, to the sense of sorrow, to the conscience never wholly
+stifled, to the desires after good never utterly eradicated and
+never slaked by aught besides itself, does this mighty word come.
+Not to this or that sort of man, not to men in this or that phase of
+progress, age of the world, or stage of civilisation, does it
+address itself, but to the common humanity which belongs to all, to
+the wants and sorrows and inward consciousness which belong to man
+as man, be he philosopher or fool, king or slave, Eastern or
+Western, 'pagan suckled in a creed outworn,' or Englishman with the
+new lights and material science of this twentieth century.
+
+Hence its universal adaptation to mankind. It alone of all so-called
+faiths overleaps all geographical limits and lives in all centuries.
+It alone wins its trophies and bestows its gifts on all sorts and
+conditions of men. Other plants which the 'Heavenly Father hath not
+planted' have their zones of vegetation and die outside certain
+degrees of latitude, but the seed of the kingdom is like corn, an
+exotic nowhere, for wherever man lives it will grow, and yet an
+exotic everywhere, for it came down from heaven. Other food requires
+an educated palate for its appreciation, but any hungry man in any
+land will relish bread. For every soul on earth this living dying
+love of the Lord Jesus Christ addresses itself to, and satisfies,
+his deepest wants. It is the bread which gives life to the world.
+
+And one of the constituents of that company by the Galilean lake was
+children. It is one great glory of Christianity that its merciful
+mysteries can find their way to the hearts of the little children.
+Its mysteries, we say--for the Gospel has its mysteries no less than
+these old systems of heathenism which fenced round their deepest
+truths with solemn barriers, only to be passed by the initiated. But
+the difference lies here--that its mysteries are taught at first to
+the neophytes, and that the sum of them lies in the words which we
+learned at our mother's knees so long ago that we have forgotten
+that they were ever new to us: 'God so loved the world that He gave
+His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not
+perish, but should have eternal life.' The little child who has
+learned his earliest lessons of what father and son, loving and
+giving, trust and life mean, by the sweet experiences of his own
+father's home and his own mother's love, can grasp these blessed
+words. They carry the deepest mysteries which will still gleam
+before us unfathomed in all their profundity, unappropriated in all
+their blessedness, when millenniums have passed since we stood in
+the inner shrine of heaven. Wonderful is the word which blesses the
+child, which transcends the angel before the throne!
+
+This is the bread for the world--meant for it, and one day to be
+partaken of by it. For these ordered fifties at their Christ-provided
+meal are for us a prophecy of the day that shall surely dawn, when
+all the hunger of wandering prodigals is over, and the deceived
+heart of the idol-worshipper no longer drawing him aside to feed on
+ashes, they shall come from the East and from the West, and from
+the North and from the South, and sit at the feast which the Lord
+hath prepared for all nations, and when all the earth shall be satisfied
+with the goodness of His house, even of His holy temple.
+
+III. The Bread which is given to the famishing is multiplied for the
+future of the Distributors.
+
+'They took of the fragments that remained twelve baskets full.' More
+was gathered than they had possessed at first. They preserved over,
+for their own sustenance and refreshment in days to come, a far
+larger store than the five loaves and two small fishes with which
+they had begun. The fact contains a principle which is true about
+almost all except material possessions, which is often in God's
+providence made true about them, and which is emphatically true
+about spiritual blessings, about our religious emotions, our
+Christian beliefs, the joys and powers which Christ comes to give.
+
+For all these, the condition of increase is diffusion. To impart to
+others is to gain for oneself. Every honest effort to bring some
+other human heart into conscious possession of Christ's love deepens
+one's own sense of its preciousness. Every attempt to lead some
+other understanding to the perception of the truth, as it is in
+Jesus, helps me to understand it better myself. If you would learn,
+teach. That will clear your mind, will open hidden harmonies, will
+reveal unsuspected deficiencies and contradictions in your own
+conceptions, will help you to feel more the truths that come from
+your lips. It will perhaps shame your cold appreciation of them,
+when you see how others grasp at them from your teaching, or give
+you more confidence in the Gospel as the power of God unto
+salvation, when you behold it, even as ministered through you,
+mighty to pull down strongholds. At the lowest, it will keep your
+own mind in healthy contact with what you art but too apt to forget.
+If you would learn to love Christ more, try to lead some one else to
+love Him, You will catch new gleams from His gracious heart in the
+very act of commending Him to others. If you would have your own
+spiritual life strengthened and deepened, remember that not by
+solitary meditation or raptures of silent communion alone can that
+be accomplished, but by these and by honest manful work for God in
+the world. The Mount of Transfiguration must be left, although there
+were there Moses and Elias, and the cloud of the divine glory and
+the words of approval from heaven, because there were a demoniac boy
+and his weeping, despairing father needing Christ down below. Work
+for God if you would live with God. Give the bread to the hungry, if
+you would have it for the food of your own souls.
+
+The refusal to engage in such service is one fruitful cause of the
+low state of spiritual health in which so many Christians pass their
+days. They seem to think that they receive the bread from heaven
+only for their own use, and that they have done all that they have
+to do with it, when they eat it themselves. And so come all manner
+of spiritual diseases. A selfish, that is an inactive, religion is
+always more or less a morbid religion. For health you need exercise.
+'In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread'; that law expresses
+not only the fact that work is needed to get it, but that toil must
+give the appetite and fit the frame to digest it. There is such a
+thing as a morbid Christianity brought on by want of healthy
+exercise.
+
+'There is that scattereth and yet increaseth, and there is that
+withholdeth more than is meet, and it tendeth to poverty.' Good
+husbandry does not grind up all the year's wheat for loaves for
+one's own eating, but keeps some of it for seed to be scattered in
+the furrows. And if Christian men will deal with the great love of
+God, the great work of Christ, the great message of the Gospel, as
+if it were bestowed on them for their own sakes only, they will have
+only themselves to blame if holy desires die out in their hearts,
+and the consciousness of Christ's love becomes faint, and all the
+blessed words of truth come to sound far off and mythical in their
+ears. The standing water gets green scum on it. The close-shut barn
+breeds weevils and smut. Let the water run. Fling the seed
+broadcast. 'Thou shalt find it after many days,' bread for thy own
+soul--even as these ministering apostles were enriched whilst they
+gave, and the full-handed liberality 'with which they carried
+Christ's gifts among the crowd' had something to do in providing the
+large residue which filled their stores for days to come.
+
+Thus, then, this scene on the sweet springing grass down by the side
+of blue Gennesaret is an emblem of the whole work of the Church in
+this starving world. The multitudes famish. Tell Christ of their
+wants. Count your own small resources till you have completely
+learned your poverty, then take them to Jesus. He will accept them,
+and in His hands they will become mighty, being transfigured from
+human thoughts and forces into divine words, into spiritual powers.
+On that bread which He gives, do you yourselves live. Then carry it
+boldly to all the hungry. Rank after rank will eat. All races, all
+ages, from grey hairs to babbling childhood, will find there the
+food of their souls. As you part the blessing, it will grow beneath
+His eye; and the longer you give, the fuller-handed you will become.
+Nor shall the bread fail, nor the word become weak, till all the
+world has tasted of its  sweetness and been refreshed by its potent
+life.
+
+This miracle is the lesson for the workers. There is another
+wondrous meal recorded in Scripture, which is the prophecy for the
+workers when they rest. The little ship has been tossing all the
+night on the waters of that Galilean lake. Fruitless has been the
+fishing. The morning breaks cold and grey, and lo! there stands on
+the shore One who first blesses the toilers' work, and then bids
+them to His table. There, mysteriously kindled, burns the fire with
+the welcome meal already laid upon it. They add to it the
+contribution of their night of toil, and then, hushed and blessed in
+His still company, they sup with Him and He with them. So when the
+weary work is over for the Church on earth, we shall be aware of His
+merciful presence on the shore, and, coming at the last safe to
+land, we shall 'rest from our labours,' in that we see the 'fire of
+coals, and fish laid thereon and bread'; and our 'works shall follow
+us,' in that we are 'bidden to bring of the fish that we have
+caught.' Then, putting off the wet fisher's coat, and leaving behind
+the tossing of the unquiet sea and the toil of the weary fishing, we
+shall sit down with Him at that meal spread by His hands, who
+blesseth the works of His servants here below, and giveth to them a
+full fruition of immortal food at His table at the last.
+
+
+
+
+THE KING'S HIGHWAY
+
+
+    'And straightway Jesus constrained His disciples to get
+    into a ship, and to go before Him unto the other side,
+    while He sent the multitudes away. 23. And when He had
+    sent the multitudes away, He went up into a mountain
+    apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was
+    there alone. 24. But the ship was now in the midst of
+    the sea, tossed with waves: for the wind was contrary.
+    25. And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went
+    unto them, walking on the sea. 26. And when the
+    disciples saw Him walking on the sea, they were
+    troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried out
+    for fear. 27. But straightway Jesus spake unto them,
+    saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid.
+    28. And Peter answered Him and said, Lord, if it be
+    Thou, bid me come unto Thee on the water. 29. And He
+    said, Come. And when Peter was come down out of the
+    ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus. 30. But
+    when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and
+    beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me.
+    31. And immediately Jesus stretched forth His hand, and
+    caught him, and said unto him, O thou of little faith,
+    wherefore didst thou doubt. 32. And when they were come
+    into the ship, the wind ceased. 33. Then they that were
+    in the ship came and worshipped Him, saying, Of a truth
+    Thou art the Son of God. 34. And when they were gone
+    over, they came into the land of Gennesaret. 35. And
+    when the men of that place had knowledge of Him, they
+    sent out into all that country round about, and brought
+    unto Him all that were diseased; 36. And besought Him
+    that they might only touch the hem of His garment: and
+    as many as touched were made perfectly whole.'
+    --MATT. xiv. 22-36.
+
+The haste and urgency with which the disciples were sent away,
+against their will, after the miracle of feeding the five thousand,
+is explained in John's account. The crowd had been excited to a
+dangerous enthusiasm by a miracle so level to their tastes. A
+prophet who could feed them was something like a prophet. So they
+determine to make him a king. Our Lord, fearing the outburst,
+resolves to withdraw into the lonely hills, that the fickle blaze
+may die down. If the disciples had remained with Him, He could not
+have so easily stolen away, and they might have caught the popular
+fervour. To divide would distract the crowd, and make it easier for
+Him to disperse them, while many of them, as really happened, would
+be likely to set off by land for Capernaum, when they saw the boat
+had gone. The main teaching of this miracle, over and above its
+demonstration of the Messianic power of our Lord, is symbolical. All
+the miracles are parables, and this eminently so. Thus regarding it,
+we have--
+
+I. The struggling toilers and the absent Christ.
+
+They had a short row of some five or six miles in prospect, when
+they started in the early evening. An hour or so might have done it,
+but, for some unknown reason, they lingered. Perhaps instead of
+pulling across, they may have kept inshore, by the head of the lake,
+expecting Jesus to join them at some point. Thus, night finds them
+but a short way on their voyage. The paschal moon would be shining
+down on them, and perhaps in their eager talk about the miracle they
+had just seen, they did not make much speed. A sudden breeze sprang
+up, as is common at nightfall on mountain lakes; and soon a gale,
+against which they could make no headway, was blowing in their
+teeth. This lasted for eight or nine hours. Wet and weary, they
+tugged at the oars through the livelong night, the seas breaking
+over them, and the wind howling down the glens.
+
+They had been caught in a similar storm once before, but then He had
+been on board, and it was daylight. Now it was dark, 'and Jesus had
+not yet come to them,' How they would look back at the dim outline
+of the hills, where they knew He was, and wonder why He had sent them
+out into the tempest alone! Mark tells us that He saw them distressed,
+hours before He came to them, and that makes His desertion the stranger.
+It is but His method of lovingly training them to do without His
+personal presence, and a symbol of what is to be the life of His people
+till the end. He is on the mountain in prayer, and He sees the labouring
+boat and the distressed rowers. The contrast is the same as is given in
+the last verses of Mark's Gospel, where the serene composure of the
+Lord, sitting at the right hand of God, is sharply set over against
+the wandering, toiling lives of His servants, in their evangelistic
+mission. The commander-in-chief sits apart on the hill, directing the
+fight, and sending regiment after regiment to their deaths. Does that
+mean indifference? So it might seem but for the words which follow,
+'the Lord working with them.' He shares in all the toil; and the lifting
+up of His holy hands sways the current of the fight, and inclines the
+balance. His love appoints effort and persistent struggle as the law
+of our lives. Nor are we to mourn or wonder; for the purpose of the
+appointment, so far as we are concerned, is to make character, and to
+give us 'the wrestling thews that throw the world.' Difficulties make
+men of us. Summer sailors, yachting in smooth water, have neither the
+joy of conflict nor the vigour which it gives. Better the darkness,
+when we cannot see our way, and the wind in our faces, if the good of
+things is to be estimated by their power to 'strengthen us with
+strength in our soul!'
+
+II. We have the approaching Christ.
+
+Not till the last watch of the night does He come, when they have
+long struggled, and the boat is out in the very middle of the lake,
+and the storm is fiercest. We may learn from this the delays of His
+love. Because He loved Mary and Martha and Lazarus, He stayed still,
+in strange inaction, for two days, after their message. Because He
+loved Peter and the praying band, He let him lie in prison till the
+last hour of the last watch of the last night before his intended
+execution, and then delivered him with a leisureliness (making him
+put on article after article of dress) which tells of conscious
+omnipotence. Heaven's clock goes at a different rate from our little
+timepieces. God's day is a thousand years, and the longest tarrying
+is but 'a little while.' When He has come, we find that it is 'right
+early,' though before He came He seemed to us to delay. He comes
+across the waves. Their restless and yielding crests are smoothed
+and made solid by the touch of His foot. 'He walketh on the sea as
+on a pavement' (Septuagint version of Job ix. 8). It is a revelation
+of divine power. It is one of the very few miracles affecting
+Christ's own person, and may perhaps be regarded as being, like the
+Transfiguration, a casual gleam of latent glory breaking through the
+body of His humiliation, and so, in some sense, prophetic. But it is
+also symbolic. He ever uses tumults and unrest as a means of
+advancing His purposes. The stormy sea is the recognised Old
+Testament emblem of antagonism to the divine rule; and just as He
+walked on the billows, so does He reach His end by the very
+opposition to it, 'girding Himself' with the wrath of men, and
+making it to praise Him. In this sense, too, His 'paths are in the
+great waters.' In another aspect, we have here the symbol of
+Christ's using our difficulties and trials as the means of His
+loving approach to us. He comes, giving a deeper and more blessed
+sense of His presence by means of our sorrows, than in calm sunny
+weather. It is generally over a stormy sea that He comes to us, and
+golden treasures are thrown on our shores after a tempest.
+
+III. We have the terror and the recognition.
+
+The disciples were as yet little lifted above their fellows; they
+had no expectation of His coming, and thought just what any rude
+minds would have thought, that this mysterious Thing stalking
+towards them across the waters came from the unseen world, and
+probably that it was the herald of their drowning. Terror froze
+their blood, and brought out a shriek (as the word might be
+rendered) which was heard above the dash of waves and the raving
+wind. They had gallantly fought the tempest, but this unmanned them.
+We too often mistake Christ, when He comes to us. We do not
+recognise His working in the storm, nor His presence giving power to
+battle with it. We are so absorbed in the circumstances that we fail
+to see Him through them. Our tears weave a veil which hides Him, or
+the darkness obscures His face, and we see nothing but the
+threatening crests of the waves, curling high above our little boat.
+We mistake our best friend, and we are afraid of Him as we dimly see
+Him; and sometimes we think that the tokens of His presence are only
+phantasms of our own imagination.
+
+They who were deceived by His appearance knew Him by His voice, as
+Mary did at the sepulchre. How blessed must have been the moment
+when that astounding certitude thrilled through their souls! That
+low voice is audible through all the tumult. He speaks to us by His
+word, and by the silent speech in our spirits, which makes us
+conscious that He is there. He does speak to us in the deepest of
+our sorrows, in the darkest of our nights; and when we hear of His
+voice, and with wonder and joy cry out, 'It is the Lord,' our sorrow
+is soothed, and the darkness is light about us.
+
+The consciousness of His presence banishes all fear. 'Be not afraid,'
+follows 'It is I.' It is of no use to preach courage unless we preach
+Christ first. If we have not Him with us, we do well to fear: His
+presence is the only rational foundation for calm fearlessness. Only
+when the Lord of Hosts is with us, ought we not to fear, 'though the
+waters roar ... and be troubled.' 'Through the dear might of Him that
+walked the waves' can we feeble creatures face all terrors, and feel
+no terror.
+
+
+IV. We have the end of the storm and of the voyage.
+
+The storm ceases as soon as Jesus is on board. John does not mention
+the cessation of the tempest, but tells us that they were
+immediately at the shore. It does not seem necessary to suppose
+another miracle, but only that the voyage ended very speedily. It is
+not always true that His presence is the end of dangers and
+difficulties, but the consciousness of His presence does hush the
+storm. The worst of trouble is gone when we know that He shares it;
+and though the long swell after the gale may last, it no longer
+threatens. Nor is it always true that His coming, and our
+consciousness that He has come, bring a speedy close to toils. We
+have to labour on, but in how different a mood these men would bend
+to their oars after they had Him on board! With Him beside us toil
+is sweet, burdens are lighter, and the road is shortened. Even with
+Him on board, life is a stormy voyage; but without Him, it ends in
+shipwreck. With Him, it may be long, but it will look all the
+shorter while it lasts, and when we land the rough weather will be
+remembered but as a transient squall. These wearied rowers, who had
+toiled all night, stepped on shore as the morning broke on the
+eastern bank. So we, if we have had Him for our shipmate, shall land
+on the eternal shore, and dry our wet garments in the sunshine, and
+all the stormy years that seemed so long shall be remembered but as
+a watch in the night.
+
+
+
+
+PETER ON THE WAVES
+
+
+    'And Peter answered Him and said, Lord, if it be Thou,
+    bid me come unto Thee on the water.'--MATT. xiv. 28.
+
+We owe this account of an episode in the miracle of Christ's walking
+on the waters to Matthew alone. Singularly enough there is no
+reference to Peter's venturesomeness and failure in the Gospel which
+is generally believed to have been written under his special
+inspection and suggestion. Mark passes by that part of the narrative
+without a word. That may be because Peter was somewhat ashamed of
+it, or it may be from a natural disinclination to make himself
+prominent in the story at all. But, whatever the reason, we may be
+thankful that in this first Gospel we have the story, for it is not
+only interesting as illustrating the characteristics of the apostle
+in a very picturesque fashion, but also as carrying in it very
+plainly large lessons that are of use for us all.
+
+I. Note, first, Peter's venturesomeness, half faith, and half
+presumption.
+
+There is a singular mixture of good and bad in it. Looked at one
+way, it seems all right; like a bit of shot silk, in one light it is
+bright, and in another it is black enough. What was good in it?
+Well, there was the man's out-and-out confidence in his Master; and
+there was, further, the unconsidered, instinctive shoot of love in
+his heart to the mysterious figure standing there upon the water, so
+that his desire was to be beside Him. It was far more 'Bid me come
+_to Thee_!' than 'Bid me come to Thee _on the water_.' The
+incident was a kind of rehearsal, with a noticeable difference, and
+yet with nearly parallel circumstances, of the other incident when,
+after the Resurrection, he discovered the Lord standing on the
+shore, and floundered through the water anyhow; whether on it or in
+it did not matter to him, so long as he could get near his Master.
+But though the apostle's action was blended with a great deal that
+was childish and sensuous, and was perhaps quite as much the result
+of mere temperament as of conscious affection, still there was good
+in that eager longing to be beside his Lord, which it would be well
+for us if we in some measure shared, and in that indifference to the
+perils of the strange path so long as it led to Christ's side,
+which, if it were ours, would ennoble our lives, and in that perfect
+confidence that Christ could enable him to tread the unquiet sea,
+which would make us lords of all storms, if it wrought in us.
+
+What was bad in it? First, the characteristic pushing of himself to
+the front, and wish to be singled out from his brethren by some
+special token. 'Bid _me_ come.' Why should he be bidden any more
+than John, who sits quietly and gazes, or the others, who are tugging
+at the oars? Then the impetuous rashness and signal over-estimate of
+his own capacity and courage were bad. Perhaps, too, there was a
+little dash of a boyish kind of wish to do a strange thing, and now
+that he sees his Master there, walking on the waters, he thinks he
+would like to try it too. So the request is a rash, self-confident
+pushing of himself before his brethren into circumstances of wholly
+unnecessary peril and trial, of which he had not estimated the
+severity till he felt the water beginning to yield under his feet
+and the wind smiting him on the face. So that the incident is a
+rehearsal and anticipation of the precisely similar thing that he did
+when, on the morning of Christ's trial, he shouldered himself
+unnecessarily into the high priest's palace, and got himself close
+up against the fire there, without a moment's reflection on the
+possible danger he was running of having his loyalty melted by a
+fiercer flame, and little dreaming that he was going to fall, and all
+his courage to ooze out at his finger-ends, before the sharp tongue
+of a maid-servant. In like manner as he says here, 'Bid me come to
+Thee,' without the smallest doubt that when he was bade to come he
+would be able to do it, so he said that night: 'Though all should
+forsake Thee, yet will not I,'--and yet he denied Him.
+
+Let us take the warning from this venturesomeness of a generous,
+impulsive, enthusiastic religious nature, and remember that the most
+genuine faith and religious emotion need to be sobered and steadied
+by reflection, and by searching into our own motives, before we
+venture upon the water, howsoever much we may wish to go there. Make
+very sure that your zeal for the Lord has an element of sober
+permanence in it, and that it is the result, not of a mere
+transitory feeling, but of a steady, settled purpose. And do not
+push yourself voluntarily into places of peril or of difficulty,
+where the fighting is hard and the fire heavy, unless you have
+reasonable grounds for believing that you can stand the strain.
+Bring quiet, sober reason into the loftiest and loveliest enthusiasm
+of your faith, and then there will be something in it that will live
+through storm, and walk the water with unwetted and unsinking foot.
+An impure alloy of selfish itching for pre-eminence and distinction
+does not seldom mingle with the fine gold of religious enthusiasm
+and desire to serve and be near our Lord. Therefore we have to test
+our motives and seek to refine our purest emotions, and the more
+scrupulously the purer they seem, lest we be yielding to the
+impulses of self while we fancy that we are being drawn by the
+magnetism of Christ.
+
+II. We have here the momentary triumph and swift collapse of an
+impure faith.
+
+One can fancy with what hushed expectation the other apostles looked at
+Peter as he let himself down over the side of the ship, and his feet
+touched the surges and did not sink. Christ's grave, single-worded
+answer 'Come' barely sanctions the apostle's request. It is at most a
+permission, but scarcely a command, and it is permission to try, in
+order that Peter may learn his own weakness. He did walk on the water
+to go to Jesus. What kept him up? Not Christ's hand, nor any power
+bestowed on the apostle, but simply the exercise of Christ's will. But
+if he was held up by the operation of that will, why did he begin to
+sink? The vivid narrative tells us: 'When he saw the wind boisterous,
+he was afraid.' That was why. It had been blowing every bit as hard
+before he stepped out of the ship. The waves were not running any
+higher after than when he said, 'Bid me come to Thee.' But he was
+down amongst them, and that makes a wonderful difference. For a
+moment he stood, and then the peril into which he had so heedlessly
+thrust himself began to tell on him. Presumption subsided swiftly
+into fright, as it usually does, and fear began to fulfil itself,
+as it usually does. 'He became afraid,' and that made him heavy and
+he began to sink. Not because the gale was any more violent, not
+because the uneven pavement was any more yielding, but because he was
+frightened, and his faith began to falter at the close sight of the
+danger.
+
+And why did the ebbing away of faith mean the withdrawal of Christ's
+will to keep him up? Why? Because it could not but be so. There is
+only one door through which Christ's upholding power gets into a
+man, and that is the door of the man's trust in the power; and if he
+shuts the door, the power stops outside. So Peter went down. The
+text does not tell us how far down he went. Depend upon it, it was
+further than over the shoes! But he went down because he began to
+lose his trust that Christ could hold him up; and when he lost his
+trust, Christ lost His power over him.
+
+All this is a parable, carrying very plain and important lessons. We
+are upborne by Christ's power, and that power, working on and in our
+weakness, invests us with prerogatives in some measure like His own.
+If He can stand quiet on the heaving wave, so can His servant. 'The
+works that I do shall ye do also'--and 'the depths of the sea
+"become" a way for the ransomed to pass over.' That power is
+exercised on condition of our faith. As soon as faith ceases the
+influx of His grace is stayed. Peter, though probably he was not
+thinking of this incident, has put the whole philosophy of it into
+plain words in his own letter, when he says, 'You who are kept
+_by_ the power of God _through_ faith unto salvation.' He was held up
+as long as he believed. His belief was a hand, and that which it
+grasped was what held him up, and that was Christ's will and power.
+So we shall be held up everywhere, and in any storm, as long as, and
+no longer than, we set our confidence upon Him.
+
+Our faith is sure to fail when we turn away our eyes from Christ to
+look at the tempest and the dangers. If we keep our gaze fixed upon
+Him, the consciousness and the confidence of His all-sustaining
+power will hold us up. If once we turn aside to look at the waves as
+they heave, and prick our ears to listen to the wind as it whistles,
+then we shall begin to doubt whether He is able to keep us up.
+'Looking off' from all these dangers 'unto Jesus' is needful if we
+are to run the race set before us.
+
+A man walking along a narrow ledge of some Alpine height has only
+one chance of safety, and that is, not to look at his feet or at the
+icy rocks beside him, or at the gulf beneath, into which he will be
+dashed if he gazes down. He must look up and onwards, and then he
+will walk along a knife-edge, and he shall not fall. So, Peter,
+never mind the water, never mind the wind; look at Jesus and you
+will get to Him dry shod. If you turn away your eyes from Him, and
+take counsel of the difficulties and trials and antagonisms, down
+you will be sure to go. 'They sank to the bottom like a stone, the
+depths covered them.' Christ holds us up. He cannot hold us up
+unless we trust Him. Faith and fear contend for supremacy in our
+hearts. If we rightly trust, we shall not be afraid. If we are
+afraid, terror will slay trust. To look away from Christ, and occupy
+our thoughts with dangers and obstacles, is sure to lead to the
+collapse of faith and the strengthening of terror. To look past and
+above the billows to Him that stands on them is sure to cast out
+fear and to hearten faith. Peter ignored the danger at the wrong
+time, before he dropped over the side of the boat, and he was aware
+of it at the wrong time, while he was actually being held up and
+delivered from it. Rashness ignores peril in the wrong way, and
+thereby ensures its falling on the presumptuous head. Faith ignores
+it in the right way, by letting the eye travel past it, to Christ
+who shields from it, and thereby faith brings about the security it
+expects, and annihilates the peril from which it looks away to
+Jesus.
+
+III. We have here the cry of desperate faith and its immediate
+answer.
+
+The very thing which had broken Peter's faith mended it again. Fear
+sunk him by making him falter in his confidence; and, as he was
+sinking, the very desperation of his terror drove him back to his
+faith, and he 'cried' with a shrill, loud voice, heard above the
+roar of the boisterous wind, 'Lord, save me.' So difficulties and
+dangers, when they begin to tell upon us, often send us back to the
+trust which the anticipation of them had broken; and out of the very
+extremity of fear we sometimes can draw its own antidote. Just as
+with flint and steel you may strike a spark, so danger, striking
+against our heart, brings out the flash that kindles the tinder.
+
+This brief cry for help singularly blends faith and fear. There is
+faith in it, else Peter would not have appealed to Christ to save
+him. There is mortal terror in it, else he would not have felt that
+he needed to cry. But faith is uppermost now, and the very terror
+feeds it. So, by swift transition, our fears may pass into their own
+opposite and become courageous trust. Just as in a coal fire the
+thick black smoke sometimes gets alight and passes into ruddy flame,
+so our fears may catch fire and flash up as confidence and prayer.
+
+Note the merciful swiftness of Christ's answer. 'Immediately He
+caught him,' because another moment would have been too late. There
+will be time to teach him the lessons of his presumption, but when
+the water is all but up to the lips that shrieked for help, there is
+but one thing to do. He must be saved first and talked to afterwards.
+Our cries for deliverance in temporal matters are not always answered
+so quickly, for it is often better for us to be left to struggle with
+the waves and winds. But our appeals for Christ's helping hand in
+soul-peril are always answered without delay. No appreciable time is
+consumed in the passage of the telegram or in flashing back the
+answer. The apostle was not caught by Christ's hand before he knew
+his danger, for it was good for him that he should go down some way,
+but he was caught as soon as he called on the Master, and before he
+had come to any harm. The trial lasted long enough to wash the
+stiffening of self-confidence out of him, and then it had done its
+work--and Christ's strong hand held him up.
+
+The manner of the answer is noteworthy. It is determined by, and
+adapted to, his weak faith. He could not be upheld now as he had
+been a moment ago, before his fear had weighted him, by the exercise
+of Christ's will only. Then Christ could hold him up without
+touching him, but now the palpable grasp of the hand was needed to
+assure the tremulous, doubting heart. So we, too, sometimes need and
+get material and outward signs which make it easier to feel the
+reality of sustaining grace. But whether we do or no, Christ's swift
+help always takes the form best suited to our faith, and He has
+regard to the capacity of our clasping hands in the measure and
+manner of His gifts.
+
+The time and tone of Christ's gentle remonstrance are remarkable.
+Deliverance comes first, and rebuke afterwards. Having first shown
+him, by the fact of safety, that his doubts were irrational, Christ
+then, and not till then, puts His gentle question. Perhaps there was
+a smile on His face, as surely there was love in His voice, that
+softened the rebuke and went to Peter's heart.
+
+What does Christ rebuke him for? Getting out of the boat? No. He
+does not blame him for venturing too much, but for trusting too
+little. He does not blame him for attempting something beyond his
+strength, but for not holding fast the beginning of his confidence
+firm unto the end. And so the lesson for us is, that we cannot
+expect too much if we expect it perseveringly. We cannot set our
+conceptions of Christ's possible help to us too high if only we keep
+at the height to which we once have set them, and are assured that
+He will hold us up when we are down amongst the weltering waves, as
+we fancied ourselves to be when we were sitting in the boat wishing
+to be with Him. That is the question that He will meet us with when
+we get up on the shore yonder; and we shall not have any more to say
+for ourselves, in vindication of our tremulous trust, than Peter,
+silenced for once, had to say on this occasion.
+
+It will be good for us all if, like this apostle, our trials
+consolidate our characters, and out of the shifting, fluctuating,
+impetuous nature that was blown about like sand by every gust of
+emotion there be made, by the pressure of responsibility and trial,
+and experience of our own unreliableness, the 'Rock' of a stable
+character, steadfast and unmovable, with calm resolution and fixed
+faith, on which the Great Architect can build some portion of His
+great temple.
+
+
+
+
+CRUMBS AND THE BREAD
+
+
+    'Then Jesus went thence, and departed into the coasts
+    of Tyre and Sidon. 22. And, behold, a woman of Canaan
+    came out of the same coasts, and cried unto Him,
+    saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David; my
+    daughter is grievously vexed with a devil. 23. But He
+    answered her not a word. And His disciples came and
+    besought Him, saying, Send her away; for she crieth
+    after us. 24. But He answered and said, I am not sent
+    but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
+    25. Then came she and worshipped Him, saying, Lord,
+    help me. 26. But He answered and said, It is not meet
+    to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs.
+    27. And she said, Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the
+    crumbs which fall from their masters' table. 28. Then
+    Jesus answered and said unto her, O woman, great is thy
+    faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt. And her
+    daughter was made whole from that very hour. 29. And
+    Jesus departed from thence, and came nigh unto the sea
+    of Galilee; and went up into a mountain, and sat down
+    there. 30. And great multitudes came unto Him, having
+    with them those that were lame, blind, dumb, maimed,
+    and many others, and cast them down at Jesus' feet;
+    and He healed them: 31. Insomuch that the multitude
+    wondered, when they saw the dumb to speak, the maimed
+    to be whole, the lame to walk, and the blind to see:
+    and they glorified the God of Israel.'--MATT. xv. 21-31.
+
+The King of Israel has passed beyond the bounds of Israel, driven by
+the hostility of those who should have been His subjects. The
+delegates of the priestly party from Jerusalem, who had come down to
+see into this dangerous enthusiasm which was beginning in Galilee,
+have made Christ's withdrawal expedient, and He goes northward, if
+not actually into the territory of Tyre and Sidon, at any rate to
+the border land. The incident of the Syro-Phoenician woman becomes
+more striking if we suppose that it took place on Gentile ground. At
+all events, after it, we learn from Mark that He made a considerable
+circuit, first north and then east, and so came round to the eastern
+side of the sea of Galilee, where the last paragraph of this section
+finds Him. The key to its meaning lies in the contrast between the
+single cure of the woman's demoniac daughter, obtained after so long
+imploring, and the spontaneous abundance of the cures wrought when
+Jesus again had Jewish sufferers to do with, even though it were on
+the half-Gentilised eastern shore of the lake. The contrast is an
+illustration of His parable of the crumbs that fell from the table
+and the plentiful feast that was spread upon it for the children.
+
+The story of the Syro-Phoenician woman naturally falls into four
+parts, each marked by the recurrence of 'He answered.'
+
+I. There is the piteous cry, and the answer of silence. Mark tells
+us that Jesus sought concealment in this journey; but distress has
+quick eyes, and this poor woman found Him. Canaanite as she is, and
+thus a descendant of the ancient race of Israel's enemies, she has
+learned to call Him the Son of David, owning His kingship, which His
+born subjects disowned. She beseeches for that which He delights to
+give, identifying herself with her poor child's suffering, and
+asking as for herself His mercy. As Chrysostom says: 'It was a sight
+to stir pity to behold a woman calling aloud in such distress, and
+that woman a mother, and pleading for a daughter, and that daughter
+in such evil plight.' In her humility she does not bring her child,
+nor ask Him to go to her. In her agony, she has nothing to say but
+to spread her grief before Him, as thinking that He, of whose pity
+she has heard, needs but to know in order to alleviate, and requires
+no motives urged to induce Him to help. In her faith, she thinks
+that His power can heal from afar. What more could He have desired?
+All the more startling, then, is His demeanour. All the conditions
+which He usually required, were present in her; but He, who was wont
+to meet these with swift and joyful over-answers, has no word to say
+to this poor, needy, persevering, humble, and faithful suppliant.
+The fountain seems frozen, from which such streams of blessing were
+wont to flow. His mercy seems clean gone, and His compassion to have
+failed. A Christ silent to a sufferer's cry is a paradox which
+contradicts the whole gospel story, and which, we may be very sure,
+no evangelist would have painted, if he had not been painting from
+the life.
+
+II. There is the disciples' intercession answered by Christ's
+statement of the limitations of His mission. Their petition
+evidently meant, 'Dismiss her by granting her request'; they knew in
+what fashion He was wont to 'send away' such suppliants. They seem,
+then, more pitiful than He is. But their thoughts are more for
+themselves than for her. That 'us' shows the cloven foot. They did
+not like the noise, and they feared it might defeat His purpose of
+secrecy; and so, by their phrase, 'Send her away,' they
+unconsciously betray that what they wanted was not granting the
+prayer, but getting rid of the petitioner. Perhaps, too, they mean,
+'Say something to her; either tell her that Thou wilt or that Thou
+wilt not; break Thy silence somehow.' No doubt, it was intensely
+disagreeable to have a shrieking woman coming after them; and they
+were only doing as most of us would have done, and as so many of us
+do, when we give help without one touch of compassion, in order to
+stop some imploring mouth.
+
+Their apparently compassionate but really selfish intercession was
+put aside by the answer, which explains the paradox of His silence.
+It puts emphasis on two things: His subordination to the divine will
+of the Father, and the restrictions imposed thereby on the scope of
+His beneficent working. He was obeying the divine will in confining
+His ministry to the Jewish people, as we know that He did. Clearly,
+that restriction was necessary. It was a case of concentration in
+order to diffusion. The fire must be gathered on the hearth, if it
+is afterward to warm the chamber. There must be geographical and
+national limits to His life; and the Messiah, who comes last in the
+long series of the kings and prophets, can only be authenticated as
+the world's Messiah, by being first the fulfiller to the children of
+the promises made to the fathers. The same necessity, which required
+that revelation should be made through that nation, required that
+the climax and fulfiller of all revelation should limit His earthly
+ministry to it. This limitation must be regarded as applying only to
+His own personal ministry. It did not limit His sympathies, nor
+interfere with His consciousness of being the Saviour and King of
+the whole world. He had already spoken the parables which claimed it
+all for the area of the development of His kingdom, and in many
+other ways had given utterance to His consciousness of universal
+dominion, and His purpose of universal mercy. But He knew that there
+was an order of development in the kingdom, and that at its then
+stage the surest way to attain the ultimate universality was rigid
+limitation of it to the chosen people. This conviction locked His
+gracious lips against even this poor woman's piteous cry. We may
+well believe that His sympathy outran His commission, and that it
+would have been hard for so much love to be silent in the presence
+of so much sorrow, if He had not felt the solemn pressure of that
+divine necessity which ruled all His life. He was bound by His
+instructions, and therefore He answered her not a word. Individual
+suffering is no reason for transcending the limits of God-appointed
+functions; and he is absolved from the charge of indifference who
+refrains from giving help, which he can only give by overleaping the
+bounds of his activity, which have been set by the Father.
+
+III. We have, next, the persistent suppliant answered by a refusal
+which sounds harsh and hopeless. Christ's former words were probably
+not heard by the woman, who seems to have been behind the group. She
+saw that something was being said to Him, and may have gathered,
+from gestures or looks, that His reply was unfavourable. Perhaps
+there was a short pause in their walk, while they spoke, during
+which she came nearer. Now she falls at His feet, and with
+'beautiful shamelessness,' as Chrysostom calls it, repeats her
+prayer, but this time with pathetic brevity, uttering but the one
+cry, 'Lord, help me!' The intenser the feeling, the fewer the words.
+Heart-prayers are short prayers. She does not now invoke Him as the
+Son of David, nor tell her sorrow over again, but flings herself in
+desperation on His pity, with the artless and unsupported cry, wrung
+from her agony, as she sees the hope of help fading away. Like
+Jacob, in his mysterious struggle, 'she wept, and made supplication
+unto Him.'
+
+As it would seem, her distress touched no chord of sympathy; and
+from the lips accustomed to drop oil and wine into every wound, came
+words like swords, cold, unfeeling, keen-edged, fitted and meant to
+lacerate. We shall not understand them, or Him, if we content
+ourselves with the explanation which jealousy for His honour as
+compassionate and tender has led many to adopt, that He meant all
+the long delay in granting her request, and the words which He
+spoke, only as tests of her faith. His refusal was a real refusal,
+founded on the divine decree, which He was bound to obey. His words
+to her, harsh as they unquestionably sound, are but another way of
+putting the limitation on which He had just insisted in His answer
+to the disciples. The 'bread' is the blessing which He, as the sent
+of God, brings; the 'children' are the 'lost sheep of the house of
+Israel'; the 'dogs' are the Gentile world. The meaning of the whole
+is simply the necessary restriction of His personal activity to the
+chosen nation. It is not meant to wound nor to insult, though, no
+doubt, it is cast in a form which might have been offensive, and
+would have repelled a less determined or less sorrowful heart. The
+form may be partly explained by the intention of trying her
+earnestness, which, though it is not the sole, or even the
+principal, is a subordinate, reason of our Lord's action. But it is
+also to be considered in the light of the woman's quick-witted
+retort, which drew out of it an inference which we cannot suppose
+that Christ did not intend. He uses a diminutive for 'dogs,' which
+shows that He is not thinking of the fierce, unclean animals,
+masterless and starving, that still haunt Eastern cities, and
+deserve their bad character, but of domestic pets, who live with the
+household, and are near the table. In fact, the woman seized His
+intention much better than later critics who find 'national scorn'
+in the words; and the fair inference from them is just that which
+she drew, and which constituted the law of the preaching of the
+Gospel,--'To the Jew first, and also to the Gentile.'
+
+IV. We have the woman's retort, which wrings hope out of apparent
+discouragement, answered by Christ's joyful granting of her request.
+Out of His very words she weaves a plea. 'Yes, Lord; I am one of the
+dogs; then I am not an alien, but belong to the household.' The
+Revised Version does justice to her words by reading 'for even'
+instead of 'yet,' She does not enter a caveat against the analogy,
+but accepts it wholly, and only asks Him to carry out His own
+metaphor. She takes the sword from His hand, or, as Luther says,
+'she catches Him in His own words.' She does not ask a place at the
+table, nor anything taken from those who have a prior claim to a
+more abundant share in His mercies. A crumb is enough for her, which
+they will never miss. In other and colder words, she acquiesces in
+the divine appointment which limits His mission to Israel; but she
+recognises that all nations belong to God's household, and that she
+and her countrymen have a real, though for the time inferior,
+position in it. She pleads that her gain will not be the children's
+loss, nor the answer to her prayers an infraction of the spirit of
+His mission. Perhaps, too, there may be a reference to the fact of
+His being there on Gentile soil, in her words, 'Which fall from the
+children's table.' She does not want the bread to be thrown from the
+table to her. She is not asking Him to transfer His ministry to
+Gentiles; but here He is. A crumb has fallen, in His brief visit.
+May she not eat of that? In this answer faith, humility,
+perseverance, swift perception of His meaning, and hallowed
+ingenuity and boldness, are equally admirable. By admitting that she
+was 'a dog,' and pleading her claim on that footing, she shows that
+she was 'a child.' And therefore, because she has shown herself one
+of the true household, in the fixedness of her faith, in the
+meekness of her humility, in the persistence of her prayers, Christ
+joyfully recognises that here is a case in which He may pass the
+line of ordinary limitation, and that, in doing so, He does not
+exceed His commission. Such faith is entitled to the fullest share
+of His gift. She takes her place beside the Gentile centurion as the
+two recipients of commendation from Him for the greatness of their
+faith. It had seemed as if He would give nothing; but He ends with
+giving all, putting the key of the storehouse into her hand, and
+bidding her take, not a crumb, but 'as thou wilt.' Her daughter is
+healed, by His power working at a distance; but that was not, we may
+be very sure, the last nor the best of the blessings which she took
+from that great treasure of which He made her mistress. Nor can we
+doubt that He rejoiced at the removal of the barrier which dammed
+back His help, as much as she did at the abundance of the stream
+which reached her at last.
+
+V. The final verses of our lesson give us a striking contrast to
+this story. Jesus is again on the shores of the lake, after a tour
+through the Tyrian and Sidonian territory, and then eastwards and
+southwards, to its eastern bank. There He, as on several former
+occasions, seeks seclusion and repose in the hills, which is broken
+in upon by the crowds. The old excitement and rush of people begin
+again. And large numbers of sick, 'lame, blind, dumb, maimed and
+many others,' are brought. They are cast 'down at His feet' in hot
+haste, with small ceremony, and, as would appear, with little
+petitioning for His healing power. But the same grace, for which the
+Canaanitish woman had needed to plead so hard, now seems to flow
+almost unasked. She had, as it were, wrung a drop out; now it gushes
+abundantly. She had not got her 'crumb' without much pleading; these
+get the bread almost without asking. It is this contrast of scant
+and full supplies which the evangelist would have us observe. And he
+points his meaning plainly enough by that expression, 'they
+glorified the God of Israel,' which seems to be Matthew's own, and
+not his quotation of what the crowd said. This abundance of miracle
+witnesses to the pre-eminence of Israel over the Gentile nations,
+and to the special revelation of Himself which God made to them in
+His Son. The crowd may have found in it only fuel for narrow
+national pride and contempt; but it was the divine method for the
+founding of the kingdom none the less; and these two scenes, set
+thus side by side, teach the same truth, that the King of men is
+first the King of Israel.
+
+
+
+
+THE DIVINE CHRIST CONFESSED, THE SUFFERING CHRIST DENIED
+
+
+    'When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Phllippi,
+    He asked His disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I
+    the Son of Man am? 14. And they said, Some say that
+    thou art John the Baptist; some, Elias; and others,
+    Jeremias, or one of the prophets. 15. He saith unto
+    them, But whom say ye that I am? 16. And Simon Peter
+    answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the
+    living God. 17. And Jesus answered and said unto him,
+    Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona: for flesh and blood
+    hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father which is
+    in heaven. 18. And I say also unto thee, That thou art
+    Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and
+    the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. 19. And
+    I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of
+    heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall
+    be hound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on
+    earth shall be loosed in heaven. 20. Then charged He
+    His disciples that they should tell no man that He was
+    Jesus the Christ. 21. From that time forth began Jesus
+    to shew unto His disciples, how that He must go unto
+    Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and
+    chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised
+    again the third day. 22. Then Peter took Him, and began
+    to rebuke Him, saying, Be it far from Thee, Lord: this
+    shall not be unto Thee. 23. But He turned, and said
+    unto Peter, Get thee behind Me, Satan: thou art an
+    offence unto Me: for thou savourest not the things that
+    be of God, but those that be of men. 24. Then said
+    Jesus unto His disciples, If any man will come after
+    Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and
+    follow Me.  25. For whosoever will save his life shall
+    lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for My sake
+    shall find it. 26. For what is a man profited, if he
+    shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or
+    what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? 27. For
+    the Son of Man shall come in the glory of His Father
+    with His angels; and then He shall reward every man
+    according to his works. 28. Verily I say unto you,
+    There be some standing here, which shall not taste of
+    death, till they see the Son of Man coming in His
+    kingdom.'--MATT. xvi. 13-28.
+
+This section is embarrassing from its fulness of material. We can
+but lightly touch points on which volumes might be, and indeed have
+been, written.
+
+I. The first section (vs. 13-20) gives us Peter's great confession
+in the name of the disciples, and Christ's answer to it. The centre
+of this section is the eager avowal of the impetuous apostle, always
+foremost for good or evil. We note the preparation for it, its
+contents, and its results. As to the preparation,--our Lord is
+entering on a new era in His work, and desires to bring clearly into
+His followers' consciousness the sum of His past self-revelation.
+The excitement, which He had checked after the first miraculous
+feeding, had died down. The fickle crowd had gone away from Him, and
+the shadows of the cross were darkening. Amid the seclusion of the
+woods, fountains, and rocks of Caesarea, far away from distracting
+influences, He puts these two momentous questions. Following the
+Revised Version reading, we have a double contrast between the first
+and second. 'Men' answers to 'ye,' and 'the Son of Man' to 'I.' The
+first question is as to the partial and conflicting opinions among
+the multitudes who had heard His name for Himself from His own lips;
+the second, in its use of the 'I,' hints at the fuller unveiling of
+the depths of His gracious personality, which the disciples had
+experienced, and implies, 'Surely you, who have been beside Me, and
+known Me so closely, have reached a deeper understanding.' It has a
+tone of the same wistfulness and wonder as that other question of
+His, 'Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known
+Me?' For their sakes, He seeks to draw out their partly unconscious
+faith, that had been smouldering, fed by their daily experience of
+His beauty and tenderness. Half-recognised convictions float in many
+a heart, which need but a pointed question to crystallise into
+master-truths, to which, henceforward, the whole being is subject.
+Great are the dangers of articulate creeds; but great is the power
+of putting our shadowy beliefs into plain words. 'With the mouth
+confession is made unto salvation.'
+
+Why should this great question have been preceded by the other?
+Probably to make the disciples feel more distinctly the chaotic
+contradictions of the popular judgment, and their own isolation by
+their possession of the clearer light. He wishes them to see the
+gulf opening between them and their fellows, and so to bind them
+more closely to Himself. This is the question the answer to which
+settles everything for a man. It has an intensely sharp point. We
+cannot take refuge from it in the general opinion. Nor does any
+other man's judgment about Him matter one whit to us. This Christ
+has a strange power, after nineteen hundred years, of coming to each
+of us, with the same persistent interrogation on His lips. And to-day,
+as then, all depends on the answer which we give. Many answer by
+exalted estimates of Him, like these varying replies which ascribed
+to Him prophetic authority, but they have not understood His own name
+for Himself, nor drunk in the meaning of His self-revelation, unless
+they can reply with the full-toned confession of the apostle, which
+sets Him far above and apart from the highest and holiest.
+
+As to the contents of the confession, it includes both the human and
+the divine sides of Christ's nature. He is the Messiah, but He is
+more than what a Jew meant by that name; He is 'the Son of the
+living God,' by which we cannot indeed suppose that Peter meant all
+that he afterwards learned it contained, or all that the Church has
+now been taught of its meaning, but which, nevertheless, is not to
+be watered down as if it did not declare His unique filial relation
+to the Father, and so His divine nature. Nathanael had burst into
+rapturous adoration of Jesus as 'the Son of God' at the very
+beginning; and the disciples' glad confidence, which cast out the
+fear of the dim form striding across the sea, had echoed the
+confession; all had heard His words, 'No man knoweth the Father but
+the Son.' So we need not hesitate to interpret this confession as in
+essence and germ containing the whole future doctrine of our Lord's
+divinity. True, the speaker did not know all which lay in His words.
+Do we? Do we not see here an illustration of the method of Christian
+progress in doctrine, which consists not in the winning of new
+truths, but in the penetrating further into the meaning of old and
+initial truths? The conviction which made and makes a Christian, is
+this of Peter's; and Christian growth is into, not away from, it.
+
+As to the results, they are set forth in our Lord's answer, which
+breathes of delight, and we may almost say gratitude. His manhood
+knew the thrill of satisfaction at having some hearts which
+understood though partially, and loved even better than they knew.
+The solemn address to the apostle by his ancestral name, gives
+emphasis to the contrast between his natural weakness and his divine
+illumination and consequent privilege. The name of Peter is not here
+bestowed, but interpreted. Christ does not say 'Thou shalt be,' but
+'Thou art,' and so presupposes the former conferring of the name.
+Unquestionably, the apostle is the rock on which the Church is
+built. The efforts to avoid that conclusion would never have been
+heard of, but for the Roman Catholic controversy; but they are as
+unnecessary as unsuccessful. Is it credible that in the course of an
+address which is wholly occupied with conferring prerogatives on the
+apostle, a clause should come in, which is concerned about an
+altogether different subject from the 'thou' of the preceding and
+the 'thee' of the following clauses, and which yet should take the
+very name of the apostle, slightly modified, for that other subject?
+We do not interpret other books in that fashion. But it was not the
+'flesh and blood' Peter, but Peter as the recipient and faithful
+utterer of the divine inspiration in his confession, who received
+these privileges. Therefore they are not his exclusive property, but
+belong to his faith, which grasped and confessed the divine-human
+Lord; and wherever that faith is, there are these gifts, which are
+its results. They are the 'natural' consequences of the true faith
+in Christ, in that higher region where the supernatural is the
+natural. Peter's grasp of Christ's nature wrought upon his
+character, as pressure does upon sand, and solidified his shifting
+impetuosity into rock-like firmness. So the same faith will tend to
+do in any man. It made him the chief instrument in the establishment
+of the early Church. On souls steadied and made solid by like faith,
+and only on such, can Christ build His Church. Of course, the
+metaphor here regards Jesus, not as the foundation, as the Scripture
+generally does, but as the founder. The names of the twelve apostles
+of the Lamb are on the foundations of the heavenly city; and, in
+historical fact, the name of this apostle is graven on the deepest
+and first laid. In like subordinate sense, all who share that heroic
+faith and proclaim it are used by the Master-builder in the
+foundations of His Church; and Peter himself is eager to share his
+name among his brethren, when he says 'Ye also, as living stones.'
+
+Built on men who hold by that confession, the Church is immortal;
+and the armies who pour out of the gates of the pale kingdoms of the
+unseen world shall not be able to destroy it. Peter, as confessor of
+his Lord's human-divine nature, wields the keys of the kingdom of
+heaven, like a steward of a great house; and that too was fulfilled
+in his apostolic activity in his admitting Jews at Pentecost, and
+Gentiles in the house of Cornelius. But the same power attends all
+who share his faith and avowal, for the preaching of that faith is
+the opening of heaven's door to men. He receives the power of
+binding and loosing, by which is not meant that of forgiving or
+retaining sins, but that of prohibiting or allowing actions, or, in
+other words, of laying down the law of Christian conduct. This
+meaning of the metaphors is made certain by the common Jewish use of
+them. Despotic legislative power is not here committed to the
+apostle, but the great principle is taught that the morality of
+Christianity flows directly from its theology, and that whosoever,
+like Peter, grasps firmly the cardinal truth of Christ's nature, and
+all which flows therefrom, will have his insight so cleared that his
+judgments on what is permitted or forbidden to a Christian man will
+correspond with the decisions of heaven, in the measure of his hold
+upon the truth which underlies all religion and all morality,
+namely, 'Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.' These are
+gifts to Peter indeed, but only as possessor of that faith, and are
+much more truly understood as belonging to all who 'possess like
+precious faith' (as Peter says), than as the prerogative of any
+individual or class.
+
+II. The second section (vs. 21-23) contains the startling new
+revelation of the suffering Messiah, and the disciples' repugnance
+to it. The Gospel has two parts: Jesus is the Christ, and the Christ
+must suffer and enter into His glory. Our Lord has made sure that
+the disciples have learned the first before He leads to the second.
+The very conviction of His dignity and divine nature made that
+second truth the more bewildering, but still the only road to it was
+through the first. Verse 21 covers an indefinite time, during which
+Jesus gradually taught His sufferings. Ordinarily we exaggerate the
+suddenness, and therefore the depth, of Peter's fall, by supposing
+that it took place immediately after his confession; but the
+narrative discountenances the idea, and merely says that Jesus then
+'began' His new teaching. There had been veiled hints of it (such as
+John ii. 19, and Matt. ix. 15, xii. 40), but henceforward it assumed
+prominence, and was taught without veil. It was no new thought to
+Himself, forced on Him by the growing enmity of the nation. The
+cross always cast its shadow on His path. He was no enthusiast,
+beginning with the dream of winning a world to His side, and slowly
+and heroically making up His mind to die a martyr, but His purpose
+in being born was to minister and to die, a ransom for the many. We
+have not here to do with a growing consciousness, but simply with an
+increasing clearness of utterance. Note the detailed accuracy of His
+prevision, which points to Jerusalem as the scene, and to the rulers
+of the nation as the instruments, and to death as the climax, and to
+resurrection as the issue, of His sufferings; the clear setting
+forth of the divine necessity which, as it ruled all His life, ruled
+here also, and is expressed in that solemn 'must'; and the perfectly
+willing acceptance by Him of that necessity, implied in that 'go,'
+and certified by many another word of His. The necessity was no
+external compulsion, driving Him to an unwelcome sacrifice, but one
+imposed alike by filial obedience and by brotherly love. He
+_must_ die because He _would_ save.
+
+How vividly the scene of Peter's rash rejection of the teaching is
+described! The apostle, full of eager love, still, as of old, swift
+to speak, and driven by unexamined impulse, lays his hand on Christ,
+and draws Him a little apart, while he 'begins' to pour out words
+which show that he has forgotten his confession. 'Rebuke' must not
+be softened down into anything less vehement or more respectful. He
+knows better than Jesus what will happen. Perhaps his assurance
+'that this shall never be' means 'We will fight first.' But he is
+not allowed to finish what he began; for the Master, whom he loved
+unwisely but well, turns His back on him, as in horror, and shows by
+the terrible severity of His rebuke how deeply moved He is. He
+repels the hint in almost the same words as He had used to the
+tempter in the wilderness, of whom that Peter, who had so lately
+been the recipient and proclaimer of a divine illumination, has
+become the mouthpiece. So possible is it to fall from sunny heights
+to doleful depths! So little can any divine inspiration be
+permanent, if the man turn away from it to think man's thoughts, and
+set his affections on the things which men desire! So certainly does
+minding these degrade to becoming an organ of Satan! The words are
+full of restrained emotion, which reveal how real a temptation Peter
+had flung in Christ's path. The rock has become a stone of
+stumbling; the man Jesus shrank from the cross with a natural and
+innocent shrinking, which never made His will tremulous, but was
+none the less real; and such words from loving lips did affect him.
+Let us note, on the whole, that the complete truth about Jesus
+Christ must include these two parts,--His divine nature and
+Messiahship, and His death on the cross; and that neither alone is
+the gospel, nor is he a disciple, such as Christ desires, who does
+not cleave to both with mind and heart.
+
+III. In verses 24-28, the law, which ruled the Master's life, is
+extended to the servants. They recoiled from the thought of His
+having to suffer. They had to learn that they must suffer too if
+they would be His. First, the condition of discipleship is set
+before them as being the fellowship of His suffering. 'If any man
+will' gives them the option of withdrawal. A new epoch is beginning,
+and they will have to enlist again, and to do so with open eyes. He
+will have no unwilling soldiers, nor any who have been beguiled into
+the ranks. No doubt, some went away, and walked no more with Him.
+The terms of service are clear. Discipleship means imitation, and
+imitation means self-crucifixion. At that time they would only
+partially understand what taking up their cross was, but they would
+apprehend that a martyred master must needs have for followers men
+ready to be martyrs too. But the requirement goes much deeper than
+this. There is no discipleship without self-denial, both in the
+easier form of starving passions and desires, and in the harder of
+yielding up the will, and letting His will supplant ours. Only so
+can we ever come after Him, and of such sacrifice of self the cross
+is the eminent example. We cannot think too much of it as the
+instrument of our reconciliation and forgiveness, but we may, and
+too often do, think too little of it as the pattern of our lives.
+When Jesus began to teach His death, He immediately presented it as
+His servants' example. Let us not forget that fact.
+
+The ground of the law is next stated in verse 25. The desire to save
+life is the loss of life in the highest sense. If that desire guide
+us, then farewell to enthusiasm, courage, the martyr spirit, and all
+which makes man's life nobler than a beast's. He who is ruled mainly
+by the wish to keep a whole skin, loses the best part of what he is
+so anxious to keep. In a wider application, regard for self as a
+ruling motive is destruction, and selfishness is suicide. On the
+other hand, lives hazarded for Christ are therein truly saved, and
+if they be not only hazarded, but actually lost, such loss is gain;
+and the same law, by which the Master 'must' die and rise again,
+will work in the servant. Verse 26 urges the wisdom of such apparent
+folly, and enforces the requirement by the plain consideration that
+'life' is worth more than anything beside, and that on the two
+grounds, that the world itself would be of no use to a dead man, and
+that, once lost, 'life' cannot be bought back. Therefore the dictate
+of the wisest prudence is that seemingly prodigal flinging away of
+the lower 'life' which puts us in possession of the higher. Note
+that the appeal is here made to a reasonable regard to personal
+advantage, and _that_ in the very act of urging to crucify
+self. So little did Christ think, as some people do, that the desire
+to save one's soul is selfishness.
+
+Verse 27 confirms all the preceding by the solemn announcement of
+the coming of the Son of Man as Judge. Mark the dignity of the
+words. He is to come 'in the glory of the Father.' That ineffable
+and inaccessible light which rays forth from the Father enwraps the
+Son. Their glory is one. The waiting angels are 'His.' He renders to
+every man according to his doing (his actions considered as one
+whole). Thus He claims for Himself universal sway, and the power of
+accurately determining the whole moral character of every life, as
+well as that of awarding precisely graduated retribution. They
+surely shall then find their lives who have followed Him here.
+
+Verse 28 adds, with His solemn 'verily,' a confirmation of this
+announcement of His coming to judge. The question of what event is
+referred to may best be answered by noting that it must be one
+sufficiently far off from the moment of speaking to allow of the
+death of the greater number of His hearers, and sufficiently near to
+allow of the survival of some; that it must also be an event, after
+which these survivors would go the common road into the grave; that
+it is apparently distinguished from His coming 'in the glory of the
+Father,' and yet is of such a nature as to afford convincing proof
+of the establishment of His kingdom on earth, and to be, in some
+sort, a sign of that final act of judgment. All these requirements
+(and they are all the fair inferences from the words) meet only in
+the destruction of Jerusalem, and of the national life of the chosen
+people. That was a crash of which we faintly realise the tremendous
+significance. It swept away the last remnant of the hope that Israel
+was to be the kingdom of the Messiah; and from out of the dust and
+chaos of that fall the Christian Church emerged, manifestly destined
+for world-wide extension. It was a 'great and terrible day of the
+Lord,' and, as such, was a precursor and a prophecy of the day of
+the Lord, when He 'shall come in the glory of the Father,' and
+'render unto every man according to his deeds.'
+
+
+
+
+CHRIST FORESEEING THE CROSS
+
+
+    'From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto His
+    disciples, how that He must go unto Jerusalem, and
+    suffer many things of the elders and chief priests
+    and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the
+    third day.'--MATT. xvi. 21.
+
+The 'time' referred to in the text was probably a little more than
+six months before the Crucifixion, when Jesus was just on the point
+of finally leaving Galilee, and travelling towards Jerusalem. It was
+an epoch in His ministry. The hostility of the priestly party in the
+capital had become more pronounced, and simultaneously the fickle
+enthusiasm of the Galilean crowds, which had been cooled by His
+discouragement, had died down into apathy. He and His followers are
+about to leave familiar scenes and faces, and to plunge into
+perilous and intrude paths. He is resolved that, if they will
+'come after Him,' as He bids them in a subsequent verse, it shall be
+with their eyes open, and as knowing that to come after Him now
+means to cut themselves loose from old moorings, and to put out into
+the storm. They shall be abundantly certified that their journeying
+to Jerusalem is not a triumphal procession to a crown, but a march
+to a cross.
+
+So, this new epoch in His life is attended with a new development of
+His teaching. My text sums up the result of many interviews in
+which, by slow degrees, He sought to put the disciples in possession
+of this unwelcome truth. It was prepared for, by the previous
+conversation in which His question elicited from Peter, as the
+mouthpiece of the apostles, the great confession of His Messiahship
+and Divinity. Settled in their belief of these truths, however
+imperfect their intellectual grasp of them, they might perhaps be
+able to receive the mournful mystery of His passion.
+
+I. We have here set forth in the first place our Lord's anticipation
+of the Cross.
+
+Mark the tone of the language, the minuteness of the detail, the
+absolute certainty of the prevision. That is not the language of a
+man who simply is calculating that the course which he is pursuing
+is likely to end in his martyrdom; but the thing lies there before
+Him, a definite, fixed certainty; every detail known, the scene, the
+instruments, the non-participation of these in the final act of His
+death, His resurrection, and its date,--all manifested and mapped
+out in His sight, and all absolutely certain.
+
+Now this was by no means the first time that the certainty of the
+Cross was plain to Christ. It was not even the first time that it
+had been announced in His teaching. Veiled hints; allusions, brief
+but pregnant, had been scattered through His earlier ministry--such,
+for instance, as the enigmatical word at its very beginning,
+'Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up'; or as
+the profound word to the rabbi that sought Him by night, 'As Moses
+lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be
+lifted up'; or as the passing hint, dropped to the people, in
+symbolical language, about the 'sign of the prophet Jonas'; or as
+the grief foreshadowed dimly to the apostles, of the withdrawal of
+the Bridegroom, and their 'fasting in those days.' These hints, and
+no doubt others unrecorded, had cropped to the surface before; and
+what we have to do with here, is neither the dawning of an
+expectation in Christ, nor the first utterance of the certainty of
+the Cross, but simply the beginning of a continuous and
+unenigmatical teaching of it, as an element in His instructions to
+His disciples.
+
+So then, we have to recognise the fact that our Lord's prevision of
+the end--shone, I was going to say, perhaps it might be truer to
+say, darkened,--all the path along which He had to travel.
+
+I think that people dogmatise a great deal too glibly as to what
+they know very little about, the interaction of the divine and the
+human elements in Christ, and on the one side are far too certain in
+their affirmation that His humanity possessed in some reflected
+fashion the divine gift of omniscience; and on the other hand, that
+His manhood, passing through the process of human development, and
+increasing in wisdom, was necessarily in its earlier stages void of
+the consciousness of His Messianic mission. I dare not affirm either
+'yes' or 'no' about that matter; but this I am sure of, that if ever
+there was a time in the development of the Manhood of Jesus Christ
+when He began to know Himself as the Messias, at that same time He
+began to be certain of the Cross. For His Messianic work required
+the Cross, and the divine thing that was in Him was born into the
+world for a double purpose, to minister and to die.
+
+So, dear friends, putting aside mere metaphysics, which are
+superficial after all, we have to recognise this as the fact, that
+all through His career there arose before our Lord the certainty of
+that death, and that it did not assume to Him the aspect which such
+a prospect might have assumed to others as a possible result of a
+mission that failed, but it assumed to Him the aspect of the certain
+result of a work that was accomplished. He began His career with no
+illusions, such as other teachers, reformers, philanthropists, men
+that have moved society, have always begun with. Moses might
+'suppose his brethren would have understood how that God by His hand
+would deliver them,' but Christ had no such illusion. He knew from
+the beginning that He came to be rejected and to die. And so He
+'trod life's common way,' with that grim certainty rising ever
+before Him. I suppose that He did not, as you and I do, forget the
+death that awaits us, and find the non-remembrance of it the
+condition of much of our energy, but that it was perpetually in His
+sight.
+
+Now I do not think that we sufficiently dwell upon that fact as an
+element in the human experience of our Lord. What beauty it gives to
+His gentleness, to the leisureliness of heart with which He was ready
+to make everybody's sorrow His own, and to lay a healing and a loving
+finger upon every wound! With this certainty before Him, there was
+yet no strain manifest upon His spirit, no self-absorption, no
+shutting Himself out from other people's burdens because He had so
+heavy ones of His own to carry; but He was ready for every joy, ready
+for all sympathy, ready for every help; and if we cannot say that,
+'in cheerful godliness,' as I think we may, at least we can say that
+with solemn joy and untroubled readiness, He journeyed towards that
+Cross. This Isaac was under no illusions as to who the Lamb for the
+offering was, but knowing it, He patiently carried the wood and
+climbed the hill, ready for the Father's will.
+
+II. That brings me to notice the second point here, our Lord's
+recognition of the necessity of His suffering.
+
+Mark that He does not say that He _shall_ suffer. Certainty is
+not all that He proclaims here, however absolute that certainty
+might be, but it is '_He must_.' He is speaking not only of the
+historical fact, but of the need, deep in the nature of things, for
+His sufferings that were to follow.
+
+And though these were wrought out by His own willing submission on
+the one hand, and by the unfettered play of the evil passions of the
+worst of men on the other, yet over all that apparent chaos of
+unbridled devildom there ruled the unalterable purpose of God; and
+the 'must' was wrought out through the passions of evil-doers and
+the voluntary submission of the innocent sufferer; thus setting
+before us, in the central fact of the history of humanity, viz. the
+Cross and passion of Jesus Christ, the eminent example of that great
+mystery how the absolute freedom of the human will, and the
+responsibility of the guilt of human wrong-doers, are congruous with
+the fixed purpose of an all-determining and all-ruling Providence.
+
+But that is apart from my purpose. Mark then, that our Lord's
+recognition of this necessity for His suffering is, on the first and
+plainest aspect of it, His recognition that His suffering was
+necessary on the ground of filial obedience. All through His life we
+hear that 'must' echoing, and His whole spirit bowed to it. As He
+says Himself, 'The Son can do nothing of Himself.' As was said for
+Him of old: 'Lo, I come. In the volume of the book it is written of
+Me, I delight to do Thy will, and Thy law is within My heart.' So
+the Father's will is the Son's law; and the Father's 'Thou shalt' is
+answered by the Son's 'I must.'
+
+But yet that necessity grounded on filial obedience was no mere
+external necessity determined solely by the divine will. God so
+willed it, because it must be so; that it must be so was not because
+God so willed it. That is to say, the work to which Christ had set
+His hand was a work that demanded the Cross, nor could it be
+accomplished without it. For it was the work of redeeming the world,
+and required more than a beautiful life, more than a divine
+gentleness of heart, more than the homely and yet deep wisdom of His
+teachings, it required the sacrifice that He offered on the Cross.
+
+So, dear friends, Christ's 'must' is but this: 'My work is not
+accomplished except I die.' And remember that the connection between
+our Lord's work and our Lord's death is not that which subsists
+between the works and the deaths of great teachers, or heroic
+martyrs, or philanthropists and benefactors, who will gladly pay the
+price of life in order to carry out their loving or their wise
+designs. It is no mere appendage to His work, nor the price that He
+paid for having done it, but it is His very work in its vital
+centre.
+
+I pray you to consider if there is any theory of the meaning and power
+of the death of Jesus Christ which adequately explains this 'must,'
+except the one that He died a sacrifice for the sins of the world. On
+any other hypothesis, as it seems to me, of what His death meant, it
+is surplusage, over and above His work: not adding much, either to His
+teaching or to the beauty of His example, and having no absolute
+stringent necessity impressed upon it. There is one doctrine--that
+when He died He bare the sins of the whole world--which makes His
+death a necessity; and I ask you, Is there any other doctrine which
+does? Take care of a Christianity which would not be much impoverished
+if the Cross were struck out of it altogether.
+
+There is a deeper question, on which, as I believe, it does not
+become us to enter, and that is, What is the necessity for the
+necessity? Why must it be that He, who is the Redeemer of the world,
+must needs be the Sacrifice for the world? We do not know enough
+about the depths of the divine nature and the divine government to
+speak very wisely or reverently upon that subject, and I, for one,
+abjure the attempt, which seems to me to be presumptuous--the
+attempt to explain why there was needed a sacrifice for sin in order
+to the forgiveness of sin. If I knew all about God, I could tell
+you; and nobody, that does not, can. But we can see, as far as
+concerns us, that, as the history of all religions tells us, for the
+forgiveness and acceptance of sinful men a pure sacrifice is needed;
+and that for teaching us the love of God, the hideousness and wages
+of sin, for our emancipation from evil, for the quieting of our
+consciences, for a foothold for faith, for an adequate motive of
+self-surrender and obedience, his sacrificial death is needful. The
+life and death of Jesus Christ, regarded as God's sacrifice for the
+world's sin, _does_ all this. The life and death of Jesus
+Christ, regarded in any other aspect, does not do this. Historically
+speaking, mutilated forms of Christianity, which have not known what
+to do with the Cross of Christ, have lost their constraining,
+purifying, and aggressive power. For us sinful men, if we are to be
+delivered from evil and become sons of God, He _must_ suffer
+many things, and be killed, and rise again the third day.
+
+III. Now note further, how we have here also our Lord's willing
+acceptance of the necessity.
+
+It is one thing to recognise, and another thing to accept, a needs-be.
+This 'must' was no unwelcome obligation laid upon Him against His will,
+but one to which His whole nature responded and which He accepted. No
+doubt there was in Him the innocent instinctive physical shrinking
+from death. No doubt the Cross, in so far, was pain and suffering. No
+doubt we are to trace the reality of a temptation in Peter's rash words
+which follow, as indicated to us by the severity and almost vehemence
+of the action with which Christ puts it away. No doubt there is a
+profound meaning in that answer of His, 'Thou art a _stumbling-block_
+to Me.' The 'Rock' is turned into a stone of stumbling, and Peter's
+suggestion appeals to something in Him which responded to it.
+
+That shrinking might be a shrinking of nature, but it was not a
+recoil of will. The ship may toss in dreadful billows, but the
+needle points to the pole. The train may rock upon the line, but it
+never leaves the rails. Christ felt that the Cross was an evil, but
+that feeling never made Him falter in His determination to bear it.
+His willing acceptance of the necessity was owing to His full
+resolve to save the world. He must die because He would redeem, and
+He would redeem because He could not but love. 'He saved others,'
+and therefore 'Himself He cannot save.' So the 'must' was not an
+iron chain that fastened Him to His Cross. Like some of the heroic
+martyrs of old, who refused to be bound to the funeral pile, He
+stood there chained to it by nothing but His own will and loving
+purpose to save the world.
+
+And, brethren, in that loving purpose, each of us may be sure that
+we had an individual and a personal share. Whatever the interaction
+between the divinity and the humanity, this at all events is
+certain, that every soul of man has his distinct and definite place
+in Christ's knowledge and in Christ's love. Each of us all may be
+sure that one strand of the cords of love which fastened Him to the
+Cross was His love for me; and each of us may say--He must die,
+because 'He loved me, and gave Himself for me.'
+
+IV. Lastly, notice here our Lord's teaching the necessity of His
+death.
+
+This announcement was preceded, as I remarked, by that conversation
+which led to the crystallising of the half-formed convictions of the
+apostles in a definite creed, 'Thou art the Christ, the Son of the
+living God.' But that was not all that they needed to know and
+believe and trust to. That was the first volume of their lesson-book.
+The second volume was this, that 'Christ must suffer.' And so let us
+learn the central place which the Cross holds in Christ's teaching.
+They tell us that the doctrine of Christ as the Sacrifice for the
+world is not in the Gospels. Where are the eyes that read the Gospels
+and do not see it? The theory of it is not there; the announcements
+of it are. And in this latest section of our Lord's ministry, they
+are fuller and more frequent than in the earlier, for the plain
+reason which is implied by the preparation through which He passed
+these disciples, ere He ventured to communicate the mournful and the
+bewildering fact. There must be, first, the grasp of His Messiahship,
+and some recognition that He is the Son of God, ere it is possible
+to go on to speak of the Cross, the full message concerning which
+could not be spoken until after the Resurrection and the Ascension.
+
+But note, you do not understand Christ's Cross unless you bring to
+it the faith in Christ's Messiahship and the belief in some measure
+that He is the Son of God. Neither the pathos nor the power of His
+death is intelligible if it be simply like other deaths--the dying
+of a man who is born subject to the law of mortality, and who yields
+to it by natural process. Unless you and I take upon our lips,
+though with far deeper meaning, the words with which the heathen
+centurion gazed upon the dying Christ, and say, 'Truly this was the
+Son of God!' His Cross is common and trivial and insignificant; but
+if we can thus speak, then it stands before us as the crown of all
+God's manifestations in the world,' the wisdom of God and the power
+of God.'
+
+And then note, still further, how, without the Cross, these other
+truths are not the whole gospel. There were disciples then, as there
+have been disciples since, and as there are to-day, who were willing
+to accept, 'Thou art the Christ'; and willing in some sense to say
+'Thou art the Son of God,' but stumbled when He said, 'The Son of
+Man must suffer.' Brethren, I venture to urge that the gospel of the
+Incarnation, precious as it is, is not the whole gospel, and that
+the full-orbed truth about Jesus Christ is that He is the Christ,
+and that He died for our sins, and rose again to live for ever, our
+Priest and King.
+
+We need a whole Christ. For our soul's salvation, for the quieting
+of our consciences, the forgiveness of our sins, for new life, for
+peace, purity, obedience, love, joy, hope, our faith must grasp
+'Christ, and Him crucified.' A half Christ is no Christ, and unless
+we have as sinful men laid hold of the one Sacrifice for sins for
+ever, which He offered, we do not understand even the preciousness
+of the half Christ whom we perceive, nor know the full beauty of His
+example, the depth of His teaching, nor the tenderness of His heart.
+
+I beseech you, ask yourselves, _What_ Christ can do for me the
+things which I need to have done, except 'the Christ that died, yea,
+rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God,
+who also maketh intercession for us'?
+
+
+
+
+THE KING IN HIS BEAUTY
+
+
+    'And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John
+    his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain
+    apart, 2. And was transfigured before them: and His
+    face did shine as the sun, and His raiment was white as
+    the light. 3. And, behold, there appeared unto them
+    Moses and Elias talking with Him. 4. Then answered
+    Peter, and said unto Jesus. Lord, it is good for us
+    to be here: if Thou wilt, let us make here three
+    tabernacles; one for Thee, and one for Moses, and one
+    for Elias. 5. While he yet spake, behold, a bright
+    cloud overshadowed them: and behold a voice out of the
+    cloud, which said, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am
+    well pleased; hear ye Him. 6. And when the disciples
+    heard it, they fell on their face, and were sore afraid.
+    7. And Jesus came and touched them, and said, Arise,
+    and be not afraid. 8. And when they had lifted up their
+    eyes, they saw no man, save Jesus only. 9. And as they
+    came down from the mountain, Jesus charged them, saying,
+    Tell the vision to no man, until the Son of Man be risen
+    again from the dead. 10. And His disciples asked Him,
+    saying, Why then say the scribes that Elias must first
+    come? 11. And Jesus answered and said unto them, Elias
+    truly shall first come, and restore all things. 12. But
+    I say unto you, That Elias is come already, and they
+    knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they
+    listed. Likewise shall also the Son of Man suffer of
+    them. 13. Then the disciples understood that He spake
+    unto them of John the Baptist.'--MATT. xvii. 1-13.
+
+The early guess at Tabor as the scene of the Transfiguration must be
+given up as untenable. Some one of the many peaks of Hermon rising
+right over Caesarea is a far more likely place. But the silence of
+all the accounts as to the locality surely teaches us the
+unimportance of knowledge on the point. The dangers of knowing would
+more than outweigh the advantages. A similar indefiniteness attaches
+to the _when_. Are we to think of it as occurring by night, or
+by day? Perhaps the former is slightly the more probable, from the
+fact of the descent being made 'the next day' (Luke). Our conception
+of the scene will be very different, as we think of that lustre from
+His face, and that bright cloud, as outshining the blaze of a Syrian
+sun, or as filling the night with glory. But we cannot settle which
+view is correct.
+
+There are three distinct parts in the whole incident: the
+Transfiguration proper; the appearance of Moses and Elijah; and the
+cloud with the voice from it.
+
+I. The Transfiguration proper.
+
+The general statement that Jesus 'was transfigured before them' is
+immediately followed out into explanatory details. These are
+twofold--the radiance of His face, and the gleaming whiteness of His
+raiment, which shone like the snow on Hermon when it is smitten by
+the sunshine. Probably we are to think of the whole body as giving
+forth the same mysterious light, which made itself visible even
+through the white robe He wore. This would give beautiful accuracy and
+appropriateness to the distinction drawn in the two metaphors,--that
+His face was 'as the sun,' in which the undiluted glory was seen; and
+His garments 'as the light,' which is sunshine diffused and weakened.
+There is no hint of any external source of the brightness. It does not
+seem to have been a reflection from the visible symbol of the divine
+presence, as was the fading radiance on the face of Moses. That symbol
+does not come into view till the last stage of the incident. We are
+then to think of the brightness as rising from within, not cast from
+without. We cannot tell whether it was voluntary or involuntary. Luke
+gives a pregnant hint, in connecting it with Christ's praying, as if
+the calm ecstasy of communion with the Father brought to the surface
+the hidden glory of the Son. Can it be that such glory always
+accompanied His prayers, and that its presence may have been one
+reason for the sedulous privacy of these, except on this one occasion,
+when He desired that His faithful three should be 'eye-witnesses of
+His majesty'? However that may be, we have probably to regard the
+Transfiguration as the transient making visible, in the natural,
+symbolic form of light, of the indwelling divine glory, which dwelt
+in Him as in a shrine, and then shone through the veil of His flesh.
+John explains the event, though His words go far beyond it, when he
+says, 'We beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the
+Father.'
+
+What was the purpose of the Transfiguration? Matthew seems to tell
+us in that 'before them.' It was for their sakes, not for His, as
+indeed follows from the belief that it was the irradiation from
+within of the indwelling light. The new epoch of His life, in which
+they were to have a share of trial and cross-bearing, needed some
+great encouragement poured into their tremulous hearts; and so, for
+once, He deigned to let them look on His face shining as the sun,
+for a remembrance when they saw it covered with 'shame and spitting'
+and His brow bleeding from the thorns. But perhaps we may venture a
+step farther, and see here some prophecy of that body of His glory
+in which He now reigns. Speculations as to the difference between
+the earthly body of our Lord and ours are fascinating but
+unsubstantial. It was a true human body, susceptible of hunger,
+pain, weariness; but we are not taught that it carried in it the
+necessity of death. It may have been more pliable to the spirit's
+behests, and more transparent to its light, than ours. There may
+have been in that hour of radiance some approximation to the perfect
+harmony between the perfect spirit and the body, which is its fit
+organ, which we know is His now, and to which we also know that He
+will conform the body of our humiliation. Then His face 'shone as
+the sun'; when one of these three saw Him in His glory, 'His
+countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength'; and His own
+promise to us is that we too 'shall shine forth as the sun.' Then
+His garments were white as the light; His promise is that they who
+are worthy shall 'walk with Him in white.' The Transfiguration was a
+revelation and a prophecy.
+
+II. The appearance of Moses and Elijah.
+
+While the three are gazing with dazzled eyes, suddenly, as if shaped
+out of air, there stand by Jesus two mighty forms, evidently men,
+and yet, according to Luke, encompassed in the white radiance,
+walking with the Son of Man in a better furnace. What a stound of
+awe and wonder must have touched the gazers as the conviction who
+these were filled their minds, and they recognised, we know not how,
+the mighty lineaments of the lawgiver and the prophet! Did the three
+mortals understand the meaning of the words of the heavenly three?
+We cannot tell. Nor does Matthew tell us what was the theme of that
+wondrous colloquy. These two might have asked, 'Why hast Thou
+disquieted us to bring us up?' What is the answer? Wherefore were
+they there? To tell Jesus that He was to die? No, for that lay plain
+before Him. To learn from Him the mystery of His passion, that they
+might be His heralds, the one in Paradise, the other in the pale
+kingdoms of Hades? Perhaps, but, more probably, they came to
+minister to Him strength for His conflict, even as women did of
+their substance, and an angel did in Gethsemane. Perhaps the
+strength came to Jesus from seeing how they yearned for the
+fulfilment of the typified redemption; perhaps it came from His
+being able to speak to them as He could not to any on earth. At all
+events, surely Moses and Elijah were not brought there for their own
+sakes alone, nor for the sake of the witnesses, but also for His
+sake who was prepared by that converse for His cross.
+
+Further, their appearance set forth Christ's death, which was their
+theme, as the climax of revelation. The Law with its requirement and
+its sacrifices, and Prophecy with its forward-looking gaze, stand
+there, in their representatives, and bear witness that their
+converging lines meet in Jesus. The finger that wrote the law, and
+the finger that smote and parted Jordan, are each lifted to point to
+Him. The stern voices that spoke the commandments and that hurled
+threatenings at the unworthy occupants of David's throne, both
+proclaim, 'Behold the Lamb of God, the perfect Fulfiller of law, the
+true King of Israel.' Their presence and their speech were the
+acknowledgment that this was He whom they had seen from afar; their
+disappearance proclaims that their work is done when they have
+pointed to Him.
+
+Their presence also teaches us that Jesus is the life of all the
+living dead. Of course, care must be exercised in drawing dogmatic
+conclusions from a manifestly abnormal incident, but some plain
+truths do result from it. Of these two, one had died, though mystery
+hung round his death and burial; the other had passed into the
+heavens by another gate than that of death; and here they both stand
+with lives undiminished by their mysterious changes, in fulness of
+power and of consciousness, bathed in glory, which was as their
+native air now. They are witnesses of an immortal life, and proofs
+that His yet unpierced hands held the keys of life and death. He
+opened the gate which moves backwards to no hand but His, and
+summoned them; and they come, with no napkins about their heads, and
+no trailing grave-clothes entangling their feet, and own Him as the
+King of life.
+
+They speak too of the eager onward gaze which the Old Testament
+believers turned to the coming Deliverer. In silent anticipation,
+through all these centuries, good men had lain down to die, saying,
+'I wait for Thy salvation,' and after death their spirits had lived
+expectant and crying, like the souls under the altar, 'How long, O
+Lord, how long?' Now these two are brought from their hopeful
+repose, perchance to learn how near their deliverance was; and
+behind them we seem to discern a dim crowd of holy men and women,
+who had died in faith, not having received the promises, and who
+throng the portals of the unseen world, waiting for the near advent
+of the better Samson to bear away the gates to the city on the hill,
+and lead thither their ransomed train.
+
+Peter's bewildered words need not long detain us. He is half dazed,
+but, true to his rash nature, thinks that he must say something, and
+that to do something will relieve the tension of his spirit. His
+proposal, so ridiculous as it is, shows that he had not really
+understood what he saw. It also expresses his feeling that it is
+much better to be there than to be travelling to a cross--and so may
+stand as an instance of a very real temptation for us all, that of
+avoiding unwelcome duties and shrinking from rough work, on the plea
+of holding sweet communion with Jesus on the mountain. It was
+_not_ 'good' to stay there, and leave demoniacs uncured in the
+plain.
+
+III. The cloud and the witnessing voice.
+
+Peter's words receive no answer, for, while he is speaking, another
+solemn and silencing wonder has place. Suddenly a strange cloud
+forms in the cloudless sky. It is 'bright' with no reflection caught
+from the sun; it is borne along by no wind; slowly it settles down
+upon them, like a roof, and, bright though it is, casts a strange
+shadow. According to one reading of Luke's account, Christ and the
+two heavenly witnesses pass within its folds, leaving the disciples
+without, and that separation seems confirmed by Matthew's saying
+that the voice 'came out of the cloud.' Our evangelist points to its
+brightness as singular. It was not merely bright, as if smitten by
+the sunlight, but its whole substance was luminous. It is almost a
+contradiction to speak of a cloud of light, and the anomalous
+expression points to something beyond nature. We cannot but remember
+the pillar which had a heart of fire, and glowed in the darkness
+over the sleeping camp, and the cloud which filled the house, and
+drove the priests from the sanctuary by its brightness. Nor should
+we forget that at His Ascension Jesus was not lost to sight in the
+blue; but while He was yet visible in the act of blessing, 'a cloud
+received Him out of their sight.' It is, in fact, the familiar
+symbol of the divine presence, which had long been absent from the
+temple, and now reappears. We may note the beauty and felicity of
+the emblem. It blends light and darkness, so suggesting how the very
+same 'attributes' of God are both; and how His revelation of Himself
+reveals Him as unrevealable. The manifestation of His power is also
+the 'hiding of His power.' The inaccessible light is also thick
+darkness. The same characteristics of His nature are light and joy
+to some, and blackness and woe to others.
+
+We may note, too, Christ's passage into the cloud. Moses and Elijah,
+being purged from mortal weakness, could pass thither. But Jesus,
+alone of men, could pass in the flesh into that brightness, and be
+hid in its fiery heart, unshrinking and unconsumed. 'Who among us
+shall dwell with everlasting burnings? His entrance into it is but
+the witness to the purity of His nature, and the absence in Him of
+all fuel for fire. That bright cloud was 'His own calm home, His
+habitation from eternity,' and where no man, compassed with flesh
+and sin, could live, He enters as the Son into the bosom of the
+Father.
+
+Then comes the articulate witness to the Son. The solemnity and
+force of the attestation are increased, if we conceive of the
+disciples as outside the cloud, and parted from Jesus. This word is
+meant for them only, and so is distinguished from the similar voice
+at the baptism, and has added the imperative 'Hear him.' The voice
+bears witness to the mystery of our Lord's person. It points to the
+contrast between His two attendants and Him. They are servants,
+'this is the Son.' It sets forth His supernaturally born humanity,
+and, deeper still, His true and proper divinity, which John unfolds,
+in his Gospel, as the deepest meaning of the name. It testifies to
+the unbroken union of love between the Father and Him, and therein
+to the absolute perfection of our Lord's character. He is the
+adequate object of the eternal, divine love. As He has been from the
+timeless depths of old, He is, in His human life, the object of the
+ever-unruffled divine complacency, in whom the Father can glass
+Himself as in a pure mirror. It enjoins obedient listening. God's
+voice bids us hear Christ's voice. If He is the beloved Son,
+listening to Him is listening to God. This is the purpose of the
+whole, so far as we are concerned. We are to hear Him, when He
+declares God; when He witnesses of Himself, of His love, His work,
+His death, His judgeship; when He invites us to come to Him, and
+find rest; when He commands and when He promises. Amid the Babel of
+this day, let us listen to that voice, low and gentle, pleading and
+soft, authoritative, majestic, and sovereign. It will one day shake
+'not the earth only, but also the heaven.' But, as yet, it calls us
+with strange sweetness, and the music of love in every tone. Well
+for us if our hearts answer, 'Speak, Lord; for Thy servant heareth.'
+
+Matthew tells us that this voice from the cloud completely unmanned
+the disciples, who fell on their faces, and lay there, we know not
+how long, till Jesus came and laid a loving hand on them, bidding
+them arise, and not fear. So when they staggered to their feet, and
+looked around, they saw nothing but the grey stones of the hillside
+and the blue sky. 'That dread voice was past,' and the silence was
+broken only by the hum of insects or the twitter of a far-off bird.
+The strange guests have gone; the radiance has faded from the
+Master's face, and all is as it used to be. 'They saw no one, save
+Jesus only.' It is the summing up of revelation; all others vanish,
+He abides. It is the summing up of the world's history. Thickening
+folds of oblivion wrap the past, and all its mighty names become
+forgotten; but His figure stands out, solitary against the
+background of the past, as some great mountain, which travellers see
+long after the lower summits are sunk beneath the horizon. Let us
+make this the summing up of our lives. We can venture to take Him
+for our sole helper, pattern, love, and aim, because He, in His
+singleness, is enough for our hearts. There are many fragmentary
+precious things, but there is only one pearl of great price. And
+then this will be a prophecy of our deaths--a brief darkness, a
+passing dread, and then His touch and His voice saying, 'Arise, be
+not afraid.' So we shall lift up our eyes, and find earth faded, and
+its voices fallen dim, and see 'no one any more, save Jesus only.'
+
+
+
+
+THE SECRET OF POWER
+
+
+    'Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, Why
+    could not we cast him out? 20. And Jesus said unto them,
+    Because of your unbelief.'--MATT. xvii. 19, 20.
+
+'And when He had called unto Him His twelve disciples, He gave them
+power against unclean spirits to cast them out.' That same power was
+bestowed, too, on the wider circle of the seventy who returned again
+with joy, saying, 'Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through
+Thy name.' The ground of it was laid in the solemn words with which
+Christ met their wonder at their own strength, and told how He
+'beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.' Therefore had they
+triumphed, showing the fruits of their Master's victory; and
+therefore had He a right to renew the gift, in the still more
+comprehensive promise, 'I give unto you power--over all the power of
+the enemy.'
+
+What a commentary on such words this story affords! What has become
+of the disciples' supernatural might? Has it ebbed away as suddenly
+as it flowed? Is their Lord's endowment a shadow or His assurances
+delusion? Has He taken back what He gave? Not so. And yet His
+servants are ignominiously beaten. One poor devil-ridden boy brings
+all their resources to nothing. He stands before them writhing in
+the gripe of his tormentor, but they cannot set him free. The
+importunity of the father's prayers is vain, and the tension of
+expectancy in his eager face relaxes into the old hopeless languor
+as he slowly droops to the conviction that 'they could not cast him
+out.' The malicious scorn in the eyes of the Scribes, those hostile
+critics who 'knew that it would be so,' helps to produce the failure
+which they anticipated. The curious crowd buzz about them, and in
+the midst of it all stand the little knot of baffled disciples,
+possessors of power which seems to leave them when they need it
+most, with the unavailing spells dying half spoken on their lips,
+and their faint hearts longing that their Master would come down
+from the mount, and cover their weakness with His own great
+strength.
+
+No wonder that, as soon as Christ and they are alone, they wish to
+know how their mortifying defeat has come about. And they get an
+answer which they little expected, for the last place where men look
+for the explanation of their failures is within; but they will
+ascend into the heavens, and descend into the deeps for remote and
+recondite reasons, before they listen to the voice which says, 'The
+fault is nigh thee, in thy heart.' Christ's reply distinctly implies
+that the cause of their impotence lay wholly in themselves, not in
+any defect or withdrawal of power, but solely in that in them which
+grasped the power. They little expected, too, to be told that they
+had failed because they had not been sure they would succeed. They
+had thought that they believed in their ability to cast out the
+demon. They had tried to do so, with some kind of anticipation that
+they could. They had been surprised when they found that they could
+not. They had wonderingly asked why. And now Christ tells them that
+all along they had had no real faith in Him and in the reality of
+His gift. So subtly may unbelief steal into the heart, even while we
+fancy that we are working in faith. And a further portion of our
+Lord's reply points them to the great means by which this conquering
+faith can be maintained--namely, prayer and fasting. If, then, we
+put all these things together, we get a series of considerations,
+very simple and commonplace indeed, but all the better and truer
+therefor, which I venture to submit to you, as having a very
+important bearing on all our Christian work, and especially on the
+missionary work of the Church. The principles which the text
+suggests touch the perpetual possession of the power which conquers;
+the condition of its victorious exercise by us, as being our faith;
+the subtle danger of unsuspected unbelief to which we are exposed;
+and the great means of preserving our faith pure and strong. I ask
+your attention to a few considerations on these points in their
+order.
+
+But first, let me say very briefly, that I would not be understood
+as, by the selection of such a text, desiring to suggest that we
+have failed in our work. Thank God! we can point to results far, far
+greater than we have deserved, far greater than we have expected,
+however they may be beneath our desires, and still further below
+what the gospel was meant to accomplish. It may suit observers who
+have never done anything themselves, and have not particularly clear
+eyes for appreciating spiritual work, to talk of Christian missions
+as failures; but it would ill become us to assent to the lie.
+Failures indeed! with half a million of converts, with new forms of
+Christian life budding in all the wilderness of the peoples, with
+the consciousness of coming doom creeping about the heart of every
+system of idolatry! Is the green life in the hedges and in the sweet
+pastures starred with rathe primroses, and in the hidden copses blue
+with hyacinths, a failure, because the east wind bites shrewdly, and
+'the tender ash delays to clothe herself with green'? No! no, we
+have not failed. Enough has been done to vindicate the enterprise,
+more than enough to fill our lips with thanksgiving, enough to
+entitle us to say to all would-be critics--Do you the same with your
+enchantments. But, on the other hand, we have to confess that the
+success has been slow and small, chequered and interrupted, that
+often we have been foiled, that we have confronted many a demon whom
+we could not cast out, and that at home and abroad the masses of
+evil seem to close in around us, and we make but little impression
+on their serried ranks. We have had success enough to assure us that
+we possess the treasure, and failures enough to make us feel how
+weak are the earthen vessels which hold it.
+
+And now let us turn to the principles which flow from this text.
+
+I. We have an unvarying power.
+
+No doubt the explanation of their defeat which most naturally suggested
+itself to these disciples would be that somehow or other--perhaps
+because of Christ's absence--they had lost the gift which they knew
+that they once had. And the same way of accounting for later want of
+success lingers among Christian people still. You will sometimes hear
+it said: 'God sends forth His Spirit in special fulness at special
+times, according to His own sovereign will; and till then we can only
+wait and pray.' Or, 'The miraculous powers which dwelt in the early
+Church have been withdrawn, and therefore the progress is slow.' The
+strong imaginative tendency to make an ideal perfect in the past
+leads us to think of the primitive age of the Church as golden, in
+opposition to the plain facts of the case. We fancy that because
+apostles were its teachers, and the Cross within its memory, the
+infant society was stronger, wiser, better than any age since, and had
+gifts which we have lost. What had it which we do not possess? The
+power of working miracles. What have we which it did not possess? A
+completed Bible, and the experience of nineteen centuries to teach us
+to understand it, and to confirm by facts our confidence that Christ's
+gospel is for all time and every land. What have we in common with it?
+The same mission to fulfil, the same wants in our brethren to meet, the
+same gospel, the same spirit, the same immortal Lord. All that any age
+has possessed to fit it for the task of witnessing for Christ we too
+possess. The Church has in it a power which is ever adequate to the
+conquest of the world; and that power is constant through all time,
+whether we consider it as recorded in an unvarying gospel, or as
+energised by an abiding spirit, or as flowing from and centred in an
+unchangeable Lord.
+
+We have a gospel which never can grow old. Its adaptation to the
+deepest needs of men's souls remains constant with these needs.
+These vary not from age to age. No matter what may be the superficial
+differences of dress, the same human heart beats beneath every robe.
+The great primal wants of men's spirits abide, as the great primal
+wants of their bodily life abide. Food and shelter for the one,--a
+loving, pardoning God, to know and love, for the other--else they
+perish. Wherever men go they carry with them a conscience which needs
+cleansing, a sense of separation from God joined with a dim knowledge
+that union with Him is life, a will which is burdened with its own
+selfhood, an imagination which paints the misty walls of this earthly
+prison with awful shapes that terrify and faint hopes that mock, a
+heart that hungers for love, and a reason which pines in atrophy
+without light. And all these the gospel which is lodged in our hands
+meets. It addresses itself to nothing in men that is not in man.
+Surface differences of position, culture, clime, age, and the like,
+it brushes aside as unimportant, and it goes straight to the universal
+wants. People tell us it has done its work, and much confident dogmatism
+proclaims that the world has outgrown it. We have a right to be
+confident also, with a confidence born of our knowledge, that it has
+met and satisfied for us the wants which are ours and every man's, and
+to believe that as long as men live by bread, so long will this word
+which proceedeth out of the mouth of God be the food of their souls.
+Areopagus and Piccadilly, Benares and Oxford, need the same message
+and will find the same response to all their wants in the same word.
+
+Many of the institutions in which Christendom has embodied its
+conceptions of God's truth will crumble away. Many of the
+conceptions will have to be modified, neglected truths will grow, to
+the dislocation of much systematic theology, and the Word better
+understood will clear away many a portentous error with which the
+Church has darkened the Word. Be it so. Let us be glad when 'the
+things which can be shaken are removed,' like mean huts built
+against the wall of some cathedral, masking and marring the
+completeness of its beauty; 'that the things which cannot be shaken
+may remain,' and all the clustered shafts, and deep-arched recesses,
+and sweet tracery may stand forth freed from the excrescences which
+hid them.
+
+'The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away. But the
+word of the Lord endureth for ever.'
+
+We have an abiding Spirit, the Giver to us of a power without
+variableness or the shadow of turning, 'I will pray the Father, and
+He shall give you another Paraclete, that He may abide with you for
+ever.' The manner of His operations may vary, but the reality of His
+energy abides. The 'works' of wonder which Jesus did on earth may no
+more be done, but the greater works than these are still the sign of
+_His_ presence, without whom no spiritual life is possible.
+Prophecies may fail, tongues may cease, but the more excellent gifts
+are poured out now as richly as ever. We are apt to look back to
+Pentecost and think that that marked a height to which the tide has
+never reached since, and therefore we are stranded amidst the ooze
+and mud. But the river which proceeds from the throne of God and of
+the Lamb is not like one of our streams on earth, that leaps to the
+light and dashes rejoicingly down the hillside, but creeps along
+sluggish in its level course, and dies away at last in the sands. It
+pours along the ages the same full volume with which it gushed forth
+at first. Rather, the source goes with the Church in all ages, and
+we drink not of water that came forth long ago in the history of the
+world, and has reached us through the centuries, but of that which
+wells out fresh every moment from the Rock that follows us. The
+Giver of all power is with us.
+
+We have a Lord, the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever. 'Lo, I
+am with you alway, even to the end of the world.' We have not merely
+to look back to the life and death of Christ in history, and
+recognise there the work, the efficacy of which shall endure for
+ever. But whilst we do this, we have also to think of the Christ
+'that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also
+maketh intercession for us.' And the one thought, as the other,
+should strengthen our confidence in our possession of all the might
+that we need for bringing the world back to our Lord.
+
+A work in the past which can never be exhausted or lose its power is
+the theme of our message. The mists of gathering ages wrap in slowly
+thickening folds of forgetfulness all other men and events in
+history, and make them ghostlike and shadowy; but no distance has
+yet dimmed or will ever dim that human form divine. Other names are
+like those stars that blaze out for a while, and then smoulder down
+into almost complete invisibility; but He is the very Light itself,
+that burns and is not consumed. Other landmarks sink below the
+horizon as the tribes of men pursue their solemn march through the
+centuries, but the Cross on Calvary 'shall stand for an ensign of
+the people, and to it shall the Gentiles seek.' To proclaim that
+accomplished salvation, once for all lodged in the heart of the
+world's history, and henceforth for ever valid, is our unalterable
+duty. The message carries in itself its own immortal strength.
+
+A living Saviour in the present, who works with us, confirming the
+word with signs following, is the source of our power. Not till He is
+impotent shall we be weak. The unmeasurable measure of the gift of
+Christ defines the degree, and the unending duration of His life who
+continueth for ever sets the period, of our possession of the grace
+which is given to every one of us. He is ever bestowing. He never
+withdraws what He once gives. The fountain sinks not a hairs-breadth,
+though nineteen centuries have drawn from it. Modern astronomy begins
+to believe that the sun itself by long expense of light will be shorn
+of its beams and wander darkling in space, circled no more by its
+daughter planets. But this Sun of our souls rays out for ever the
+energies of life and light and love, and after all communication
+possesses the infinite fulness of them all. 'His name shall be
+continued as long as the sun; all nations shall call Him blessed.'
+
+Here then, brethren, are the perpetual elements of our constant
+power, an eternal Word, an abiding Spirit, an unchanging Lord.
+
+II. The condition of exercising this power is Faith.
+
+With such a force at our command--a force that could shake the
+mountains and break the rocks--how come we ever to fail? So the
+disciples asked, and Christ's answer cuts to the very heart of the
+matter. Why could you not cast him out? For one reason only, because
+you had lost your hold of My strength, and therefore had lost your
+confidence in your own derived power, or had forgotten that it was
+derived, and essayed to wield it as if it were your own. You did not
+trust Me, so you did not believe that you could cast him out; or you
+believed that you could by your own might, therefore you failed. He
+throws them back decisively on themselves as solely responsible.
+Nowhere else, in heaven or in earth or hell, but only in us, does
+the reason lie for our breakdown, if we have broken down. Not in
+God, who is ever with us, ready to make all grace abound in us,
+whose will is that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge
+of the truth; not in the gospel which we preach, for 'it is the
+power of God unto salvation'; not in the demon might which has
+overcome us, for 'greater is He that is in us than he that is in the
+world.' We are driven from all other explanations to the bitterest
+and yet the most hopeful of all, that we only are to blame.
+
+And what in us is to blame? Some of us will answer--Our modes of
+working; they have not been free enough, or not orderly enough, or
+in some way or other not wisely adapted to our ends. Some will
+answer--Our forms of presenting the truth; they have not been
+flexible enough, or not fixed enough; they have been too much a
+reproduction of the old; they have been too licentious a departure
+from the old. Some will answer--Our ecclesiastical arrangements;
+they have been too democratic; they have been too priestly. Some
+will answer--Our intellectual culture; it has been too great,
+obscuring the simplicity that is in Christ; it has been too small,
+sending poorly furnished men into the field to fight with ordered
+systems of idolatry which rest upon a philosophical basis, and can
+only be overturned by undermining that. It is no part of my present
+duty to discuss these varying answers. No doubt there is room for
+improvement in all the fields which they indicate. But does not the
+spirit of our Lord's words here beckon us away from these purely
+secondary subjects to fix our self-examination on the depth and
+strength of our faith, as incomparably the most important element in
+the conditions which determine our success or our failure? I do not
+undervalue the worth of wise methods of action, but the history of
+the Church tells us that pretty nearly any methods of action are
+fruitful in the right hands, and that without living faith the best
+of them become like the heavy armour which half-smothered a feeble
+man. I do not pretend to that sublime indifference to dogma which is
+the modern form of supreme devotion to truth, but experience has
+taught us that wherever the name of Christ, as the Saviour of the
+world, has been lovingly proclaimed, there devils have been cast
+out, whatever private and sectional doctrines the exerciser has
+added to it. I do not disparage organisation, but courage is more
+than drill; and there is such a thing as the very perfection of
+arrangement without life, like cabinets in a museum, where all the
+specimens are duly classified, and dead. I believe, with the old
+preacher, that if God does not need our learning, He needs our
+ignorance still less, but it is of comparatively little importance
+whether the draught of living water be brought to thirsty lips in an
+earthen cup or a golden vase.
+
+  'The main thing is, does it hold good measure?
+   Heaven soon sets right all other matters.'
+
+And therefore, while leaving full scope for all improvements in
+these subordinate conditions, let me urge upon you that the main
+thing which makes us strong for our Christian work is the grasp of
+living faith, which holds fast the strength of God. There is no need
+to plunge into the jungle of metaphysical theology here. Is it not a
+fact that the might with which the power of God has wrought for
+men's salvation has corresponded with the strength of the Church's
+desire and the purity of its trust in His power? Is it not a truth
+plainly spoken in Scripture and confirmed by experience, that we
+have the awful prerogative of limiting the Holy One of Israel, and
+quenching the Spirit? Was there not a time in Christ's life on earth
+when He could do no mighty works because of their unbelief? We
+receive all spiritual gifts in proportion to our capacity, and the
+chief factor in settling the measure of our capacity is our faith.
+Here on the one hand is the boundless ocean of the divine strength,
+unfathomable in its depth, full after all draughts, tideless and
+calm, in all its movement never troubled, in all its repose never
+stagnating; and on the other side is the empty aridity of our poor
+weak natures. Faith opens these to the influx of that great sea, and
+'according to our faith,' in the exact measure of our receptivity,
+does it enter our hearts. In itself the gift is boundless. It has no
+limit except the infinite fulness of the power which worketh in us.
+But in reference to our possession it is bounded by our capacity,
+and though that capacity enlarges by the very fact of being filled,
+and so every moment becomes greater through fruition, yet at each
+moment it is the measure of our possession, and our faith is the
+measure of our capacity. Our power is God's power in us, and our
+faith is the power with which we grasp God's power and make it ours.
+So then, in regard to God, our faith is the condition of our being
+strengthened with might by His Spirit.
+
+Consider, too, how the same faith has a natural operation on ourselves
+which tends to fit us for casting out the evil spirits. Given a man
+full of faith, you will have a man tenacious in purpose, absorbed in
+one grand object, simple in his motives, in whom selfishness has been
+driven out by the power of a mightier love, and indolence stirred into
+unwearied energy. Such a man will be made wise to devise, gentle to
+attract, bold to rebuke, fertile in expedients, and ready to be
+anything that may help the aim of his life. Fear will be dead in him,
+for faith is the true anaesthesia of the soul; and the knife may cut
+into the quivering flesh, and the spirit be scarce conscious of a pang.
+Love, ambition, and all the swarm of distracting desires will be
+driven from the soul in which the lamp of faith burns bright. Ordinary
+human motives will appeal in vain to the ears which have heard the
+tones of the heavenly music, and all the pomps of life will show poor
+and tawdry to the sight that has gazed on the vision of the great
+white throne and the crystal sea. The most ignorant and erroneous
+'religious sentiment'--to use a modern phrase--is mightier than all
+other forces in the world's history. It is like some of those terrible
+compounds of modern chemistry, an inert, innocuous-looking drop of
+liquid. Shake it, and it flames heaven high, shattering the rocks and
+ploughing up the soil. Put even an adulterated and carnalised faith
+into the hearts of a mob of wild Arabs, and in a century they will
+stream from their deserts, and blaze from the mountains of Spain to
+the plains of Bengal. Put a living faith in Christ and a heroic
+confidence in the power of His Gospel to reclaim the worst sinners
+into a man's heart, and he will out of weakness be made strong, and
+plough his way through obstacles with the compact force and crashing
+directness of lightning. There have been men of all sorts who have
+been honoured to do much in this world for Christ. Wise and foolish,
+learned and ignorant, differing in tone, temper, creed, forms of
+thought, and manner of working, in every conceivable degree; but one
+thing, and perhaps one thing only, they have all had--a passion of
+enthusiastic personal devotion to their Lord, a profound and living
+faith in Him and in His salvation. All in which they differed is but
+the gay gilding on the soldier's coat. That in which they were alike
+is as the strong arm which grasps the sword, and has its muscles
+braced by the very clutch. Faith is itself a source of strength, as
+well as the condition of drawing might from heaven.
+
+Consider, too, how faith has power over men who see it. The
+exhibition of our own personal convictions has more to do in
+spreading them than all the arguments which we use. There is a
+magnetism and a contagious energy in the sight of a brother's faith
+which few men can wholly resist. If you wish me to weep, your own
+tears must flow; and if you would have me believe, let me see your
+soul heaving under the emotion which you desire me to feel. The
+arrow may be keen and true, the shaft rounded and straight, the bow
+strong, and the arm sinewy; but unless the steel be winged it will
+fall to the ground long before it strikes the butt. Your arrows must
+be winged with faith, else orthodoxy, and wise arrangements, and
+force and zeal, will avail nothing. No man will believe in, and no
+demon will obey, spells which the would-be exorcist only half
+believes himself. Even if he speak the name of Christ, unless he
+speak it with unfaltering confidence, all the answer he will get
+will only be the fierce and taunting question, 'Jesus I know, and
+Paul I know, but who are ye?' Brethren, let us give heed to the
+solemn rebuke which our Master lovingly reads to us in these words,
+and while we aim at the utmost possible perfection in all
+subordinate matters, let us remember that they all without faith are
+weak, as an empty suit of armour with no life beneath the corselet;
+and that faith without them all is strong, like the knight of old,
+who rode into the bloody field in simple silken vest, and conquered.
+That which determines our success or failure in the work of our Lord
+is our faith.
+
+III. Our faith is ever threatened by subtle unbelief.
+
+It would appear that the disciples were ignorant of the unbelief
+that had made them weak. They fancied that they had confidence in
+their Christ-given power, and they certainly had in some dull kind
+of fashion expected to succeed in their attempt. But He who sees the
+heart knew that there was no real living confidence in their souls;
+and His words are a solemn warning to us all, of how possible it is
+for us to have our faith all honeycombed by gnawing doubt while we
+suspect it not, like some piece of wood apparently sound, the whole
+substance of which has been eaten away by hidden worms. We may be
+going on with Christian work, and may even be looking for spiritual
+results. We may fancy ourselves faithful stewards of the gospel, and
+all the while there may be an utter absence of the one thing which
+makes our words more than so much wind whistling through an archway.
+The shorn Samson went out 'to shake himself as at other times,' and
+knew not that the Spirit of the Lord had departed from him. Who
+among us is not exposed to the assaults of that pestilence that
+walketh in darkness? and, alas! who among us can say that he has
+repelled the contagion? Subtly it creeps over us all, the stealthy
+intangible vapour, unfelt till it has quenched the lamp which alone
+lights the darkness of the mine, and clogged to suffocation the
+labouring lungs.
+
+I will not now speak of the general sources of danger to our faith,
+which are always in operation with a retarding force as constant as
+friction, as certain as the gravitation which pulls the pendulum to
+rest at its lowest point. But I may very briefly particularise two
+of the enemies of that faith, which have a special bearing on our
+missionary work, and may be illustrated from the narrative before
+us.
+
+First, all our activity in spreading the Gospel, whether by personal
+effort or by our gifts, like every form of outward action, tends to
+become mechanical, and to lose its connection with the motive which
+originated it. Of course it is also true, on the other side, that
+all outward action also tends to strengthen the motive from which it
+flows. But our Christian work will not do so, unless it be carefully
+watched, and pains be taken to keep it from slipping off its
+original foundation, and so altering its whole character. We may
+very easily become so occupied with the mere external occupation as
+to be quite unconscious that it has ceased to be faithful work, and
+has become routine, dull mechanism, or the result of confidence, not
+in Christ, whose power once flowed through us, but in ourselves the
+doers. So these disciples may have thought, 'We can cast out this
+devil, for we have done the like already,' and have forgotten that
+it was not they, but Christ in them, who had done it.
+
+How widely this foe to our faith operates amid the multiplied
+activities of this busy age, one trembles to think. We see all
+around us a Church toiling with unexampled expenditure of wealth,
+and effort, and time. It is difficult to repress the suspicion that
+the work is out of proportion to the life. Ah, brethren, how much of
+all this energy of effort, so admirable in many respects, will He
+whose fan is in His hand accept as true service--how much of it will
+be wheat for the garner, how much chaff for the fire? It is not for
+us to divide between the two, but it is for us to remember that it
+is not impossible to make of our labours the most dangerous enemy to
+the depth of our still life hidden with Christ in God, and that
+every deed of apparent service which is not the real issue of living
+faith is powerless for good to others, and heavy with hurt to
+ourselves. Brethren and fathers in the ministry! how many of us know
+what it is to talk and toil away our early devotion; and all at once
+to discover that for years perhaps we have been preaching and
+labouring from mere habit and routine, like corpses galvanised into
+some ghastly and transient caricature of life. Christian men and
+women, beware lest this great enterprise of missions, which our
+fathers began from the holiest motives and in the simplest faith,
+should in our hand be wrenched away from its only true basis, and be
+done with languid expectation and more languid desires of success,
+from no higher motive than that we found it in existence, and have
+become accustomed to carry it on. If that be our reason, then we
+harm ourselves, and mask from our own sight our own unbelief. If
+that be the case the work may go on for a while, like a clock
+ticking with fainter and fainter beats for a minute after it has run
+down; but it will soon cease, and neither heaven nor earth will be
+much the poorer for its ending.
+
+Again, the atmosphere of scornful disbelief which surrounded the
+disciples made their faith falter. It was too weak to sustain itself
+in the face of the consciousness that not a man in all that crowd
+believed in their power; and it melted away before the contempt of
+the scribes and the incredulous curiosity of the bystanders, without
+any reason except the subtle influence which the opinions and
+characters of those around us have on us all.
+
+And, brethren, are not we in danger to-day of losing the firmness of
+our grasp on Christ, as our Saviour and the world's, from a
+precisely similar cause? We live in an atmosphere of hesitancy and
+doubt, of scornful rejection of His claims, of contemptuous
+disbelief in anything which a scalpel cannot cut. We cannot but be
+conscious that to hold by Jesus Christ as the Incarnate God, the
+supernatural Beginning of a new life, the sole Hope of the world, is
+to expose ourselves to the contempt of so-called advanced and
+liberal thinkers, and to be out of harmony with the prevailing set
+of opinions. The current of educated thought runs strongly against
+such beliefs, and I suppose that every thoughtful man among us feels
+that a great danger to our faith to-day comes from the force with
+which that current swings us round, and threatens to make some of us
+drag our anchors, and drift, and strike and go to pieces on the
+sands. For one man who is led by the sheer force of reason to yield
+to the intellectual grounds on which modern unbelief reposes, there
+are twenty who simply catch the infection in the atmosphere. They
+find that their early convictions have evaporated, they know not
+how; only that once the fleece was wet with dew and now it is dry.
+For unbelief has a contagious energy wholly independent of reason,
+no less than has faith, and affects multitudes who know nothing of
+its grounds, as the iceberg chills the summer air for leagues, and
+makes the sailors shiver long before they see its barren peaks.
+
+Therefore, brethren, let us all take heed to ourselves, lest we
+suffer our grasp of our dear Lord's hand to relax for no better
+reason than because so many have left His side. To us all His
+pleading love, which knows how much we are moulded by the example of
+others, is saying, in view of the fashion of unbelief, 'Will ye also
+go away?' Let us answer, with a clasp that clings the tighter for
+our danger of being sucked in by the strong current, 'Lord, to whom
+shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.' We cannot help
+seeing that the creeping paralysis of hesitancy and doubt about even
+the power of Christ's name is stealing over portions of the Church,
+and stiffening the arm of its activity. Lips that once spoke with
+full confidence the words that cast out devils, mutter them now
+languidly with half-belief. Hearts that were once full of sympathy
+with the great purpose for which Christ died are growing cold to the
+work of preaching the Gospel to the heathen, because they are
+growing to doubt whether, after all, there is any Gospel at all.
+This icy breath, dear brethren, is blowing over our Churches and
+over our hearts. And wherever it reaches, there labour for Jesus and
+for men languishes, and we recoil baffled with unavailing exorcisms
+dying in our throats, and the rod of our power broken in our hands.
+'Why could not we cast him out? Because of your unbelief.'
+
+IV. Our faith can only be maintained by constant devotion and rigid
+self-denial.
+
+I can touch but very lightly on that solemn thought in which our Lord
+sets forth the condition of our faith, and therefore of our power.
+This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting. The discipline
+then which nurtures faith is mainly moral and spiritual--not as a
+substitute for, or to the exclusion of, the intellectual discipline,
+which is presupposed, not neglected, in these words.
+
+The first condition of the freshness and energy of faith is constant
+devotion. The attrition of the world wears it thin, the distractions
+of life draw it from its clinging hold on Christ, the very toil for
+Him is apt to entice our thoughts from out of the secret place of
+the most High into the busy arena of our strife. Therefore we have
+ever need to refresh the drooping flowers of the chaplet by bathing
+them in the Fountain of Life, to rise above all the fevered toil of
+earth to the calm heights where God dwells, and in still communion
+with Him to replenish our emptied vessels and fill our dimly burning
+lamps with His golden oil. The sister of the cumbered Martha is the
+contemplative Mary, who sits in silence at the Master's feet and
+lets His words sink into her soul; the closest friend of Peter the
+apostle of action is John the apostle of love. If our work is to be
+worthy, it must ever be freshened anew by our gaze into His face; if
+our communion with Him is to be deep, it must never be parted from
+outward service. Our Master has left us the example, in that, when
+the night fell and every man went to his own home, Jesus went to the
+Mount of Olives; and thence, after His night of prayer, came very
+early in the morning to the temple, and taught. The stream that is
+to flow broad and life-giving through many lands must have its
+hidden source high among the pure snows that cap the mount of God.
+The man that would work for God must live with God. It was from the
+height of transfiguration that _He_ came, before whom the demon
+that baffled the disciples quailed and slunk away like a whipped
+hound. This kind goeth not out but by prayer.
+
+The second condition is rigid self-denial. Fasting is the expression
+of the purpose to control the lower life, and to abstain from its
+delights in order that the life of the spirit may be strengthened.
+As to the outward fact, it is nothing--it may be practised or not.
+If it be, it will be valuable only in so far as it flows from and
+strengthens that purpose. And such vigorous subordination of all
+the lower powers, and abstinence from many an inferior good, both
+material and immaterial, is absolutely necessary if we are to have
+any wholesome strength of faith in our souls. In the recoil from
+the false asceticism of Roman Catholicism and Puritanism, has not
+this generation of the Church gone too far in the opposite
+direction? and in the true belief that Christianity can sanctify
+all joys, and ensure the harmonious development of all our powers,
+have we not been forgetting that hand and foot may cause us to
+stumble, and that we had better live maimed than die with all our
+limbs? There is a true asceticism, a discipline--a 'gymnastic unto
+godliness,' as Paul calls it. And if our faith is to grow high and
+bear rich clusters on the topmost boughs that look up to the sky,
+we must keep the wild lower shoots close nipped. Without rigid
+self-control and self-limitation, no vigorous faith.
+
+And without them no effectual work! It is no holiday task to cast
+out devils. Self-indulgent men will never do it. Loose-braced, easy
+souls, that lie open to all the pleasurable influences of ordinary
+life, are no more fit for God's weapons than a reed for a lance, or
+a bit of flexible lead for a spear-point. The wood must be tough and
+compact, the metal hard and close-grained, out of which God makes
+His shafts. The brand that is to guide men through the darkness to
+their Father's home must glow with a pallor of consuming flame that
+purges its whole substance into light. This kind goeth not out but
+by prayer and fasting.
+
+Dear brethren, what solemn rebuke these words have for us all! How
+they winnow our works of Christian activity! How they show us the
+hollowness of our services, the self-indulgence of our lives, the
+coldness of our devotion, the cowardice of our faith! How marvellous
+they make the fruits which God's great goodness has permitted us to
+see even from our doubting service! Let us turn to Him with fresh
+thankfulness that unto us, who are 'less than the least of all
+saints, is this grace given, that we should preach among the nations
+the unsearchable riches of Christ.' Let us not be driven from our
+confidence that we have a gospel to preach for all the world; but
+strong in the faith which rests on impregnable historical grounds,
+on our own experience of what Christ has done for us, and on
+nineteen centuries of growing power and unfolding wisdom, let us
+thankfully welcome all that modern thought may supply for the
+correction of errors in belief, in organisation, and in life, that
+may have gathered round His perfect and eternal gospel--being
+assured, as we have a right to be, that all will but lift higher the
+Name which is above every name, and set forth more plainly that
+Cross which is the true tree of life to all the families of men. Let
+us cast ourselves before Him with penitent confession, and say,--O
+Lord, our strength! we have not wrought any deliverance on earth; we
+have been weak when all Thy power was at our command; we have spoken
+Thy word as if it were an experiment and a peradventure whether it
+had might; we have let go Thy hand and lost Thy garment's hem from
+our slack grasp; we have been prayerless and self-indulgent.
+Therefore Thou hast put us to shame before our foes, and 'our
+enemies laugh among themselves. Thou that dwellest between the
+cherubim, shine forth; stir up Thy strength and come and save us!'
+Then will the last words that He spoke on earth ring out again from
+the throne: 'All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth. Go
+ye therefore and teach all nations; and lo, I am with you alway,
+even unto the end of the world.'
+
+
+
+
+THE COIN IN THE FISH'S MOUTH
+
+
+    'And when he was come into the house, Jesus prevented
+    him, saying, What thinkest them, Simon? of whom do the
+    kings of the earth take custom or tribute? of their own
+    children, or of strangers? 26. Peter saith unto Him, Of
+    strangers. Jesus saith unto him, Then are the children
+    free.'--MATT. xvii. 25, 26.
+
+All our Lord's miracles are 'signs' as well as 'wonders.' They have
+a meaning. They not only authenticate His teaching, but they are
+themselves no inconsiderable portion of the teaching. They are not
+only 'the great bell before His sermon,' but they are also a portion
+of the sermon.
+
+That doctrinal or dogmatic purpose characterises all the miracles in
+varying degrees. It is the only purpose of the one before us. This
+singular miracle of finding the coin in the fish's mouth and giving
+it for the tribute-money is unlike our Lord's other works in several
+particulars. It is the only miracle--with the exception of the
+cursing of the barren fig-tree, and the episode of the unclean
+spirits entering into the swine--in which there is no message of
+love or blessing for man's sorrow and pain. It is the only miracle
+in which our Lord uses His power for His own service or help, and it
+is like the whole brood of legendary miracles, and unlike all the
+rest of Christ's in that, at first sight, it seems done for a very
+trivial end--the providing of some three shillings of our money.
+
+Now, if we put all these things together, the absence of any
+alleviation of man's sorrow, the presence of a personal end, and the
+apparent triviality of the result secured, I think we shall see that
+the only explanation of the miracle is given by regarding it as
+being what I may call a teaching one, full of instruction with
+regard to our Lord's character, person, and work. It is a parable as
+well as a miracle, and it is in that aspect that I wish to look at
+it now, and try to bring out its lessons.
+
+I. We have here, first, the freedom of the Son.
+
+The whole point of the story depends upon the fact that this
+tribute-money was not a civil, but an ecclesiastical impost. It had
+originally been levied in the Wilderness, at the time of the
+numbering of the people, and was enjoined to be repeated at each
+census, when every male Israelite was to pay half a shekel for 'a
+ransom for his soul,' an acknowledgment that his life was forfeited
+by sin. In later years it came to be levied as an annual payment for
+the support of the temple and its ceremonial. It was never
+compulsory, there was no power to exact it. The question of the
+collectors, 'Doth not your Master pay tribute?' does not sound like
+the imperative demand which a 'publican' would have made for payment
+of an impost due to the Roman Government. It was an 'optional
+church-rate,' and the very fact that it was so, would make Jews who
+were, or wished to be considered, patriotic or religious, the more
+punctilious in paying it.
+
+The question put to Peter possibly implies a doubt whether this
+Rabbi, who held lax views on so many points of Pharisaical
+righteousness, would be likely to recognise the obligation of the
+tax. Peter's quick answer seems to be prompted by zeal for his
+Master's honour, on which the question appears to him to cast a
+slur. It was perhaps too quick, but the apostle has been too much
+blamed for his answer, which was in fact correct, and for which our
+Lord does not blame him. When he comes to Christ to tell what has
+happened, before he can speak, Christ puts to him this little
+parable which I have taken as part of my text: 'How thinkest thou?
+Do kings of this world take custom?'--meaning thereby not imports or
+exports, but taxes of all kinds of things,--'or tribute,'--meaning
+thereby taxes on persons--'from their own children, or from subjects
+who are not their children?' The answer, of course, is, 'From the
+latter.' So the answer comes, 'Then are the children free.'
+
+Christ then here claims in some sense, Sonship to Him to whom the
+tribute is paid, that is, to God, and therefore freedom from the
+obligation to pay the tribute. But notice, for this is an important
+point in the explanation of the words, that the plural in our Lord's
+words, 'Then are the children free,' is not intended to include
+Peter and the others in the same category as Himself. The only
+question in hand is as to His obligation to pay a certain tax; and
+to include any one else would have been irrelevant, as well as
+erroneous. The plural belongs to the illustration, not to its
+application, and corresponds with the plural in the question, 'Of
+whom do the _kings_ of the earth take custom?' The kings of the
+earth are contrasted with the one King of the heavens, the supreme
+and sole Sovereign; and the children of the kings of the earth are
+contrasted with the only begotten Son of the only King of kings and
+Lord of lords.
+
+So that here there is no mixing up of Himself with others, or of
+others with Himself, but the claiming of an unique position,
+singular and sole, belonging to Him only, in which He stands as the
+Son of the mighty Monarch to whom the tribute is paid. He claims to
+have the divine nature, the divine prerogatives, to bear a specific
+relationship to God Himself, and to be, as other words in Scripture
+put it, 'the brightness of the Father's glory and the express image
+of His person.'
+
+If there is anything certain about Jesus Christ's teaching, this is
+certain about it, that He proclaimed Himself to be the Son of God,
+in such a sense as no man shared with Him, and in such a sense as
+vindicated the attitude which He took up, the demands which He made,
+and the gifts which He offered to men.
+
+What a deduction must be made from the wisdom of His teaching, and
+from the meekness of His Spirit, if that claim was an illusion! What
+shall we say of the sanity of a man who poses himself before the
+whole race, claiming to be the Son of God, and whose continual
+teaching to them therefore is, _not_, 'Believe in goodness';
+'Believe in virtue'; 'Believe in truth'; 'Believe in My word'; but
+'Believe in Me'? Was there ever anywhere else a religious teacher,
+all of whose words were gracious and wise and sweet, but who--
+
+  'Make the important stumble,
+   Of saying that he, the sage and humble,
+   Was likewise--one with the Creator'?
+
+But now what is the freedom based on sonship which our Lord here
+claims?
+
+I have said that this tax was levied with a double meaning; first,
+it was an atonement or ransom for the soul; second, it was devoted
+to the temple and its worship. And now, mark, that in both these
+aspects our Lord alleges His true sonship as the reason why He is
+exempt from it.
+
+That is to say, first, Jesus Christ claims to have no need of a
+ransom for His soul. Never one word dropped from His lips which
+indicated the smallest consciousness of flaw or failure, of defect
+or imperfection, still less of actual transgression. He takes His
+position outside the circle of sinful men which includes all others.
+It is a strange characteristic in a religious teacher, very unlike
+the usual tone of devout men. And stranger still is the fact that
+the absence of this consciousness of evil has never been felt to be
+itself evil and a blot. Think of a David's agony of penitence. Think
+of a Paul's, 'Of whom I am chief!' Think of the long wail of an
+Augustine's confessions. Think of the stormy self-accusations of a
+Luther; and then think that He who inspired them all, never, by word
+or deed, betrayed the slightest consciousness that in Himself there
+was the smallest deflection from the perfect line of right, the
+least speck or stain on the perfect gold of His purity. And
+remember, too, that when He challenges the world with, 'Which of you
+convinceth Me of sin?' with the exception of half a dozen men, of
+whom we can scarcely say whether their want of spiritual insight or
+their arrogance of self-importance is the most flagrant, who, in the
+course of nineteen centuries, have ventured to fling their little
+handfuls of mud at Him, the whole world has answered, 'Thou art
+fairer than the children of men; grace is poured into Thy lips.'
+
+The Son needs no 'ransom for His soul,' which, being translated, is
+but this: the purity and the innocence of Jesus Christ, which is a
+manifest fact in His biography, is only explicable when we believe
+that we have before us the Incarnate God, and therefore the Perfect
+Man. And the Son needs no temple for His worship. His whole life, as
+human, was a life of communion and prayer with His Father in heaven.
+And just because He 'dwelt in' God's 'bosom all the year,' for Him
+ritual and temple were nought. Sense-bound men needed them; He
+needed them not. 'In this place,' said He, 'is one greater than the
+temple.' He was all which the temple symbolised. Was it the
+dwelling-place of God, the place of sacrifice, the meeting-place of
+man with God, the place of divine manifestation? 'The temple of His
+body' was in deepest reality all these. In it dwelt the whole
+fulness of the Godhead. It was at once sacrifice and place of
+sacrifice, even as He is the true everlasting Priest. In Him men see
+God, and meet with God. He is greater than the temple because He is
+the true temple, and He is the true temple because He is the Son.
+And because He is the Son, therefore He is free from all dependence
+upon, and connection with, the outward worship of ceremony and
+sacrifice and priest and ritual.
+
+Now, dear brethren, let me pause for one moment to press upon you
+and upon myself this question: Do I welcome that Christ with the
+full conviction that He is the Son of God? It seems to me that, in
+this generation, the question of questions, as far as religion is
+concerned, is the old one which Christ asked of His disciples by the
+fountains and woods of Caesarea Philippi: 'Whom say ye that I, the
+Son of Man, am?' Can you lift up your face to meet His clear and
+all-searching eye, and say: 'Thou art the Christ, the Son of the
+living God'? If you can, you are on the way to understanding Him and
+His work; if you cannot, His life and work are all wrapped in
+darkness for you, His death robbed of its truest power, and your
+life deprived of its surest anchor.
+
+II. Now, there is a second lesson that I would gather from this
+miracle--the voluntary submission of the Son to the bonds from which
+He is free.
+
+He bids His disciple pay the tribute for Him, for a specific reason:
+'Lest we should offend them.' That, of course, is simply a piece of
+practical wisdom, to prevent any narrow or purblind souls from
+stumbling at His teaching, by reason of His neglect of this trivial
+matter. The question of how far religious teachers or any others are
+at liberty, when they are not actuated by personal motives, to
+render compliance with ceremonies which are of no value to them, is
+a wide one, which I have no need to dwell upon here. But, turning
+from that specific aspect of the incident, I think we may look upon
+it as being an illustration, in regard to a very small matter, of
+what is really the essence of our Lord's relation to the whole world
+and ourselves--His voluntary taking upon Himself of bonds from which
+He is free.
+
+Is it not a symbol of the very heart of the meaning of His
+Incarnation? 'For as much as the children are partakers of flesh and
+blood He also Himself likewise takes part of the same.' 'He is found
+in fashion as a man.' He chooses to enter within the limits and the
+obligations of humanity. Round the radiant glories of the divinity,
+He gathers the folds of the veil of human flesh. He immerses the
+pillar of fire in a cloud of smoke. He comes amongst us, taking on
+His own wrists the fetters that bind us, suffering Himself to be
+'cribbed, cabined, and confined' within the narrow limits of our
+manhood, in order that by His voluntary acceptance of it we may be
+redeemed from our corruption.
+
+Is it not a parable of His life and lowly obedience? He proclaimed
+the same principle as the guide for all His conduct, when, sinless,
+He presented Himself to John for the 'baptism of repentance,' and
+overcame the baptiser's scruples with the words, 'Thus it becometh
+us to fulfil all righteousness.' He comes under the law. Bound to no
+such service, He binds Himself to all human duties that He may
+hallow the bonds which He has worn, may set us the pattern of
+perfect obedience, and may know a servant's heart.
+
+The Prince is free, but King's Son though He be, He goes among His
+Father's poor subjects, lives their squalid lives, makes experience
+of their poverty, and hardens His hands by labouring like them.
+Sympathy He 'learned in huts where poor men lie.'
+
+Is it not the rehearsal in parable of His death? He was free from
+the bonds of mortality, and He took upon Him our human flesh. He was
+free from the necessity of death, even after He had taken our flesh
+upon Him. But, being free from the necessity, He submitted to the
+actuality, and laid down His life of Himself, because of His loving
+will, to save and help each of us. Oh, dear friends! we never can
+understand the meaning and the beauty, either of the life or of the
+death of our Master, unless we look at each from this point of view,
+that it is His willing acceptance of the bonds that bind us. His own
+loving will brought Him here; His own loving will kept Him here; His
+own loving will impelled Him along the path of life, though at every
+step of it He trod as with naked feet upon burning iron; His own
+loving Will brought Him to the Cross; His own loving will, and not
+the Roman soldiers' nails, fastened Him to it. Let us look, then, to
+Him with thankfulness, and recognise in that death His thorough
+identification with all the bonds and miseries of our condition. He
+'took part of the same that through death He might deliver them that
+by fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.'
+
+III. Then there is another lesson which I think we may fairly gather
+from this miracle, viz. that we have here the supernatural glory
+which ever accompanies the humiliation of the Son.
+
+The miracle, at first sight, appears to be for a very trivial end.
+Men have made merry with it by reason of that very triviality. But
+the miracle is vindicated, peculiar as it is, by a deep divine
+congruity and decorum. He will submit, Son though He be, to this
+complete identification of Himself with us. But He will so submit
+as, even in submitting, to assert His divine dignity. As has been
+well said, 'In the midst of the act of submission majesty flashes
+forth.' A multiform miracle--containing many miracles in one--a
+miracle of omniscience, and a miracle of influence over the lower
+creatures is wrought. The first fish that rises carries in its mouth
+the exact sum needed.
+
+Here, therefore, we have another illustration of that remarkable
+blending of humiliation and glory, which is a characteristic of our
+Lord's life. These two strands are always twined together, like a
+twisted line of gold and black. At each moment of special abasement
+there is some special coruscation of the brightness of His glory.
+Whensoever He stoops there is something accompanying the stooping,
+to tell how great and how merciful He is who bows. Out of the
+deepest darkness there flashes some light. So at His cradle, which
+seems to be the identifying of Him with humanity in its most
+helpless and lowest condition, there shall be angels, and the stars
+in their courses shall bow and move to guide wise men from afar with
+offerings to His feet. And at His Cross, where He sounds the very
+bass string and touches the lowest point of humiliation and defeat,
+a clearer vision sees in that humiliation the highest glory.
+
+And thus, here, He will not only identify Himself with sinful men
+who need a ransom, and with sense-bound men who need a sacrifice and
+a temple, but He will so identify Himself with them as that He shall
+send His power into the recesses of the lake, where His knowledge
+sees, as clearly as our eyes see the men that stand beside us, and
+obedient to an unconscious impulse from Him, the dumb creature that
+had swallowed, as it sunk, the shining _stater_ that had
+dropped out of the girdle of some fisherman, shall rise first to the
+hook; in token that not only in His Father's house does He rule as a
+Son over His own house, but that He 'doeth as He hath pleased, in
+all deep places,' and that in Him the ancient hope is fulfilled of a
+Son of Man who 'hath dominion over the fish of the sea, and
+whatsoever passeth through the paths of the sea.' The miracle was
+for a trivial end in appearance, but it was a demonstration, though
+to one man only at first, yet through him to all the world, that
+this Christ, in His lowliness, is the Everlasting Son of the Father.
+
+IV. And so, lastly, we have here also the lesson of the sufficiency
+for us all of what He provides.
+
+'That take, and give unto them for Me and for thee. He does not say
+'_For us._' He and Peter do not stand on the game level. He has
+chosen to submit Himself to the obligations, Peter was necessarily
+under them. That which is found by miracle in the fish's mouth is
+precisely the amount required for both the one and the other. It is
+rendered, as the original has it, _'Instead of_ thee and Me,'
+putting emphasis upon the characteristic of the tribute as being
+ransom, or payment, for a man's soul.
+
+And so, although this thought is not part of the original purpose of
+the miracle, and, therefore, is different from those which I have
+already been dwelling on, which are part of that purpose, I think we
+may fairly see here this great truth,--that that which Christ brings
+to us by supernatural act, far greater than the miracle here, is
+enough for all the claims and obligations that God, or man, or law,
+or conscience have upon any of us. His perfect obedience and
+stainless life discharged for Himself all the obligations to law and
+righteousness under which He came as a Man; His perfect life and His
+mighty death are for us the full discharge of all that can be
+brought against us.
+
+There are many and solemn claims and claimants upon each of us. Law
+and duty, that awful 'ought' which should rule our lives and which
+we have broken thousands of times, come to each of us in many an
+hour of clear vision, and take us by the throat, and say, 'Pay us
+what thou owest!' And there is a Judgment Day before all of us;
+which is no mere bugbear to frighten children, but will be a fact of
+experience in our case. Friend! how are you going to meet your
+obligations? You owe God all your love, all your heart, will,
+strength, service. What an awful score of unpaid debts, with
+accumulated interest, there stands against each of our names! Think
+of some bankrupt sitting in his counting-house with a balance-sheet
+before him that shows his hopeless insolvency. He sits and broods,
+and broods, and does not know what in the world he is going to do.
+The door opens--a messenger enters and gives him an envelope. He
+tears it open, and there flutters out a cheque that more than pays
+it all. The illustration is a very low one; it does not cover the
+whole ground of Christ's work for you. It puts a possibly commercial
+aspect into it, which we have to take care of lest it become the
+exclusive one; but it is true for all that. You are the bankrupt.
+What have you to pay? Oh, behold that precious treasure of gold
+tried in the fire, which is Christ's righteousness and Christ's
+death; and by faith in Him, '_that_ take and give' and all the
+debt will be discharged, and you will be set free and made a son by
+that Son who has taken upon Himself all our bonds, and so has broken
+them; who has taken upon Himself all our debts, and so has cancelled
+them every one.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE
+
+ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D., Litt. D.
+
+
+ST. MATTHEW
+
+_Chaps. XVIII to XXVIII_
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+THE LAW OF PRECEDENCE IN THE KINGDOM (Matt. xviii. 1-14)
+
+SELF-MUTILATION FOR SELF-PRESERVATION (Matt. xviii. 8, R.V.)
+
+THE LOST SHEEP AND THE SEEKING SHEPHERD (Matt. xviii. 12)
+
+THE PERSISTENCE OF THWARTED LOVE (Matt. xviii. 13; Luke xv. 4)
+
+FORGIVEN AND UNFORGIVING (Matt. xviii. 22)
+
+THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE KING (Matt. xix. 16-26)
+
+NEAREST TO CHRIST (Matt. xx. 23)
+
+THE SERVANT-LORD AND HIS SERVANTS (Matt. xx. 28)
+
+WHAT THE HISTORIC CHRIST TAUGHT ABOUT HIS DEATH (Matt. xx. 28)
+
+THE COMING OF THE KING TO HIS PALACE (Matt. xxi. 1-16)
+
+A NEW KIND OF KING (Matt. xxi. 4, 5)
+
+THE VINEYARD AND ITS KEEPERS (Matt. xxi. 33-46)
+
+THE STONE OF STUMBLING (Matt. xxi. 44)
+
+TWO WAYS OF DESPISING GOD'S FEAST (Matt. xxii. 1-14)
+
+THE TABLES TURNED: THE QUESTIONERS QUESTIONED (Matt. xxii. 34-46)
+
+THE KING'S FAREWELL (Matt. xxiii. 27-39)
+
+TWO FORMS OF ONE SAYING (Matt. xxiv. 13, R.V.; Luke xxi. 19)
+
+THE CARRION AND THE VULTURES (Matt. xxiv. 28)
+
+WATCHING FOR THE KING (Matt. xxiv. 42-51)
+
+THE WAITING MAIDENS (Matt. xxv. 1-13)
+
+DYING LAMPS (Matt. xxv. 8)
+
+'THEY THAT WERE READY' (Matt. xxv. 10)
+
+TRADERS FOR THE MASTER (Matt. xxv. 14-30)
+
+WHY THE TALENT WAS BURIED (Matt. xxv. 24, 25)
+
+THE KING ON HIS JUDGMENT THRONE (Matt. xxv. 31-46)
+
+THB DEFENCE OF UNCALCULATING LOVE (Matt. xxvi. 6-16)
+
+THE NEW PASSOVER (Matt. xxvi. 17-30)
+
+'IS IT I?' (Matt. xxvi. 22, 25; John xiii. 25)
+
+'THIS CUP' (Matt. xxvi. 27, 28)
+
+'UNTIL THAT DAY' (Matt. xxvi. 29)
+
+GETHSEMANE, THE OIL-PRESS (Matt. xxvi. 36-46)
+
+THE LAST PLEADING OF LOVE (Matt. xxvi. 50)
+
+THE REAL HIGH PRIEST AND HIS COUNTERFEIT (Matt. xxvi. 57-68)
+
+JESUS CHARGED WITH BLASPHEMY (Matt. xxvi. 35)
+
+'SEE THOU TO THAT!' (Matt. xxvii. 4, 24)
+
+THE SENTENCE WHICH CONDEMNED THE JUDGES (Matt. xxvii. 11-26)
+
+THE CRUCIFIXION (Matt. xxvii. 33-50)
+
+THE BLIND WATCHERS AT THE CROSS (MATT. xxvii. 36)
+
+TAUNTS TURNING TO TESTIMONIES (Matt. xxvii. 41-43)
+
+THE VEIL RENT (Matt. xxvii. 51)
+
+THE PRINCE OF LIFE (Matt. xxviii. 1-15)
+
+THE RISEN LORD'S GREETINGS AND GIFTS (Matt. xxviii. 9; John xx. 19)
+
+ON THE MOUNTAIN (Matt. xxviii, 16, 17; 1 Cor. xv. 6)
+
+
+
+
+THE LAW OF PRECEDENCE IN THE KINGDOM
+
+
+    'At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus,
+    saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?
+    2. And Jesus called a little child unto Him, and set
+    him in the midst of them, 3. And said, Verily I say
+    unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little
+    children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.
+    4. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this
+    little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of
+    heaven. 5. And whoso shall receive one such little
+    child in My name receiveth Me. 6. But whoso shall
+    offend one of these little ones which believe in Me,
+    it were better for him that a millstone were hanged
+    about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth
+    of the sea. 7. Woe unto the world because of offences!
+    for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to
+    that man by whom the offence cometh! 8. Wherefore if
+    thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and
+    cast them from thee; it is better for thee to enter
+    into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands
+    or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. 9. And
+    if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it
+    from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life
+    with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast
+    into hell fire. 10. Take heed that ye despise not one
+    of these little ones; for I say unto you, That in
+    heaven their angels do always behold the face of My
+    Father which is in heaven. 11. For the Son of Man is
+    come to save that which was lost. 12. How think ye? if
+    a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone
+    astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and
+    goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is
+    gone astray? 13. And if so be that he find it, verily
+    I say unto you, he rejoiceth more of that sheep, than
+    of the ninety and nine which went not astray. 14. Even
+    so it is not the will of your Father which is in
+    heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.'
+    --MATT. xviii. 1-14.
+
+Mark tells us that the disciples, as they journeyed, had been
+squabbling about pre-eminence in the kingdom, and that this
+conversation was brought on by our Lord's question as to the subject
+of their dispute. It seems at first sight to argue singular
+insensibility that the first effect of His reiterated announcement
+of His sufferings should have been their quarrelling for the lead;
+but their behaviour is intelligible if we suppose that they regarded
+the half-understood prophecies of His passion as indicating the
+commencement of the short conflict which was to end in His Messianic
+reign. So it was time for them to be getting ready and settling
+precedence. The form of their question, in Matthew, connects it with
+the miracle of the coin in the fish's mouth, in which there was a
+very plain assertion of Christ's royal dignity, and a distinguishing
+honour given to Peter. Probably the 'then' of the question means,
+Since Peter is thus selected, are we to look to him as foremost?
+Their conception of the kingdom and of rank in it is frankly and
+entirely earthly. There are to be graded dignities, and these are to
+depend on His mere will. Our Lord not only answers the letter of
+their question, but cuts at the root of the temper which inspired
+it.
+
+I. He shows the conditions of entrance into and eminence in His
+kingdom by a living example. There were always children at hand
+round Him, when He wanted them. Their quick instinct for pure and
+loving souls drew them to Him; and this little one was not afraid to
+be taken by the hand, and to be afterwards caught up in His arms,
+and pressed to His heart. One does not wonder that the legend that
+he was Ignatius the martyr should have been current; for surely the
+remembrance of that tender clasping arm and gentle breast would not
+fade nor be fruitless. The disciples had made very sure that they
+were to be in the kingdom, and that the only question concerning
+them was how high up in it they were each to be. Christ's answer is
+like a dash of cold water to that confidence. It is, in effect,
+'Greatest in the kingdom! Make sure that you go in at all, first;
+which you will never do, so long as you keep your present ambitious
+minds.'
+
+Verse 3 lays down the condition of entrance into the kingdom, from
+which necessarily follows the condition of supremacy in it. What a
+child is naturally, and without effort or merit, by reason of age
+and position, we must become, if we are to pass the narrow portal
+which admits into the large room. That 'becoming' is impossible
+without a revolution in us. 'Be converted' is corrected, in the
+Revised Version, into 'turn,' and rightly; for there is in the word
+a distinct reference to the temper of the disciples as displayed by
+their question. As long as they cherished it they could not even get
+inside, to say nothing of winning promotion to dignities in the
+kingdom. Their very question condemned them as incapable of
+entrance. So there must be a radical change, not unaccompanied, of
+course, with repentance, but mainly consisting in the substitution
+of the child's temper for theirs. What is the temper thus enjoined?
+We are to see here neither the entirely modern and shallow
+sentimental way of looking at childhood, in which popular writers
+indulge, nor the doctrine of its innocence. It is not Christ's
+teaching, either that children are innocent, or that men enter the
+kingdom by making themselves so. But the child is, by its very
+position, lowly and modest, and makes no claims, and lives by
+instinctive confidence, and does not care about honours, and has
+these qualities which in us are virtues, and is not puffed up by
+possessing them. That is the ideal which is realised more generally
+in the child than analogous ideals are in mature manhood. Such
+simplicity, modesty, humility, must be ours. We must be made small
+ere we can enter that door. And as is the requirement for entrance,
+so is it for eminence. The child does not humble himself, but is
+humble by nature; but we must humble ourselves if we would be great.
+
+Christ implies that there are degrees in the kingdom. It has a
+nobility, but of such a kind that there may be many greatest; for
+the principle of rank there is lowliness. We rise by sinking. The
+deeper our consciousness of our own unworthiness and weakness, the
+more capable are we of receiving the divine gifts, and therefore the
+more fully shall we receive them. Rivers run in the hollows; the
+mountain-tops are dry. God works with broken reeds, and the princes
+in His realm are beggars taken from the dunghill. A lowliness which
+made itself lowly for the sake of eminence would miss its aim, for
+it would not be lowliness. The desire to be foremost must be cast
+out, in order that it may be fulfilled.
+
+II. The question has been answered, and our Lord passes to other
+thoughts rising out of His answer. Verses 5 and 6 set forth
+antithetically our duties to His little ones. He is not now speaking
+of the child who served as a living parable to answer the question,
+but of men who have made themselves like the child, as is plain from
+the emphatic 'one _such_ child,' and from verse 6 ('which
+_believe_ on Me').
+
+The subject, then, of these verses is the blessedness of recognising
+and welcoming Christlike lowly believers, and the fatal effect of
+the opposite conduct. To 'receive one such little child in My name'
+is just to have a sympathetic appreciation of, and to be ready to
+welcome to heart and home, those who are lowly in their own and in
+the world's estimate, but princes of Christ's court and kingdom.
+Such welcome and furtherance will only be given by one who himself
+has the same type of character in some degree. He who honours and
+admires a certain kind of excellence has the roots of it in himself.
+A possible artist lies in him who thrills at the sight or hearing of
+fair things painted or sung. Our admiration is an index of our
+aspiration, and our aspiration is a prophecy of our attainment. So
+it will be a little one's heart which will welcome the little ones,
+and a lover of Christ who receives them in His name. The reception
+includes all forms of sympathy and aid. 'In My name' is equivalent
+to 'for the sake of My revealed character,' and refers both to the
+receiver and to the received. The blessedness of such reception, so
+far as the receiver is concerned, is not merely that he thereby
+comes into happy relations with Christ's foremost servants, but that
+he gets Christ Himself into his heart. If with true appreciation of
+the beauty of such a childlike disposition, I open my heart or my
+hand to its possessor, I do thereby enlarge my capacity for my own
+possession of Christ, who dwells in His child, and who comes with
+him where He is welcomed. There is no surer way of securing Him for
+our own than the loving reception of His children. Whoso lodges the
+King's favourites will not be left unvisited by the King. To
+recognise and reverence the greatest in the kingdom is to be oneself
+a member of their company, and a sharer in their prerogatives.
+
+On the other hand, the antithesis of 'receiving' is 'causing to
+stumble,' by which is meant giving occasion for moral fall. That
+would be done by contests about pre-eminence, by arrogance, by
+non-recognition. The atmosphere of carnality and selfishness in
+which the disciples were moving, as their question showed, would
+stifle the tender life of any lowly believer who found himself in
+it; and they were not only injuring themselves, but becoming
+stumbling-blocks to others, by their ambition. How much of the
+present life of average Christians is condemned on the same
+ground! It is a good test of our Christian character to ask--would
+it help or hinder a lowly believer to live beside us? How many
+professing Christians are really, though unconsciously, doing
+their utmost to pull down their more Christlike brethren to their
+own low level! The worldliness and selfish ambitions of the Church
+are responsible for the stumbling of many who would else have been
+of Christ's 'little ones.' But perhaps we are rather to think of
+deliberate and consciously laid stumbling-blocks. Knowingly to try
+to make a good man fall, or to stain a more than usually pure
+Christian character, is surely the very height of malice, and
+presupposes such a deadly hatred of goodness and of Christ that no
+fate can be worse than the possession of such a temper. To be
+flung into the sea, like a dog, with a stone round his neck, would
+be better for a man than to live to do such a thing. The deed
+itself, apart from any other future retribution, is its own
+punishment; yet our Lord's solemn words not only point to such a
+future retribution, which is infinitely more terrible than the
+miserable fate described would be for the body, but to the
+consequences of the act, as so bad in its blind hatred of the
+highest type of character, and in its conscious preference of evil,
+as well as so fatal in its consequences, that it were better to die
+drowned than to live so.
+
+III. Verses 10-14 set forth the honour and dignity of Christ's
+'little ones.' Clearly the application of the designation in these
+closing verses is exclusively to His lowly followers. The warning
+not to despise them is needed at all times, and, perhaps, seldom
+more, even by Christians, than now, when so many causes induce a far
+too high estimate of the world's great ones, and modest, humble
+godliness looks as dull and sober as some russet-coated little bird
+among gorgeous cockatoos and birds of paradise. The world's standard
+is only too current in the Church; and it needs a spirit kept in
+harmony with Christ's spirit, and some degree of the child-nature in
+ourselves, to preserve us from overlooking the delicate hidden
+beauties and unworldly greatness of His truest disciples.
+
+The exhortation is enforced by two considerations,--a glimpse into
+heaven, and a parable. Fair interpretation can scarcely deny that
+Christ here teaches that His children are under angel-guardianship.
+We should neither busy ourselves in curious inferences from His
+reticent words, nor try to blink their plain meaning, but rather
+mark their connection and purpose here. He has been teaching that
+pre-eminence belongs to the childlike spirit. He here opens a door
+into the court of the heavenly King, and shows us that, as the
+little ones are foremost in the kingdom of heaven, so the angels who
+watch over them are nearest the throne in heaven itself. The
+representation is moulded on the usages of Eastern courts, and
+similar language in the Old Testament describes the principal
+courtiers as 'the men who see the King's face continually.' So high
+is the honour in which the little ones are held, that the highest
+angels are set to guard them, and whatever may be thought of them on
+earth, the loftiest of creatures are glad to serve and keep them.
+
+Following the Revised Version we omit verse 11. If it were genuine,
+the connection would be that such despising contradicted the purpose
+of Christ's mission; and the 'for' would refer back to the
+injunction, not to the glimpse into heaven which enforced it.
+
+The exhortation is further confirmed by the parable of the ninety
+and nine, which is found, slightly modified in form and in another
+connection, in Luke xv. Its point here is to show the importance of
+the little ones as the objects of the seeking love of God, and as so
+precious to Him that their recovery rejoices His heart. Of course,
+if verse 11 be genuine, the Shepherd is Christ; but, if we omit it,
+the application of the parable in verse 14 as illustrating the
+loving will of God becomes more direct. In that case God is the
+owner of the sheep. Christ does not emphasise His own love or share
+in the work, reference to which was not relevant to His purpose,
+but, leaving that in shadow, casts all the light on the loving
+divine will, which counts the little ones as so precious that, if
+even one of them wanders, all heaven's powers are sent forth to find
+and recover it. The reference does not seem to be so much to the one
+great act by which, in Christ's incarnation and sacrifice, a sinful
+world has been sought and redeemed, as to the numberless acts by
+which God, in His providence and grace, restores the souls of those
+humble ones if ever they go astray. For the connection requires that
+the wandering sheep here should, when it wanders, be 'one of these
+little ones'; and the parable is introduced to illustrate the truth
+that, because they belong to that number, the least of them is too
+precious to God to be allowed to wander away and be lost. They have
+for their keepers the angels of the presence; they have God Himself,
+in His yearning love and manifold methods of restoration, to look
+for them, if ever they are lost, and to bring them back to the fold.
+Therefore, 'see that ye despise not one of these little ones,' each
+of whom is held by the divine will in the grasp of an individualising
+love which nothing can loosen.
+
+
+
+
+SELF-MUTILATION FOR SELF-PRESERVATION
+
+
+    'If thy hand or thy foot causeth thee to stumble, cut
+    it off, and  cast it from  thee.'-MATT. xviii. 8, R.V.
+
+No person or thing can do our characters as much harm as we
+ourselves can do. Indeed, none can do them any harm but ourselves.
+For men may put stumbling-blocks in our way, but it is we who make
+them stumbling-blocks. The obstacle in the path would do us no hurt
+if it were not for the erring foot, nor the attractive prize if it
+were not for the hand that itched to lay hold of it, nor the
+glittering bauble if it were not for the eye that kindled at the
+sight of it. So our Lord here, having been speaking of the men that
+put stumbling-blocks in the way of His little ones, draws the net
+closer and bids us look at home. A solemn woe of divine judgment is
+denounced on those who cause His followers to stumble; let us leave
+God to execute that, and be sure that we have no share in their
+guilt, but let us ourselves be the executioners of the judgment upon
+the things in ourselves which alone give the stumbling-blocks, which
+others put before us, their fatal power.
+
+There is extraordinary energy in these words. Solemnly they are
+repeated twice here, verbatim; solemnly they are repeated verbatim
+three times in Mark's edition. The urgent stringency of the command,
+the terrible plainness of the alternative put forth by the lips that
+could say nothing harsh, and the fact that the very same injunction
+appears in a wholly different connection in the Sermon on the Mount,
+show us how profoundly important our Lord felt the principle to be
+which He was here laying down.
+
+We mark these three points. First, the case supposed, 'If thy hand
+or thy foot cause thee to stumble.' Then the sharp, prompt remedy
+enjoined, 'Cut them off and cast them from thee.' Then the solemn
+motive by which it is enforced, 'It is better for thee to enter into
+life maimed than, being a whole man, to be cast into hell-fire.'
+
+I. First, then, as to the case supposed.
+
+Hand and foot and eye are, of course, regarded as organs of the
+inward self, and symbols of its tastes and capacities. We may
+perhaps see in them the familiar distinction between the practical
+and the theoretical:--hand and foot being instruments of action, and
+the eye the organ of perception. Our Lord takes an extreme case. If
+members of the body are to be amputated and plucked out should they
+cause us to stumble, much more are associations to be abandoned and
+occupations to be relinquished and pleasures to be forsaken, if
+these draw us away. But it is to be noticed that the whole stringency
+of the commandment rests upon that _if_. '_If_ they cause thee
+to stumble,' then, and not else, amputate. The powers are natural,
+the operation of them is perfectly innocent, but a man may be ruined
+by innocent things. And, says Christ, if that process is begun, then,
+and only then, does My exhortation come into force.
+
+Now, all that solemn thought of a possible injurious issue of
+innocent occupations, rests upon the principles that our nature has
+an ideal order, so as that some parts of it are to be suppressed and
+some are to rule, and that there are degrees of importance in men's
+pursuits, and that where the lower interfere and clog the operations
+of the higher, there they are harmful. And so the only wisdom is to
+excise and cut them off.
+
+We see illustrations in abundance every day. There are many people
+who are being ruined in regard to the highest purposes of their
+lives, simply by an over-indulgence in lower occupations which in
+themselves may be perfectly right. Here is a young woman that spends
+so much of her day in reading novels that she has no time to look
+after the house and help her mother. Here is a young man so given to
+athletics that his studies are neglected--and so you may go all
+round the circle, and find instances of the way in which innocent
+things, and the excessive or unwise exercise of natural faculties,
+are destroying men. And much more is that the case in regard to
+religion, which is the highest object of pursuit, and in regard to
+those capacities and powers by which we lay hold of God. These are
+to be ministered to by the rest, and if there be in my nature or in
+the order of my life something which is drawing away to itself the
+energy that ought to go in that other direction, then, howsoever
+innocent it may be, _per se_, it is harming me. It is a wen
+that is sucking all the vital force into itself, and turning it into
+poison. And there is only one cure for it, and that is the knife.
+
+Then there is another point to be observed in this case supposed,
+and that is that the whole matter is left to the determination of
+personal experience. No one else has the right to decide for you
+what it is safe and wise for you to do in regard to things which are
+not in themselves wrong. If they are wrong in themselves, of course
+the consideration of consequences is out of place altogether; but if
+they be not wrong in themselves, then it is you that must settle
+whether they are legitimate for you or not. Do not let your
+Christian liberty be interfered with by other people's dictation in
+regard to this matter. How often you hear people say, _'I_
+could not do it'; meaning thereby, 'therefore _he_ ought not to
+do it!' But that inference is altogether illegitimate. True, there
+are limitations of our Christian liberty in regard to things
+indifferent and innocent. Paul lays down the most important of these
+in three sentences. 'All things are lawful for me, but all things
+are not expedient.' 'All things are lawful for me, but all things
+edify not';--you must think of your brethren as well as of yourself.
+'All things are lawful for me, yet will I not be brought under the
+power of any'; keep master of them, and rather abstain altogether
+than become their slave. But these three limitations being observed,
+then, in regard to all such matters, nobody else can prescribe for
+you or me. 'To his own Master he standeth or falleth.'
+
+But, on the other hand, do not you be led away into things that
+damage you, because some other man does them, as he supposes,
+without injury. 'Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that
+thing which he alloweth.' There are some Christian people who are
+simply very unscrupulous and think themselves very strong; and whose
+consciences are not more enlightened, but less sensitive, than those
+of the 'narrow-minded brethren' upon whom they look askance.
+
+And so, dear friend, you ought to take the world--to inhale it, if I
+may so say, as patients do chloroform; only you must be your own
+doctor and keep your own fingers on your pulse, and watch the first
+sign of failure there, and take no more. When the safety lamps begin
+to burn blue you may be quite sure there is choke-damp about; and
+when Christian men and women begin to find prayer wearisome, and
+religious thoughts dull, and the remembrance of God an effort or a
+pain, then, whatever anybody else may do, it is time for them to
+pull up. 'If thy hand offend thee,' never mind though your brother's
+hand is not offending him, do the necessary thing for your health,
+'cut it off and cast it from you.'
+
+But of course there must be caution and common-sense in the
+application of such a principle. It does not mean that we are to
+abandon all things that are susceptible of abuse, for everything is
+so; and if we are to regulate our conduct by such a rule, it is not
+the amputation of a hand that will be sufficient. We may as well cut
+off our heads at once, and go out of the world altogether; for
+everything is capable of being thus abused.
+
+Nor does the injunction mean that unconditionally we are to abandon
+all occupations in which there is danger. It can never be a duty to
+shirk a duty because it is dangerous. And sometimes it is as much a
+Christian man's duty to go into, and to stand in, positions that are
+full of temptation and danger, as it is a fireman's business to go
+into a burning house at the risk of suffocation. There were saints
+in Caesar's household, flowers that grew on a dunghill, and they
+were not bidden to abandon their place because it was full of
+possible danger to their souls. Sometimes Christ sets His sentinels
+in places where the bullets fly very thick; and if we are posted in
+such a place--and we all are so some time or other in our lives--the
+only course for us is to stand our ground until the relieving guard
+comes, and to trust that He said a truth that was always to be true,
+when He sent out His servants to their dangerous work, with the
+assurance that if they drank any deadly thing it should not hurt
+them.
+
+II. So much, then, for the first of the points here. Now a word, in
+the second place, as to the sharp remedy enjoined.
+
+'Cut it off and cast it from thee.' Entire excision is the only
+safety. I myself am to be the operator in that surgery. I am to lay
+my hand upon the block, and with the other hand to grasp the axe and
+strike. That is to say, we are to suppress capacities, to abandon
+pursuits, to break with associates, when we find that they are
+damaging our spiritual life and hindering our likeness to Jesus
+Christ.
+
+That is plain common-sense. In regard to physical intoxication, it
+is a great deal easier to abstain altogether than to take a very
+little and then stop. The very fumes of alcohol will sometimes drive
+a reclaimed drunkard into a bout of dissipation that will last for
+weeks; therefore, the only safety is in entire abstinence. The rule
+holds in regard to everyday life. Every man has to give up a great
+many things if he means to succeed in one, and has to be a man of
+one pursuit if anything worth doing is to be done. Christian men
+especially have to adopt that principle, and shear off a great deal
+that is perfectly legitimate, in order that they may keep a reserve
+of strength for the highest things.
+
+True, all forms of life are capable of being made Christian service
+and Christian discipline, but in practice we shall find that if we
+are earnestly seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness, not
+only shall we lose our taste for a great deal that is innocent, but
+we shall have, whether we lose our taste for them or not--and more
+imperatively if we have not lost our taste for them than if we have--to
+give up allowable things in order that with all our heart, and soul,
+and strength, and mind, we may love and serve our Master. There are no
+half-measures to be kept; the only thing to do with the viper is to
+shake it off into the fire and let it burn there. We have to empty our
+hands of earth's trivialities if we would grasp Christ with them. We
+have to turn away our eyes from earth if we would behold the Master,
+and rigidly to apply this principle of excision in order that we may
+advance in the divine life. It is the only way to ensure progress.
+There is no such certain method of securing an adequate flow of sap
+up the trunk as to cut off all the suckers. If you wish to have a
+current going down the main bed of the stream, sufficient to keep it
+clear, you must dam up all the side channels.
+
+But it is not to be forgotten that this commandment, stringent and
+necessary as it is, is second best. The man is maimed, although it
+was for Christ's sake that he cut off his hand, or put out his eye.
+His hand was given him that with it he might serve God, and the
+highest thing would have been that in hand and foot and eye he
+should have been anointed, like the priests of old, for the service
+of his Master. But until he is strong enough to use the faculty for
+God, the wisest thing is not to use it at all. Abandon the outworks
+to keep the citadel. And just as men pull down the pretty houses on
+the outskirts of a fortified city when a siege is impending, in order
+that they may afford no cover to the enemy, so we have to sweep away
+a great deal in our lives that is innocent and fair, in order that
+the foes of our spirit may find no lodgment there. It is second best,
+but for all that it is absolutely needful. We must lay 'aside every
+_weight_,' as well as 'the _sin_ which so easily besets us.' We
+must run lightly if we would run well. We must cast aside all burdens,
+even though they be burdens of treasure and delights, if we would 'run
+with patience the race that is set before us.' 'If thy foot offend
+thee,' do not hesitate, do not adopt half-measures, do not try
+moderation, do not seek to sanctify the use of the peccant member;
+all these may be possible and right in time, but for the present there
+is only one thing to do--down with it on the block, and off with it!
+'Cut it off and cast it from thee.'
+
+III. And now, lastly, a word as to the solemn exhortation by which
+this injunction is enforced.
+
+Christ rests His command of self-denial and self-mutilation upon the
+highest ground of self-interest. 'It is better for thee.' We are
+told nowadays that this is a very low motive to appeal to, that
+Christianity is a religion of selfishness, because it says to men,
+'Your life or your death depends upon your faith and your conduct.'
+Well, I think it will be time for us to listen to fantastic
+objections of this sort when the men that urge them refuse to turn
+down another street, if they are warned that in the road on which
+they are going they will meet their death. As long as they admit
+that it is a wise and a kind thing to say to a man, 'Do not go that
+way or your life will be endangered,' I think we may listen to our
+Master saying to us, 'Do not do that lest thou perish; do this, that
+thou may'st enter into life.'
+
+And then, notice that a maimed man may enter into life, and a
+complete man may perish. The first may be a very poor creature, very
+ignorant, with a limited nature, undeveloped capacities, intellect
+and the like all but dormant in him, artistic sensibilities quite
+atrophied, and yet he may have got hold of Jesus Christ and His
+love, and be trying to love Him back again and serve Him, and so be
+entering into life even here, and be sure of a life more perfect
+yonder. And the complete man, cultured all round, with all his
+faculties polished and exercised to the full, may have one side of
+his nature undeveloped--that which connects him with God in Christ.
+And so he may be like some fair tree that stands out there in the
+open, on all sides extending its equal beauty, with its stem
+symmetrical, cylindrical, perfect in its green cloud of foliage, yet
+there may be a worm at the root of it, and it may be given up to
+rottenness and destruction. Cultivated men may perish, and
+uncultured men may have the life. The maimed man may touch Christ
+with his stump, and so receive life, and the complete man may lay
+hold of the world and the flesh and the devil with his hands, and so
+share in their destruction.
+
+Ay! and in that case the maimed man has the best of it. It is a very
+plain axiom of the rudest common-sense, this of my text: 'It is
+better for thee to enter into life maimed, than to go into hell-fire
+with both thy hands.' That is to say, it is better to live maimed
+than to die whole. A man comes into a hospital with gangrene in his
+leg; the doctor says it must come off; the man says, 'It shall not,'
+and he is dead to-morrow. Who is the fool--the man that says, 'Here,
+then, cut away; better life than limb,' or the man that says, 'I
+will keep it and I will die'?
+
+'Better to enter into life maimed,' because you will not always be
+maimed. The life will overcome the maiming. There is a wonderful
+restoration of capacities and powers that have been sacrificed for
+Christ's sake, a restoration even here. As crustaceans will develop
+a new claw in place of one that they have thrown off in their peril
+to save their lives, so we, if we have for Christ's sake maimed
+ourselves, will find that in a large measure the suppression will be
+recompensed even here on earth.
+
+And hereafter, as the Rabbis used to say, 'No man will rise from the
+grave a cripple.' All the limitations which we have imposed upon
+ourselves, for Christ's sake, will be removed then. 'Then shall the
+eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf be unstopped;
+then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb
+shall sing.' 'Verily I say unto thee, there is no man that hath left
+any' of his possessions, affections, tastes, capacities, 'for My
+sake but he shall receive a hundredfold more in this life, and in
+the world to come, life everlasting.' No man is a loser by giving up
+anything for Jesus Christ.
+
+And, on the other hand, the complete man, complete in everything
+except his spiritual nature, is a fragment in all his completeness;
+and yonder, there will for him be a solemn process of stripping.
+'Take it from him, and give it to him that hath ten talents.' Ah!
+how much of that for which some of you are flinging away Jesus
+Christ will fade from you when you go yonder. 'His glory shall not
+descend after him'; 'as he came, so shall he go.' 'Tongues, they
+shall cease; knowledge, it shall vanish away'; gifts will fail,
+capacities will disappear when the opportunities for the exercise of
+them in a material world are at an end, and there will be little
+left to the man who _would_ carry hands and feet and eyes all
+into the fire and forgot the 'one thing needful,' but a thin thread,
+if I may so say, of personality quivering with the sense of
+responsibility, and preyed upon by the gnawing worm of a too-late
+remorse.
+
+My brother, the lips of Incarnate Love spoke those solemn words of
+my text, which it becomes not me to repeat to you as if they were
+mine; but I ask you to weigh this, His urgent commandment, and to
+listen to His solemn assurance, by which He enforces the wisdom of
+the self-suppression: 'It is better for thee to enter into life
+maimed, than having two hands, to be cast into hell-fire.'
+
+Give your hearts to Jesus Christ, and set the following in His
+footsteps and the keeping of His commandments high above all other
+aims. You will have to suppress much and give up much, but such
+suppression is the shortest road to becoming perfect men, complete
+in Him, and such surrender is the surest way to possess all things.
+'He that loseth his life'--which is more than hand or eye--for
+Christ's sake,' the same shall find it.'
+
+
+
+
+THE LOST SHEEP AND THE SEEKING SHEPHERD
+
+
+    If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone
+    astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and
+    goeth Into the mountains, and seeketh that which is
+    gone astray!--MATT. xviii. 12.
+
+We find this simple parable, or germ of a parable, in a somewhat more
+expanded form, as the first of the incomparable three in the fifteenth
+chapter of Luke's Gospel. Perhaps our Lord repeated the parable more
+than once. It is an unveiling of His inmost heart, and therein a
+revelation of the very heart of God. It touches the deepest things in
+His relation to men, and sets forth thoughts of Him, such as man never
+dared to dream. It does all this by the homeliest image and by an
+appeal to the simplest instincts. The most prosaic shepherd looks for
+lost sheep, and everybody has peculiar joy over lost things found.
+They may not be nearly so valuable as things that were not lost. The
+unstrayed may he many, and the strayed be but one. Still there is a
+keener joy in the recovery of the one than in the unbroken possession
+of the ninety-and-nine. That feeling in a man may be only selfishness,
+but homely as it is--when the loser is God, and the lost are men, it
+becomes the means of uttering and illustrating that truth concerning
+God which no religion but that of the Cross has ever been bold enough
+to proclaim, that He cares most for the wanderers, and rejoices over the
+return of the one that went astray more than over the ninety-and-nine
+who never wandered.
+
+There are some significant differences between this edition of the
+parable and the form which it assumes in the Gospel according to
+Luke. There it is spoken in vindication of Christ's consorting with
+publicans and sinners; here it is spoken in order to point the
+lesson of not despising the least and most insignificant of the sons
+of men. There the seeking Shepherd is obviously Christ; here the
+seeking Shepherd is rather the Divine Father; as appears by the
+words of the next verse: 'For it is not the will of your Father
+which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.'
+There the sheep is lost; here the sheep goes astray. There the
+Shepherd seeks till He find, here the Shepherd, perhaps, fails to
+find; for our Lord says, '_If so be_ that he find it.'
+
+But I am not about to venture on all the thoughts which this parable
+suggests, nor even to deal with the main lesson which it teaches. I
+wish merely to look at the two figures--the wanderer and the seeker.
+
+I. First, then, let us look at that figure of the one wanderer.
+
+Of course I need scarcely remind you that in the immediate
+application of the parable in Luke's Gospel, the ninety-and-nine
+were the respectable people who thought the publicans and harlots
+altogether too dirty to touch, and regarded it as very doubtful
+conduct on the part of this young Rabbi from Nazareth to be mixed up
+with persons whom no one with a proper regard for whited sepulchres
+would have anything to do with. To them He answers, in effect--I am
+a shepherd; that is my vindication. Of course a shepherd goes after
+and cares for the lost sheep. He does not ask about its worth, or
+anything else. He simply follows the lost because it is lost. It may
+be a poor little creature after all, but it is lost, and that is
+enough. And so He vindicates Himself to the ninety-and-nine: 'You do
+not need Me, you are found. I take you on your own estimation of
+yourselves, and tell you that My mission is to the wanderers.'
+
+I do not suppose, however, that any of us have need to be reminded
+that upon a closer and deeper examination of the facts of the case,
+every hoof of the ninety-and-nine belonged to a stray sheep too; and
+that in the wider application of the parable _all_ men are
+wanderers. Remembering, then, this universal application, I would
+point out two or three things about the condition of these strayed
+sheep, which include the whole race. The ninety-and-nine may shadow
+for us a number of beings, in unfallen worlds, immensely greater
+than even the multitudes of wandering souls that have lived here
+through weary ages of sin and tears, but that does not concern us
+now.
+
+The first thought I gather from the parable is that all men are
+Christ's sheep. That sounds a strange thing to say. What? all these
+men and women who, having run away from Him, are plunged in sin,
+like sheep mired in a black bog, the scoundrels and the profligates,
+the scum and the outcasts of great cities; people with narrow
+foreheads, and blighted, blasted lives, the despair of our modern
+civilisation--are they all His? And in those great wide-lying
+heathen lands where men know nothing of His name and of His love,
+are they all His too? Let Him answer, 'Other sheep I have'--though
+they look like goats to-day--'which are not of this fold, them also
+must I bring, and they shall hear My voice.' All men are Christ's,
+because He has been the Agent of divine creation, and the grand
+words of the hundredth Psalm are true about Him. 'It is He that hath
+made us, and we are His. We are His people and the sheep of His
+pasture.' They are His, because His sacrifice has bought them for
+His. Erring, straying, lost, they still belong to the Shepherd.
+
+Notice next, the picture of the sheep as wandering. The word is,
+literally, 'which _goeth_ astray,' not 'which is gone astray.'
+It pictures the process of wandering, not the result as accomplished.
+We see the sheep, poor, silly creature, not going anywhere in
+particular, only there is a sweet tuft of grass here, and it crops
+that; and here is a bit of ground where there is soft walking, and it
+goes there; and so, step by step, not meaning anything, not knowing
+where it is going, or that it _is_ going anywhere; it goes, and
+goes, and goes, and at last it finds out that it is away from its
+beat on the hillside--for sheep keep to one bit of hillside generally,
+as any shepherd will tell you--and then it begins to bleat, and most
+helpless of creatures, fluttering and excited, rushes about amongst
+the thorns and brambles, or gets mired in some quag or other, and it
+will never find its way back of itself until some one comes for it.
+
+'So,' says Christ to us, 'there are a great many of you who do not
+mean to go wrong; you are not going anywhere in particular, you do
+not start on your course with any intentions either way, of doing
+right or wrong, of keeping near God, or going away from Him, but you
+simply go where the grass is sweetest, or the walking easiest. But
+look at the end of it; where you have got to. You have got away from
+Him.'
+
+Now, if you take that series of parables in Luke xv., and note the
+metaphors there, you will see three different sides given of the
+process by which men's hearts stray away from God. There is the
+sheep that wanders. That is partly conscious, and voluntary, but in
+a large measure simply yielding to inclination and temptation. Then
+there is the coin that trundles away under some piece of furniture,
+and is lost--that is a picture of the manner in which a man, without
+volition, almost mechanically sometimes, slides into sins and
+disappears as it were, and gets covered over with the dust of evil.
+And then there is the worst of all, the lad that had full knowledge
+of what he was doing. 'I am going into a far-off country; I cannot
+stand this any longer--all restraint and no liberty, and no power of
+doing what I like with my own; and always obliged to obey and be
+dependent on my father for my pocket-money! Give me what belongs to
+me, for good and all, and let me go!' That is the picture of the
+worst kind of wandering, when a man knows what he is about, and
+looks at the merciful restraint of the law of God, and says: 'No! I
+had rather be far away; and my own master, and not always be
+"cribbed, cabined, and confined" with these limitations.'
+
+The straying of the half-conscious sheep may seem more innocent, but
+it carries the poor creature away from the shepherd as completely as
+if it had been wholly intelligent and voluntary. Let us learn the
+lesson. In a world like this, if a man does not know very clearly
+where he is going, he is sure to go wrong. If you do not exercise a
+distinct determination to do God's will, and to follow in His
+footsteps who has set us an example; and if your main purpose is to
+get succulent grass to eat and soft places to walk in, you are
+certain before long to wander tragically from all that is right and
+noble and pure. It is no excuse for you to say: 'I never meant it';
+'I did not intend any harm, I only followed my own inclinations.'
+'More mischief is wrought'--to the man himself, as well as to other
+people--'from want of thought than is wrought by' an evil will. And
+the sheep has strayed as effectually, though, when it set out on its
+journey, it never thought of straying. Young men and women beginning
+life, remember! and take this lesson.
+
+But then there is another point that I must touch for a moment. In
+the Revised Version you will find a very tiny alteration in the
+words of my text, which, yet, makes a large difference in the sense.
+The last clause of my text, as it stands in our Bible, is, 'And
+seeketh that which is _gone_ astray'; the Revised Version more
+correctly reads, 'And seeketh that which _is going_ astray.'
+Now, look at the difference in these two renderings. In the former
+the process is represented as finished, in the correct rendering it
+is represented as going on. And that is what I would press on you,
+the awful, solemn, necessarily progressive character of our
+wanderings from God. A man never gets to the end of the distance
+that separates between him and the Father, if his face is turned
+away from God. Every moment the separation is increasing. Two lines
+start from each other at the acutest angle and diverge more the
+further they are produced, until at last the one may be away up by
+the side of God's throne, and the other away down in the deepest
+depths of hell. So accordingly my text carries with solemn pathos,
+in a syllable, the tremendous lesson: 'The sheep is not gone, but
+_going_ astray.' Ah! there are some of my hearers who are daily
+and hourly increasing the distance between themselves and their
+merciful Father.
+
+Now the last thing here in this picture is the contrast between the
+description given of the wandering sheep in our text, and that in
+St. Luke. Here it is represented as wandering, there it is
+represented as lost. That is very beautiful and has a meaning often
+not noticed by hasty readers. Who is it that has lost it? We talk
+about the lost soul and the lost man, as if it were the man that had
+lost _himself_, and that is true, and a dreadful truth it is.
+But that is not the truth that is taught in this parable, and meant
+by us to be gathered from it. Who is it that has lost it? He to whom
+it belonged.
+
+That is to say, wherever a heart gets ensnared and entangled with
+the love of the treasures and pleasures of this life, and so departs
+in allegiance and confidence and friendship from the living God,
+there God the Father regards Himself as the poorer by the loss of
+one of His children, by the loss of one of His sheep. He does not
+care to possess you by the hold of mere creation and supremacy and
+rule. He desires you to love Him, and then He deems that He has you.
+And if you do not love Him, He deems that He has lost you. There is
+something in the divine heart that goes out after His lost property.
+We touch here upon deep things that we cannot speak of intelligently;
+only remember this, that what looks like self-regard in man is the
+purest love in God, and that there is nothing in the whole revelation
+which Christianity makes of the character of God more wonderful than
+this, that He judges that He has lost His child when His child has
+forgotten to love Him.
+
+II. So much, then, for one of the great pictures in this text. I can
+spare but a sentence or two for the other--the picture of the
+Seeker.
+
+I said that in the one form of the parable it was more distinctly
+the Father, and in the other more distinctly the Son, who is
+represented as seeking the sheep. But these two do still coincide in
+substance, inasmuch as God's chief way of seeking us poor wandering
+sheep is through the work of His dear Son Jesus, and the coming of
+Christ is the Father's searching for His sheep in the 'cloudy and
+dark day.'
+
+According to my text God leaves the ninety-and-nine and goes into
+the mountains where the wanderer is, and seeks him. And this,
+couched in veiled form, is the great mystery of the divine love, the
+incarnation and sacrifice of Jesus Christ our Lord. Here is the
+answer by anticipation to the sarcasm that is often levelled at
+evangelical Christianity: 'You must think a good deal of human
+nature, and must have a very arrogant notion of the inhabitant of
+this little speck that floats in the great sea of the heavens, if
+you suppose that with all these millions of orbs he is so important
+that the divine Nature came down upon this little tiny molehill, and
+took his nature and died.'
+
+'Yes!' says Christ, 'not because man was so great, not because man
+was so valuable in comparison with the rest of creation--he was but
+one amongst ninety-nine unfallen and unsinful--but because he was so
+wretched, because he was so small, because he had gone so far away
+from God; _therefore_, the seeking love came after him, and
+would draw him to itself.' That, I think, is answer enough to the
+cavil.
+
+And then, there is a difference between these two versions of the
+Parable in respect to their representation of the end of the seeking.
+The one says 'seeks until He finds.' Oh! the patient, incredible
+inexhaustibleness of the divine love. God's long-suffering, if I may
+take such a metaphor, like a sleuth-hound, will follow the object
+of its search through all its windings and doublings, until it comes
+up to it. So that great seeking Shepherd follows us through all the
+devious courses of our wayward, wandering footsteps doubling back
+upon themselves, until He finds us. Though the sheep may increase its
+distance, the Shepherd follows. The further away we get the more
+tender His appeal; the more we stop our ears the louder the voice
+with which He calls. You cannot wear out Jesus Christ, you cannot
+exhaust the resources of His bounteousness, of His tenderness.
+However we may have been going wrong, however far we may have
+been wandering, however vehemently we may be increasing, at every
+moment, our distance from Him, He is coming after us, serene, loving,
+long-suffering, and will not be put away.
+
+Dear friend! would you only believe that a loving, living Person is
+really seeking you, seeking you by my poor words now, seeking you by
+many a providence, seeking you by His Gospel, by His Spirit; and
+will never be satisfied till He has found you in your finding Him
+and turning your soul to Him!
+
+But, I beseech you, do not forget the solemn lesson drawn from the
+other form of the parable which is given in my text: _If so be
+that He find it_. There is a possibility of failure. What an
+awful power you have of burying yourself in the sepulchre, as it
+were, of your own self-will, and hiding yourself in the darkness of
+your own unbelief! You can frustrate the seeking love of God. Some
+of you have done so--some of you have done so all your lives. Some
+of you, perhaps at this moment, are trying to do so, and consciously
+endeavouring to steel your hearts against some softening that may
+have been creeping over them whilst I have been speaking. Are you
+yielding to His seeking love, or wandering further and further from
+Him? He has come to find you. Let Him not seek in vain, but let the
+Good Shepherd draw you to Himself, where, lifted on the Cross, He
+'giveth His life for the sheep.' He will restore your soul and carry
+you back on His strong shoulder, or in His bosom near His loving
+heart, to the green pastures and the safe fold. There will be joy in
+His heart, more than over those who have never wandered; and there
+will be joy in the heart of the returning wanderer, such as they who
+had not strayed and learned the misery could never know, for, as the
+profound Jewish saying has it, 'In the place where the penitents
+stand, the perfectly righteous cannot stand.'
+
+
+
+
+PERSISTENCE OF THWARTED LOVE
+
+
+    'If so be that he find it.'--MATT. xviii. 13.
+
+    'Until he find it.'--LUKE xv. 4.
+
+Like other teachers, Jesus seems to have had favourite points of
+view and utterances which came naturally to His lips. There are
+several instances in the gospels of His repeating the same sayings
+in entirely different connections and with different applications.
+One of these habitual points of view seems to have been the thought
+of men as wandering sheep, and of Himself as the Shepherd. The
+metaphor has become so familiar that we need a moment's reflection
+to grasp the mingled tenderness, sadness, and majesty of it. He
+thought habitually of all humanity as a flock of lost sheep, and of
+Himself as high above them, unparticipant of their evil, and having
+one errand--to bring them back.
+
+And not only does He frequently refer to this symbol, but we have
+the two editions, from which my texts are respectively taken, of the
+Parable of the Lost Sheep. I say two editions, because it seems to
+me a great deal more probable that Jesus should have repeated
+Himself than that either of the Evangelists should have ventured to
+take this gem and set it in an alien setting. The two versions
+differ slightly in some unimportant expressions, and Matthew's is
+the more condensed of the two. But the most important variation is
+the one which is brought to light by the two fragments which I have
+ventured to isolate as texts. '_If_ He find' implies the
+possible failure of the Shepherd's search; '_till_ He find'
+implies His unwearied persistence in the teeth of all failure. And,
+taken in conjunction, they suggest some very blessed and solemn
+considerations, which I pray for strength to lay upon your minds and
+hearts now.
+
+I. But first let me say a word or two upon the more general thought
+brought out in both these clauses--of the Shepherd's search.
+
+Now, beautiful and heart-touching as that picture is, of the
+Shepherd away amongst the barren mountains searching minutely in
+every ravine and thicket, it wants a little explanation in order to
+be brought into correspondence with the fact which it expresses. For
+His search for His lost property is not in ignorance of where it is,
+and His finding of it is not His discovery of His sheep, but its
+discovery of its Shepherd. We have to remember wherein consists the
+loss before we can understand wherein consists the search.
+
+Now, if we ask ourselves that question first, we get a flood of
+light on the whole matter. The great hundredth Psalm, according to
+its true rendering, says, 'It is He that hath made us, _and we are
+His_;  ... we are ... the sheep of His pasture.' But God's true
+possession of man is not simply the possession inherent in the act
+of creation. For there is only one way in which spirit can own
+spirit, or heart can possess heart, and that is through the
+voluntary yielding and love of the one to the other. So Jesus
+Christ, who, in all His seeking after us men, is the voice and hand
+of Almighty Love, does not count that He has found a man until the
+man has learned to love Him. For He loses us when we are alienated
+from Him, when we cease to trust Him, when we refuse to obey Him,
+when we will not yield to Him, but put Him far away from us.
+Therefore the search which, as being Christ's is God's in Christ, is
+for our love, our trust, our obedience; and in reality it consists
+of all the energies by which Jesus Christ, as God's embodiment and
+representative, seeks to woo and win you and me back to Himself,
+that He may truly possess us.
+
+If the Shepherd's seeking is but a tender metaphor for the whole
+aggregate of the ways by which the love that is divine and human in
+Jesus Christ moves round about our closed hearts, as water may feel
+round some hermetically sealed vessel, seeking for an entrance, then
+surely the first and chiefest of them, which makes its appeal to each
+of us as directly as to any man that ever lived, is that great mystery
+that Jesus Christ, the eternal Word of God, left the ninety-and-nine
+that were safe on the high pastures of the mountains of God, and came
+down among us, out into the wilderness, 'to seek and to save that
+which was lost.'
+
+And, brother, that method of winning--I was going to say, of
+_earning_--our love comes straight in its appeal to every
+single soul on the face of the earth. Do not say that thou wert not
+in Christ's heart and mind when He willed to be born and willed to
+die. Thou, and thou, and thou, and every single unit of humanity
+were there clear before Him in their individuality; and He died for
+thee, and for me, and for _every_ man. And, in one aspect, that
+is more than to say that He died for _all_ men. There was a
+specific intention in regard to each of us in the mission of Jesus
+Christ; and when He went to the Cross the Shepherd was not giving
+His life for a confused flock of which He knew not the units, but
+for sheep the face of each of whom He knows, and each of whom He
+loves. There was His first seeking; there is His chief seeking.
+There is the seeking which ought to appeal to every soul of man, and
+which, ever since you were children, has been making its appeal to
+you. Has it done so in vain? Dear friend, let not your heart still
+be hard.
+
+He seeks us by every record of that mighty love that died for us,
+even when it is being spoken as poorly, and with as many limitations
+and imperfections, as I am speaking it now. 'As though God did
+beseech you by us, pray you in Christ's stead.' It is not arrogance,
+God forbid! it is simple truth when I say, Never mind about me; but
+my word, in so far as it is true and tender, is Christ's word to
+you. And here, in our midst, that unseen Form is passing along these
+pews and speaking to these hearts, and the Shepherd is seeking His
+sheep.
+
+He seeks each of us by the inner voices and emotions in our hearts
+and minds, by those strange whisperings which sometimes we hear, by
+the suddenly upstarting convictions of duty and truth which sometimes,
+without manifest occasion, flash across our hearts. These voices are
+Christ's voice, for, in a far deeper sense than most men superficially
+believe, 'He is the true Light that lighteth every man coming into
+the world.'
+
+He is seeking us by our unrest, by our yearnings after we know not
+what, by our dim dissatisfaction which insists upon making itself
+felt in the midst of joys and delights, and which the world fails to
+satisfy as much as it fails to interpret. There is a cry in every
+heart, little as the bearer of the heart translates it into its true
+meaning--a cry after God, even the living God. And by all your
+unrests, your disappointments, your hopes unfulfilled, your hopes
+fulfilled and blasted in the fulfilment, your desires that perish
+unfruited; by all the mystic movements of the spirit that yearns for
+something beyond the material and the visible, Jesus Christ is
+seeking His sheep.
+
+He seeks us by the discipline of life, for I believe that Christ is
+the active Providence of God, and that the hands that were pierced
+on the Cross do move the wheels of the history of the world, and
+mould the destinies of individual spirits.
+
+The deepest meaning of all life is that we should be won to seek Him
+who in it all is seeking us, and led to venture our hopes, and fling
+the anchor of our faith beyond the bounds of the visible, that it
+may fasten in the Eternal, even in Christ Himself, 'the same
+yesterday and to-day and for ever' when earth and its training are
+done with. Brethren, it is a blessed thing to live, when we
+interpret life's smallnesses aright as the voice of the Master, who,
+by them all--our sadness and our gladness, the unrest of our hearts
+and the yearnings and longings of our spirits, by the ministry of
+His word, by the record of His sufferings--is echoing the invitation
+of the Cross itself, 'Come unto Me, all ye ... and I will give you
+rest!' So much for the Shepherd's search.
+
+II. And now, in the second place, a word as to the possible
+thwarting of the search.
+
+'If so be that He find.' That is an awful _if_, when we think
+of what lies below it. The thing seems an absurdity when it is
+spoken, and yet it is a grim fact in many a life--viz. that Christ's
+effort can fail and be thwarted. Not that His search is perfunctory
+or careless, but that we shroud ourselves in darkness through which
+that love can find no way. It is we, not He, that are at fault when
+He fails to find that which He seeks. There is nothing more certain
+than that God, and Christ the image of God, desire the rescue of
+every man, woman, and child of the human race. Let no teaching blur
+that sunlight fact. There is nothing more certain than that Jesus
+Christ has done, and is doing, all that He can do to secure that
+purpose. If He could make every man love Him, and so find every man,
+be sure that He would do it. But He cannot. For here is the central
+mystery of creation, which if we could solve there would be few
+knots that would resist our fingers, that a finite will like yours
+or mine can lift itself up against God, and that, having the
+capacity, it has the desire. He says, 'Come!' We say, 'I will not.'
+That door of the heart opens from within, and He never breaks it
+open. He stands at the door and knocks. And then the same solemn
+_if_ comes--'If any man opens, I will come in'; if any man
+keeps it shut, and holds on to prevent its being opened, I will stop
+out.
+
+Brethren, I seek to press upon you now the one plain truth, that if
+you are not saved men and women, there is no person in heaven or
+earth or hell that has any blame in the matter but yourself alone.
+God appeals to us, and says, 'What more _could_ have been done
+to My vineyard that I have not done unto it?' His hands are clean,
+and the infinite love of Christ is free from all blame, and all the
+blame lies at our own doors.
+
+I must not dwell upon the various reasons which lead so many men
+among us--as, alas! the utmost charity cannot but see that there
+are--to turn away from Christ's appeals, and to be unwilling to
+'have this Man' either 'to reign over' them or to save them. There
+are many such, I am sure, in my audience now; and I would fain, if I
+could, draw them to that Lord in whom alone they have life, and
+rest, and holiness, and heaven.
+
+One great reason is because you do not believe that you need Him.
+There is an awful inadequacy in most men's conceptions--and still
+more in their feelings--as to their sin. Oh dear friends, if you
+would only submit your consciences for one meditative half-hour to
+the light of God's highest law, I think you would find out something
+more than many of you know, as to what you are and what your sin is.
+Many of us do not much believe that we are in any danger. I have
+seen a sheep comfortably cropping the short grass on a down over the
+sea, with one foot out in the air, and a precipice of five hundred
+feet below it, and at the bottom the crawling water. It did not know
+that there was any danger of going over. That is like some of us. If
+you believed what is true--that 'sin when it is finished, bringeth
+forth death,' and understood what 'death' meant, you would feel the
+mercy of the Shepherd seeking you. Some of us think we are in the
+flock when we are not. Some of us do not like submission. Some of us
+have no inclination for the sweet pastures that He provides, and
+would rather stay where we are, and have the fare that is going
+there.
+
+We do not need to _do_ anything to put Him away. I have no
+doubt that some of us, as soon as my voice ceases, will plunge again
+into worldly talk and thoughts before they are down the chapel
+steps, and so blot out, as well as they can, any vagrant and
+superficial impression that may have been made. Dear brethren, it is
+a very easy matter to turn away from the Shepherd's voice. 'I
+called, and ye refused. I stretched out My hands, and _no man
+regarded_.' That is all! That is what you do, and that is enough.
+
+III. So, lastly, the thwarted search prolonged.
+
+'Till He find'--that is a wonderful and a merciful word. It
+indicates the infinitude of Christ's patient forgiveness and
+perseverance. _We_ tire of searching. 'Can a mother forget' or
+abandon her seeking after a lost child? Yes! if it has gone on for
+so long as to show that further search is hopeless, she will go home
+and nurse her sorrow in her heart. Or, perhaps, like some poor
+mothers and wives, it will turn her brain, and one sign of her
+madness will be that, long years after grief should have been calm
+because hope was dead, she will still be looking for the little one
+so long lost. But Jesus Christ stands at the closed door, as a great
+modern picture shows, though it has been so long undisturbedly
+closed that the hinges are brown with rust, and weeds grow high
+against it. He stands there in the night, with the dew on His hair,
+unheeded or repelled, like some stranger in a hostile village
+seeking for a night's shelter. He will not be put away; but, after
+all refusals, still with gracious finger, knocks upon the door, and
+speaks into the heart. Some of you have refused Him all your lives,
+and perhaps you have grey hairs upon you now. And He is speaking to
+you still. He 'suffereth long, is not easily provoked, is not soon
+angry; hopeth all things,' even of the obstinate rejecters.
+
+For that is another truth that this word 'till' preaches to us--viz.
+the possibility of bringing back those that have gone furthest away
+and have been longest away. The world has a great deal to say about
+incurable cases of moral obliquity and deformity. Christ knows
+nothing about 'incurable cases.' If there is a worst man in the
+world--and perhaps there is--there is nothing but his own
+disinclination to prevent his being brought back, and made as pure
+as an angel.
+
+But do not let us deal with generalities; let us bring the truths to
+ourselves. Dear brethren, I know nothing about the most of you. I
+should not know you again if I met you five minutes after we part
+now. I have never spoken to many of you, and probably never shall,
+except in this public way; but I know that _you_ need Christ,
+and that Christ wants _you_. And I know that, however far you
+have gone, you have not gone so far but that His love feels out
+through the remoteness to grasp you, and would fain draw you to
+itself.
+
+I dare say you have seen upon some dreary moor, or at the foot of
+some 'scaur' on the hillside, the bleached bones of a sheep, lying
+white and grim among the purple heather. It strayed, unthinking of
+danger, tempted by the sweet herbage; it fell; it vainly bleated; it
+died. But what if it had heard the shepherd's call, and had
+preferred to lie where it fell, and to die where it lay? We talk
+about 'silly sheep.' Are there any of them so foolish as men and
+women listening to me now, who will not answer the Shepherd's voice
+when they hear it, with, 'Lord, here am I, come and help me out of
+this miry clay, and bring me back.' He is saying to each of you,
+'Turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die?' May He not have to say at last
+of any of us, 'Ye would not come to Me, that ye might have life!'
+
+
+
+
+FORGIVEN AND UNFORGIVING
+
+
+    'Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until
+     seven times; but, Until seventy times seven.'
+     --MATT. xviii. 22.
+
+The disciples had been squabbling about pre-eminence in the kingdom
+which they thought was presently to appear. They had ventured to
+refer their selfish and ambitious dispute to Christ's arbitrament.
+He answered by telling them the qualifications of 'the greatest in
+the kingdom'--that they are to be humble like little children; that
+they are to be placable; that they are to use all means to reclaim
+offenders; and that, even if the offence is against themselves, they
+are to ignore the personal element, and to regard the offender, not
+so much as having done them harm, as having harmed himself by his
+evil-doing.
+
+Peter evidently feels that that is a very hard commandment for a man
+of his temperament, and so he goes to Jesus Christ for a little
+further direction, and proposes a question as to the limits of this
+disposition: 'How often shall my brother sin?' The very question
+betrays that he does not understand what forgiveness means; for it
+is not real, if the 'forgiven' sin is stowed away safely in the
+memory. 'I can forgive, but I cannot forget,' generally means, 'I do
+not _quite_ forgive.' We are not to take the pardoned offence,
+and carry it to a kind of 'suspense account,' to be revived if
+another is committed, but we are to blot it out altogether. Peter
+thought that he had given a very wide allowance when he said 'seven
+times.' Christ's answer lifts the whole subject out of the realm of
+hard and fast lines and limits, for He takes the two perfect numbers
+'ten' and 'seven,' and multiplies them together, and then He
+multiplies that by 'seven' once more; and the product is _not_
+four hundred and ninety, but is innumerableness. He does not mean
+that the four hundred and ninety-first offence is outside the pale,
+but He suggests indefiniteness, endlessness. So, as I say, He lifts
+the question out of the region in which Peter was keeping it,
+thereby betraying that he did not understand what he was talking
+about, and tells us that there are no limits to the obligation.
+
+The parable which follows, and follows with a 'therefore,' does not
+deal so much with Peter's question as to the limits of the
+disposition, but sets forth its grounds and the nature of its
+manifestations. If we understand why we ought to forgive, and what
+forgiveness is, we shall not say, 'How often?' The question will
+have answered itself.
+
+I turn to the parable rather than the words which I have read as our
+starting-point, to seek to bring out the lessons which it contains
+in regard to our relations to God, and to one another. There are
+three sections in it: the king and his debtor; the forgiven debtor
+and _his_ debtor; and the forgiven debtor unforgiven because
+unforgiving. And if we look at these three points I think we shall
+get the lessons intended.
+
+I. The king and his debtor.
+
+A certain king has servants, whom he gathers together to give in
+their reckoning. And one of them is brought that owes him ten
+thousand talents. Now, it is to be noticed at the very outset that
+the analogy between debt and sin, though real, is extremely
+imperfect. No metaphor of that sort goes on all fours, and there has
+been a great deal of harm done to theology and to evangelical
+religion by carrying out too completely the analogy between money
+debts and our sins against God. But although the analogy is
+imperfect, it is very real. The first point that is to be brought
+out in this first part of the parable is the immense magnitude of
+every man's transgressions against God. Numismatists and
+arithmeticians may jangle about the precise amount represented by
+the thousand talents. It differs according to the talent which is
+taken as the basis of the calculation. There were several talents in
+use in the currency of ancient days. But the very point of the
+expression is not the specification of an exact amount, but the use
+of a round number which is to suggest an undefined magnitude. 'Ten
+thousand talents,' according to one estimate, is some two millions
+and a quarter of pounds sterling.
+
+But I would point out that the amount is stated in terms of talents,
+and _any_ talent is a large sum; and there are ten thousand of
+these; and the reason why the account is made out in terms of
+talents, the largest denomination in the currency of the period, is
+because every sin against God is a great sin. He being what He is,
+and we being what we are, and sin being what it is, every sin is
+large, although the deed which embodies it may be, when measured by
+the world's foot-rule, very small. For the essence of sin is
+rebellion against God and the enthroning of self as His victorious
+rival; and all rebellion is rebellion, whether it is found in arms
+in the field, or whether it is simply sulkily refusing obedience and
+cherishing thoughts of treason. We are always apt to go wrong in our
+estimate of the great and small in human actions, and, although the
+terms of magnitude do not apply properly to moral questions at all,
+there is no more conspicuous misuse of language than when we speak
+of anything which has in it the virus of rebellion against God, and
+the breach of His law, as being a small sin. It may be a small act;
+it is a great sin. Little rattlesnakes are snakes; they have rattles
+and poison fangs as really as the most monstrous of the brood that
+coils and hisses in some cave. So the account is made out in terms
+of talents, because every sin is a great one. I need not dwell upon
+the numerousness that is suggested. 'Ten thousand' is the natural
+current expression for a number that is not innumerable, but is only
+known to be very great. The psalmist says: 'They are more than the
+hairs of my head.' How many hairs had you in your head, David? Do
+you know? 'No!' And how many sins have you committed? Do you know?
+'No!' The number is beyond count by us, though it may be counted by
+Him against whom they are done. Do you believe that about yourself,
+my friend, that the debit side of your account has filled all the
+page and has to be carried forward on to another? Do we any of us
+realise, as we all of us ought to do, the infinite number, and the
+transcendent greatness, of our transgressions against the Father?
+
+But the next point to be noticed is the stern legal right of the
+creditor. It sounds harsh, cruel, almost brutal, that the man and
+his wife and his children should be sold into slavery, and all that
+he had should be taken from him, in order to go some little way
+towards the reduction of the enormous debt that he owed. Christ puts
+in that harsh and apparently cruel conduct in the story, not to
+suggest that it was harsh and cruel, but because it was according to
+the law of the time. A recognised legal right was exercised by the
+creditor when he said, 'Take him; sell him for a slave, and bring me
+what he fetches in the open markets.' So that we have here suggested
+the solemn thought of the right that divine justice, acting
+according to strict retributive law, has over each of us. Our own
+consciences attest it as perfectly within the scope of the divine
+retributive justice that our enormous sin should bring down a
+tremendous punishment.
+
+I said that the analogy between sin and debt was a very imperfect
+one. It is imperfect in regard to one point--viz. the implication of
+other people in the consequences of the man's evil; for although it
+is quite true that 'the evil that men do lives after them, and
+spreads far beyond their sight, and involves many people, no other
+is amenable to divine justice for the sinner's debt. It is quite
+true that, when we do an evil action, we never can tell how far its
+wind-borne seeds may be carried, or where they may alight, or what
+sort of unwholesome fruit they may bear, or who may be poisoned by
+them; but, on the other hand, we, and we only, are responsible for
+our individual transgressions against God. 'If thou be wise, thou
+shalt be wise for thyself; and if thou scornest, thou alone shalt
+bear it.'
+
+The same imperfection in the analogy applies to the next point in the
+parable--viz. the bankrupt debtor's prayer, 'Have patience with me,
+and I will pay thee all.' Easy to promise! I wonder how long it would
+have taken a penniless bankrupt to scrape together two and a quarter
+millions of pounds? He said a great deal more than he could make good.
+But the language of his prayer is by no means the language that
+becomes a penitent at God's throne. We have not to offer to make
+future satisfaction. No! that is impossible. 'What I have written I
+have written,' and the page, with all its smudges and blots and
+misshapen letters, cannot be made other than it is by any future
+pages fairly written. No future righteousness has any power to affect
+the guilt of past sin. There is one thing that does _discharge_ the
+writing from the page. Do you remember Paul's words, 'blotting out
+the handwriting that was against us--nailing it to His Cross'? You
+sometimes dip your pens into red ink, and run a couple of lines
+across the page of an account that is done with. Jesus Christ does
+the same across our account, and the debt is non-existent, because
+He has died.
+
+But the prayer is the expression, if not of penitence yet of
+petition, and all the stern rigour of the law's requirement at once
+melts away, and the king who, in the former words, seemed so harsh,
+now is almost incredibly merciful. For he not only cancels the debt,
+but sets the man free. 'Thy ways are not as our ways; ... as the
+heavens are higher than the earth, so great is His mercy toward' the
+sinful soul.
+
+II. So much, then, for the first part of this parable. Now a word as
+to the second, the forgiven debtor and his debt.
+
+Our Lord uses in the 27th and 28th verses of our text the same
+expression very significantly and emphatically. 'The lord of _that
+servant_ was moved with compassion.' And then again, in the 28th
+verse, 'But that _servant_ went out and found one of his
+fellow-servants.' The repetition of the same phrase hooks the two
+halves together, emphasises the identity of the man, and the
+difference of his demeanour, on the two occasions.
+
+The conduct described is almost impossibly disgusting and truculent.
+'He found his fellow-servant, who owed him a hundred pence'--some
+three pounds, ten shillings--and with the hands that a minute before
+had been wrung in agony, and extended in entreaty, he throttled him;
+and with the voice that had been plaintively pleading for mercy a
+minute before, he gruffly growled, 'Pay me that thou owest.' He had
+just come through an agony of experience that might have made him
+tender. He had just received a blessing that might have made his
+heart glow. But even the repetition of his own petition does not
+touch him, and when the poor fellow-servant, with his paltry debt,
+says, 'Have patience with me, and I will pay thee all,' it avails
+nothing. He durst not sell his fellow-servant. God's rights over a
+man are more than any man's over another. But he does what he can.
+He will not do much towards recouping himself of his loan by
+flinging the poor debtor into prison, but if he cannot get his
+ducats he will gloat over his 'pound of flesh.' So he hurries him
+off to gaol.
+
+Could a man have done like that? Ah! brethren, the things that would
+be monstrous in our relations to one another are common in our
+relations to God. Every day we see, and, alas! do, the very same
+thing, in our measure and degree. Do you never treasure up somebody's
+slights? Do you never put away in a pigeon-hole for safe-keeping,
+endorsed with the doer's name on the back of it, the record of some
+trivial offence against you? It is but as a penny against a talent,
+for the worst that any of us can do to another is nothing as compared
+with what many of us have been doing all our lives toward God. I dare
+say that some of us will go out from this place, and the next man that
+we meet that 'rubs us the wrong way,' or does us any harm, we shall
+score down his act against him with as implacable and unmerciful an
+unforgivingness as that of this servant in the parable. Do not believe
+that he was a monster of iniquity. He was just like us. We all of us
+have one human heart, and this man's crime is but too natural to us
+all. The essence of it was that having been forgiven, he did not
+forgive.
+
+So, then, our Lord here implies the principle that God's mercy to us
+is to set the example to which our dealings with others is to be
+conformed. 'Even as I had mercy on thee' plainly proposes that
+miracle of divine forgiveness as our pattern as well as our hope.
+The world's morality recognises the duty of forgiveness. Christ
+shows us God's forgiveness as at once the model which is the perfect
+realisation of the idea in its completeness and inexhaustibleness,
+and also the motive which, brought into our experience, inclines and
+enables us to forgive.
+
+III. And now I come to the last point of the text--the debtor who
+had been forgiven falling back into the ranks of the unforgiven,
+because he does not forgive.
+
+The fellow-servants were very much disgusted, no doubt. Our
+consciences work a great deal more rapidly, and rigidly, about other
+people's faults than they do about our own. And nine out of ten of
+these fellow-servants that were very sorry, and ran and told the
+king, would have done exactly the same thing themselves. The king,
+for the first time, is wroth. We do not read that he was so before,
+when the debt only was in question; but such unforgiving harshness,
+after the experience of such merciful forgiveness, rouses his
+righteous indignation. The unmercifulness of Christian people is a
+worse sin than many a deed that goes by very ugly names amongst men.
+And so the judgment that falls upon this evil-doer, who, by his
+truculence to his fellow-servant, had betrayed the baseness of his
+nature and the ingratitude of his heart, is, 'Put him back where he
+was! Tie the two and a quarter millions round his neck again! Let us
+see what he will do by way of discharging it now!'
+
+Now, do not let any theological systems prevent you from recognising
+the solemn truth that underlies that representation, that there may
+be things in the hearts and conduct of forgiven Christians which may
+cancel the cancelling of their debt, and bring it all back again. No
+man can cherish the malicious disposition that treasures up offences
+against himself, and at the same moment feel that the divine love is
+wrapping him round in its warm folds. If we are to retain our
+consciousness of having been forgiven by God, and received into the
+amplitude of His heart, we must, in our measure and degree, imitate
+that on which we trust, and be mirrors of the divine mercy which we
+say has saved us.
+
+Our parable lays equal stress on two things. First, that the
+foundation of all real mercifulness in men is the reception of
+forgiving mercy from God. We must have experienced it before we can
+exercise it. And, second, we must exercise it, if we desire to
+continue to experience it. 'Blessed are the merciful, for they shall
+obtain mercy.' That applies to Christian people. But behind that
+there lies the other truth, that in order to be merciful we must
+first of all have received the initial mercy of cancelled
+transgression.
+
+So, dear friends, here are the two lessons for every one of us.
+First, to recognise our debt, and go to Him in whom God is well
+pleased, for its abolishment and forgiveness; and then to go out
+into the world, and live like Him, and show to others love kindled
+by and kindred to that to which we trust for our own salvation. 'Be
+ye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in
+love, as God also hath loved us.'
+
+
+
+
+THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE KING
+
+
+    'And, behold, one came and said unto Him, Good Master,
+    what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal
+    life? 17. And He said unto him, Why callest thou Me
+    good? there is none good but One, that is, God: but
+    if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.
+    18. He saith unto Him, Which? Jesus said, Thou shalt
+    do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou
+    shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness,
+    19. Honour thy father and thy mother: and, Thou shalt
+    love thy neighbour as thyself. 20. The young man saith
+    unto Him, All these things have I kept from my youth
+    up: what lack I yet? 21. Jesus said unto him, If thou
+    wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give
+    to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven:
+    and come and follow Me. 22. But when the young man
+    heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had
+    great possessions. 23. Then said Jesus unto His
+    disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall
+    hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. 24. And again
+    I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through
+    the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into
+    the kingdom of God. 25. When His disciples heard it,
+    they were exceedingly amazed, saying, Who then can be
+    saved? 26. But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them,
+    With men this is impossible; but with God all things
+    are possible.'--MATT. xix. 16-26.
+
+We have here one of the saddest stories in the gospels. It is a true
+soul's tragedy. The young man is in earnest, but his earnestness has
+not volume and force enough to float him over the bar. He wishes to
+have some great thing bidden him to do, but he recoils from the
+sharp test which Christ imposes. He truly wants the prize, but the
+cost is too great; and yet he wishes it so much that he goes away
+without it in deep sorrow, which perhaps, at another day, ripened
+into the resolve which then was too high for him. There is a certain
+severity in our Lord's tone, an absence of recognition of the much
+good in the young man, and a naked stringency in His demand from
+him, which sound almost harsh, but which are set in their true light
+by Mark's note, that Jesus 'loved him,' and therefore treated him
+thus. The truest way to draw ingenuous souls is not to flatter, nor
+to make entrance easy by dropping the standard or hiding the
+requirements, but to call out all their energy by setting before
+them the lofty ideal. Easy-going disciples are easily made--and
+lost. Thorough-going ones are most surely won by calling for entire
+surrender.
+
+I. We may gather together the earlier part of the conversation, as
+introductory to the Lord's requirement (vs. 16-20), in which we have
+the picture of a real though imperfect moral earnestness, and may
+note how Christ deals with it. Matthew tells us that the questioner
+was young and rich. Luke adds that he was a 'ruler'--a synagogue
+official, that is--which was unusual for a young man, and indicates
+that his legal blamelessness was recognised. Mark adds one of his
+touches, which are not only picturesque, but character-revealing, by
+the information that he came 'running' to Jesus in the way, so eager
+was he, and fell at His feet, so reverential was he. His first
+question is singularly compacted of good and error. The fact that he
+came to Christ for a purely religious purpose, not seeking personal
+advantage for himself or for others, like the crowds who followed
+for loaves and cures, nor laying traps for Him with puzzles which
+might entangle Him with the authorities, nor asking theological
+questions for curiosity, but honestly and earnestly desiring to be
+helped to lay hold of eternal life, is to be put down to his credit.
+He is right in counting it the highest blessing.
+
+Where had he got hold of the thought of 'eternal life'? It was miles
+above the dusty speculations and casuistries of the rabbis. Probably
+from Christ Himself. He was right in recognising that the conditions
+of possessing it were moral, but his conception of 'good' was
+superficial, and he thought more of doing good than of being good,
+and of the desired life as payment for meritorious actions. In a
+word, he stood at the point of view of the old dispensation. 'This
+do, and thou shalt live,' was his belief; and what he wished was
+further instruction as to what 'this' was. He was to be praised in
+that he docilely brought his question to Jesus, even though, as
+Christ's answer shows, there was error mingling in his docility.
+Such is the character--a young man, rich, influential, touched with
+real longings for the highest life, ready, so far as he knows
+himself, to do whatever he is bidden, in order to secure it.
+
+We might have expected Christ, who opened His arms wide for
+publicans and harlots, to have welcomed this fair, ingenuous seeker
+with some kindly word. But He has none for him. We adopt the reading
+of the Revised Version, in which our Lord's first word is repellent.
+It is in effect--'There is no need for your question, which answers
+itself. There is one good Being, the source and type of every good
+thing, and therefore the good, which you ask about, can only be
+conformity to His will. You need not come to Me to know what you are
+to do.' He relegates the questioner, not to his own conscience, but
+to the authoritative revealed will of God in the law. Modern views
+of Christ's work, which put all its stress on the perfection of His
+moral character, and His office as a pattern of righteousness, may
+well be rebuked by the fact that He expressly disclaimed this
+character, and declared that, if He was only to be regarded as
+republishing the law of human conduct, His work was needless. Men
+have enough knowledge of what they must do to enter into life,
+without Jesus Christ. No doubt, Christ's moral teaching transcends
+that given of old; but His special work was not to tell men what to
+do, but to make it possible for them to do it; to give, not the law,
+but the power, both the motive and the impulse, which will fulfil
+the law. On another occasion He answered a similar question in a
+different manner. When the Jews asked Him, 'What must we do, that we
+may work the works of God?' He replied by the plain evangelical
+statement: 'This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He
+hath sent.' Why did He not answer the young ruler thus? Only because
+He knew that he needed to be led to that thought by having his own
+self-complacency shattered, and the clinging of his soul to earth
+laid bare. The whole treatment of him here is meant to bring him to
+the apprehension of faith as preceding all truly good work.
+
+The young man's second question says a great deal in its one word.
+It indicates astonishment at being remanded to these old, well-worn
+precepts, and might be rendered, 'What sort of commandments?' as if
+taking it for granted that they must be new and peculiar. It is the
+same spirit as that which in all ages has led men who with partial
+insight longed after eternal life, to seek it by fantastic and
+unusual roads of extraordinary sacrifices or services--the spirit
+which filled monasteries, and invented hair shirts, and fastings,
+and swinging with hooks in your back at Hindoo festivals. The
+craving for more than ordinary 'good works' shows a profound mistake
+in the estimate of the ordinary, and a fatal blunder as to the
+relation between 'goodness' and 'eternal life.'
+
+So Christ answers the question by quoting the second half of the
+Decalogue, which deals with the homeliest duties, and appending to
+it the summary of the law, which requires love to our neighbour as
+to ourselves. Why does He omit the earlier half? Probably because He
+would meet the error of the question, by presenting only the
+plainest, most familiar commandments, and because He desired to
+excite the consciousness of deficiency, which could be most easily
+done in connection with these.
+
+There is a touch of impatience in the rejoinder, 'All these have I
+kept,' and more than a touch of self-satisfaction. The law has
+failed to accomplish one of its chief purposes in the young man, in
+that it has not taught him his sinfulness. No doubt he had a right
+to say that his outward life had been free from breaches of such
+very elementary morality which any old woman could have taught him.
+He had never gone below the surface of the commandments, nor below
+the surface of his acts, or he would not have answered so jauntily.
+He had yet to learn that the height of 'goodness' is reached, not by
+adding some strange new performances to the threadbare precepts of
+everyday duty, but by digging deep into these, and bottoming the
+fabric of our lives on their inmost spirit. He had yet to learn that
+whoever says, 'All these have I kept,' thereby convicts himself of
+understanding neither them nor himself.
+
+Still he was not at rest, although he had, as he fancied, kept them
+all. His last question is a plaintive, honest acknowledgment of the
+hungry void within, which no round of outward obediences can ever
+fill. He knows that he has not the inner fountain springing up into
+eternal life. He is dimly aware of something wanting, whether in his
+obedience or no, at all events in his peace; and he is right in
+believing that the reason for that conscious void is something
+wanting in his conduct. But he will not learn what Christ has been
+trying to teach him, that he needs no new commandment, but a deeper
+understanding and keeping of the old. Hence his question, half a
+wail of a hungry heart, half petulant impatience with Christ's
+reiteration of obvious duties. There are multitudes of this kind in
+all ages, honestly wishing to lay hold of eternal life, able to
+point to virtuous conduct, anxious to know and do anything lacking,
+and yet painfully certain that something is wanting somewhere.
+
+II. Now comes the sharp-pointed test, which pricks the brilliant
+bubble. Mark tells us that Jesus accompanied His word with one of
+those looks which searched a soul, and bore His love into it. 'If
+thou wouldest be perfect,' takes up the confession of something
+'lacking,' and shows what that is. It is unnecessary to remark that
+this commandment to sell all and give to the poor is intended only
+for the individual case. No other would-be disciple was called upon
+to do so. It cannot be meant for others; for, if all were sellers,
+where would the buyers be? Nor need we do more than point out that
+the command of renunciation is only half of Christ's answer, the
+other being, 'Come, follow Me.' But we are not to slide easily over
+the precept with the comfortable thought that it was special
+treatment for a special case. The principle involved in it is
+medicine for all, and the only way of healing for any. This man was
+tied to earth by the cords of his wealth. They did not hinder him
+from keeping the commandments, for he had no temptations to murder,
+or adultery, or theft, or neglect of parents. But they did hinder
+him from giving his whole self up, and from regarding eternal life
+as the most precious of all things. Therefore for him there was no
+safety short of entire outward denuding himself of them; and, if he
+was in earnest out and out in his questions, here was a new thing
+for him to do. Others are hindered by other things, and they are
+called to abandon these. The one thing needful for entrance into
+life is at bottom self-surrender, and the casting away of all else
+for its sovereign sake. 'I do count them but dung' must be the
+language of every one who will win Christ. The hands must be emptied
+of treasures, and the heart swept clear of lesser loves, if He is to
+be grasped by our hands, and to dwell in our hearts. More of us than
+we are willing to believe are kept from entire surrender to Jesus
+Christ, by money and worldly possessions; and many professing
+Christians are kept shrivelled and weak and joyless because they
+love their wealth more than their Lord, and would think it madness
+to do as this man was bidden to do. When ballast is thrown out, the
+balloon shoots up. A general unlading of the 'thick clay' which
+weighs down the Christian life of England, would let thousands soar
+to heights which they will never reach as long as they love money
+and what it buys as much as they do. The letter of this commandment
+may be only applicable in a special case (though, perhaps, this one
+young man was not the only human being that ever needed this
+treatment), but the spirit is of universal application. No man
+enters into life who does not count all things but loss, and does
+not die to them all, that he may follow Christ.
+
+III. Then comes the collapse of all the enthusiasm. The questioner's
+earnestness chills at the touch of the test. What has become of the
+eagerness which brought him running to Jesus, and of the willingness
+to do any hard task to which he was set? It was real, but shallow.
+It deceived himself. But Christ's words cut down to the inner man,
+and laid bare for his own inspection the hard core of selfish
+worldliness which lay beneath. How many radiant enthusiasms, which
+cheat their subjects quite as much as their beholders, disappear
+like tinted mist when the hard facts of self-sacrifice strike
+against them! How much sheer worldliness disguises itself from
+itself and from others in glistering garments of noble sentiments,
+which fall at a touch when real giving up is called for, and show
+the ugly thing below! How much 'religion' goes about the world, and
+gets made 'a ruler' of the synagogue in recognition of its
+excellence, which needs but this Ithuriel's spear to start up in its
+own shape! The completeness  and immediateness of the collapse are
+noticeable. The young man seems to speak no word, and to take no
+time for reflection. He stands for a moment as if stunned, and then
+silently turns away. What a moment! his fate hung on it. Once more
+we see the awful mystery enacted before our eyes, of a soul
+gathering up its power to put away life. Who will say that the
+decision of a moment, which is the outcome of all the past, may not
+fix the whole future? This man had never before been consciously
+brought to the fork in the road; but now the two ways are before
+him, and, knowingly, he chooses the worse. Christ did not desire him
+to do so; but He did desire that he should choose, and should know
+that he did. It was the truest kindness to tear away the veil of
+surface goodness which hid him from himself, and to force him to a
+conscious decision.
+
+One sign of grace he does give, in that he went away 'sorrowful.' He
+is not angry nor careless. He cannot see the fair prospect of the
+eternal life, which he had in some real fashion desired, fade away,
+without a pang. If he goes back to the world, he goes back feeling
+more acutely than ever that it cannot satisfy him. He loves it too
+well to give it up, but not enough to feel that it is enough.
+Surely, in coming days, that godly sorrow would work a change of the
+foolish choice, and we may hope that he found no rest till he cast
+away all else to make Christ his own. A soul which has travelled as
+far on the road to life eternal as this man had done, can scarcely
+thereafter walk the broad road of selfishness and death with entire
+satisfaction.
+
+IV. The section closes with Christ's comment on the sad incident. He
+speaks no word of condemnation, but passes at once from the
+individual to the general lesson of the difficulty which rich men
+(or, as He explains it in Mark, men who 'trust in riches') have in
+entering the kingdom. The reflection breathes a tone of pity, and is
+not so much blame as a merciful recognition of special temptations
+which affect His judgment, and should modify ours. A camel with its
+great body, long neck, and hump, struggling to get through a
+needle's eye, is their emblem. It is a new thing to pity rich men,
+or to think of their wealth as disqualifying them for anything. The
+disciples, with childish _naivete_, wonder. We may wonder that
+they wondered. They could not understand what sort of a kingdom it
+was into which capitalists would find entrance difficult. All doors
+fly open for them to-day, as then. They do not find much difficulty
+in getting into the church, however hard it may be to get into the
+kingdom. But it still remains true that the man who has wealth has a
+hindrance to his religious character, which, like all hindrances,
+may be made a help by the use he makes of it; and that the man who
+trusts in riches, which he who possesses them is wofully likely to
+do, has made the hindrance into a barrier which he cannot pass.
+
+That is a lesson which commercial nations, like England, have need
+to lay to heart, not as a worn-out saying of the Bible, which means
+very little for us, but as heavy with significance, and pointing to
+the special dangers which beset Christian perfection.
+
+So real is the peril of riches, that Christ would have His disciples
+regard the victory over it as beyond our human power, and beckons us
+away from the effort to overcome the love of the world in our
+strength, pointing us to God, in whose mighty grace, breathed into
+our feeble wills and treacherous hearts, is the only force which can
+overcome the attraction of perishable riches, and make any of us
+willing or able to renounce them all that we may win Christ. The
+young ruler had just shown that 'with men this is impossible.'
+Perhaps he still lingered near enough to catch the assurance that
+the surrender, which had been too much for him to achieve, might yet
+be joyfully made, since 'with God all things are possible.'
+
+
+
+
+NEAREST TO CHRIST
+
+
+    'To sit on My right hand, and on My left, is not Mine
+    to give, but it shall be given to them for whom it is
+    prepared of My Father.'--MATT. xx. 23.
+
+You will observe that an unusually long supplement is inserted by
+our translators in this verse. That supplement is quite unnecessary,
+and, as is sometimes the case, is even worse than unnecessary. It
+positively obscures the true meaning of the words before us.
+
+As they stand in our Bibles, the impression that they leave upon
+one's mind is that Christ in them abjures the power of giving to His
+disciples their places in the kingdom of heaven, and declares that
+it belongs not to His function, but relegates it, to His own
+exclusion, to the Father; whereas what He says is the very opposite
+of this. He does not put aside the granting of places at His right
+hand or His left as not being within His province, but He states the
+principles and conditions on which He does make such a grant, and so
+is really claiming it as in His province. All that would have been a
+great deal clearer if our translators had been contented to render
+the words that they found before them in the Book, without addition,
+and to read, 'To sit on My right hand, and on My left, is not Mine
+to give, but to them for whom it is prepared of My Father.'
+
+Another introductory remark may be made, to the effect that our Lord
+does not put aside this prayer of His apostles as if they were
+seeking an impossible thing. It is never safe, I know, to argue from
+the silence of Scripture. There may be many reasons for that silence
+beyond our ken in any given case; but still it does strike one as
+noteworthy that, when this fond mother and her ambitious sons came
+with their prayer for pre-eminence in His kingdom, our Lord did not
+answer what would have been so obvious to answer if it had been
+true, 'You are asking a thing which cannot be granted to anybody,
+for they are all upon one level in that kingdom of the heavens.' He
+says by implication the very opposite. Not only does His silence
+confirm their belief that when He came in His glory, some would be
+closer to His side than others; but the plain statement of the text
+is that, in the depth of the eternal counsels, and by the
+preparation of divine grace, there were thrones nearest to His own
+which some men should fill. He does _not_ say, 'You are asking
+what cannot be.' He does say, 'There are men for whom it is prepared
+of My Father.'
+
+And then, still further, Jesus does not condemn the prayer as
+indicating a wrong state of mind on the part of James and John,
+though good and bad were strangely mingled in it. We are told
+nowadays that it is a very selfish thing, far below the lofty height
+to which our transcendental teachers have attained, to be heartened
+and encouraged, strengthened and quickened, by the prospect of the
+crown and the rest that remain for the people of God. If so, Christ
+ought to have turned round to these men, and have rebuked the
+passion for reward, which, according to this new light, is so
+unworthy and so low. But, instead of that, He confines Himself to
+explaining the conditions on which the fulfilment of the desire is
+possible, and by implication permits and approves the desire. 'You
+want to sit on My right hand and on My left, do you? Then be it so.
+You may do so if you like. Are you ready to accept the conditions?
+It is well that you should want it,--not for the sake of being above
+your brethren, but for the sake of being nearest to Me. Hearken! Are
+ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of?' They say unto
+Him (and I do not know that there are anywhere grander words than
+the calm, swift, unhesitating, modest, and yet confident answer of
+these two men), 'We are able.' 'You shall have your desire if you
+fulfil the conditions. It is given to them for whom it is prepared
+of My Father.'
+
+I. So, then, if we rightly understand these words, and take them
+without the unfortunate comment which our translators have inserted,
+they contain, first, the principle that some will be nearer Christ
+than others in that heavenly kingdom.
+
+As I have said, the words of our Lord do not merely imply, by the
+absence of all hint that these disciples' petition was impossible,
+the existence of degrees among the subjects of His heavenly kingdom,
+but articulately affirm that such variety is provided for by the
+preparation of the Father. Probably the two brothers thought that
+they were only asking for preeminence in an earthly kingdom, and had
+no idea that their prayer pointed beyond the grave; but that
+confusion of thought could not be cured in their then stage of
+growth, and our Lord therefore leaves it untouched. But the other
+error, if it were an error, was of a different kind, and might, for
+aught that one sees, have been set right in a moment. Instead of
+which the answer adopts it, and seems to set Christ's own
+confirmation on it, as being no Jewish dream, but a truth.
+
+They were asking for earth. He answers--for heaven. He leaves them
+to learn in after days--when the one was slain with the sword, first
+martyr among the apostles, and the other lived to see them all pass
+to their thrones, while he remained the 'companion in tribulation'
+of the second generation of the Church--how far off was the
+fulfilment which they fancied so near.
+
+We need not he surprised that so large a truth should be spoken by
+Christ so quietly, and as it were incidentally. For that is in
+keeping with His whole tone when speaking of the unseen world. One
+knows not whether to wonder more at the decisive authority with
+which He tells us of that mysterious region, or at the small space
+which such revelations occupy in His words. There is an air of
+simplicity and unconsciousness, and withal of authority, and withal
+of divine reticence about them all, which are in full harmony with
+the belief that Christ speaking of heaven speaks of that He knows,
+and testifies that He hath seen.
+
+That truth to which, as we think, our Lord's words here inevitably
+lead, is distinctly taught in many other places of Scripture. We
+should have had less difficulty about it, and should have felt more
+what a solemn and stimulating thought it is, if we had tried a
+little more than most of us do to keep clear before us what really
+is the essential of that future life, what is the lustre of its
+light, the heaven of heaven, the glory of the glory. Men talk about
+physical theories of another life. I suppose they are possible. They
+seem to me infinitely unimportant. Warm imaginations, working by
+sense, write books about a future state which wonderfully succeed in
+making it real by making it earthly. Some of them read more like a
+book of travels in this world than forecastings of the next. They
+may be true or not. It does not matter one whit. I believe that
+heaven is a place. I believe that the corporeity of our future life
+is essential to the perfection of it. I believe that Christ wears,
+and will wear for ever, a glorified human body. I believe that that
+involves locality, circumstance, external occupations; and I say,
+all that being so, and in its own place very important, yet if we
+stop there, we have no vision of the real light that makes the
+lustre, no true idea of the glory that makes the blessedness.
+
+For what is heaven? Likeness to God, love, purity, fellowship with
+Him; the condition of the spirit and the relation of the soul to
+Him. The noblest truth about the future world flows from the words
+of our Master--'This is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true
+God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.' Not 'this brings'; not
+'this will lead up to'; not 'this will draw after it'; but 'this
+is'; and whosoever possesses that eternal life hath already in him
+the germ of all the glories that are round the throne, and the
+blessedness that fills the hearts of perfected spirits.
+
+If so, if already eternal life in the bud standeth in the knowledge
+of God in Christ, what makes its fruitage and completeness? Surely,
+not physical changes or the circumstances of heaven, at least not
+these primarily, however much such changes and circumstances may
+subserve our blessedness there, and the anticipation of them may
+help our sense-bound hopes here. But the completeness of heaven is
+the completion of our knowledge of God and Christ, with all the
+perfecting of spirit which that implies and produces. The faith, and
+love, and happy obedience, and consecration which is calm, that
+partially occupied and ruled the soul here, are to be thought of as
+enlarged, perfected, delivered from the interruption of opposing
+thoughts, of sensuous desires, of selfish purposes, of earthly and
+sinful occupations. And that perfect knowledge and perfect union and
+perfect likeness are perfect bliss. And that bliss is heaven. And
+if, whilst heaven is a place, the heaven of heaven be a state, then
+no more words are needed to show that, then, heaven can be no dead
+level, nor can all stand at the same stage of attainments, though
+all be perfect; but that in that solemn company of the blessed, 'the
+spirits of just men made perfect,' there are indefinitely numerous
+degrees of approximation to the unattainable Perfection, which
+stretches above them all, and draws them all to itself. We have not
+to think of that future life as oppressed, if I may so say, with the
+unbroken monotony of perfect identity in character and attainments.
+All indeed are like one another, because all are like Jesus, but
+that basis of similarity does not exclude infinite variety. The same
+glory belongs to each, but it is reflected at differing angles and
+received in divers measures. Perfect blessedness will belong to
+each, but the capacity to receive it will differ. There will be the
+same crown on each head, the same song on each lip, the same fulness
+of joy filling each heart; but star differeth from star, and the
+great condition of happy intercourse on earth will not be wanting in
+heaven--a deep-seated similarity and a superficial diversity.
+
+Does not the very idea of an endless progress in that kingdom involve
+such variety? We do not think of men passing into the heavens, and
+being perfected by a bound so as that there shall be no growth. We
+think of them indeed as being perfected up to the height of their
+then capacity, from the beginning of that celestial life, so as that
+there shall be no sin, nor any conscious incompleteness, but not so
+as that there shall be no progress. And, if they each grow through
+all the ages, and are ever coming nearer and nearer to Christ, that
+seems necessarily to lead to the thought that this endless progress,
+carried on in every spirit, will place them at different points of
+approximation to the one centre. As in the heavens there are planets
+that roll nearer the central sun, and others that circle farther out
+from its rays, yet each keeps its course, and makes music as it moves,
+as well as planets whose broader disc can receive and reflect more
+of the light than smaller sister spheres, and yet each blazes over
+its whole surface and is full to its very rim with white light; so
+round that throne the spirits of the just made perfect shall move in
+order and peace--every one blessed, every one perfect, every one
+like Christ at first, and becoming liker through every moment of
+the eternities. Each perfected soul looking on his brother shall
+see there another phase of the one perfectness that blesses and
+adorns him too, and all taken together shall make up, in so far as
+finite creatures can make up, the reflection and manifestation of
+the fulness of Christ. 'Having then gifts differing according to
+the grace that is given to us' is the law for the incompleteness
+of earth. 'Having then gifts differing according to the glory that
+is given to us' will be the law for the perfection of the heavens.
+There are those for whom it is prepared of His Father, that they
+shall sit in special nearness to Him.
+
+II. Still further, these words rightly understood assert that truth
+which, at first sight, our Authorised Version's rendering seems to
+make them contradict, viz. that Christ is the giver to each of these
+various degrees of glory and blessedness. 'It is not Mine to give,
+save to them for whom it is prepared.' Then it is Thine to give it
+to them. To deny or to doubt that Christ is the giver of the
+blessedness, whatsoever the blessedness may be, that fills the
+hearts and souls of the redeemed, is to destroy His whole work, to
+destroy all the relations upon which our hopes rest, and to
+introduce confusion and contradiction into the whole matter.
+
+For Scripture teaches us that He is God's unspeakable gift; that in
+Him is given to us everything; that He is the bestower of all which
+we need; that 'out of His fulness,' as one of those two disciples
+long afterwards said, 'all we have received, and grace for grace.'
+There is nothing within the compass of God's love to bestow of which
+Christ is not the giver. There is nothing divine that is done in the
+heavens and the earth, as I believe, of which Christ is not the
+doer. The representation of Scripture is uniformly that He is the
+medium of the activity of the divine nature; that he is the energy
+of the divine will; that He is, to use the metaphor of the Old
+Testament, 'the arm of the Lord'--the forthputting of God's power;
+that He is, to use the profound expression of the New Testament, the
+Word of the Lord, cognate with, and the utterance of, the eternal
+nature, the light that streams from the central brightness, the
+river that flows from the else sealed fountain. As the arm is to the
+body, and as is the word to the soul, so is Christ to God--the
+eternal divine utterance and manifestation of the divine nature.
+And, therefore, to speak of anything that a man can need and
+anything that God can give as not being given by Christ, is to
+strike at the very foundation, not only of our hopes, but at the
+whole scheme of revealed truth. He is the giver of heaven and
+everything else which the soul requires.
+
+And then, again, let me remind you that on this matter we are not
+left to such general considerations as those that I have been
+suggesting, but that the plain statements of Scripture do confirm
+the assertion that Christ is the determiner and the bestower of all
+the differing grades of glory and blessedness yonder. For do we not
+read of Him that He is the Judge of the whole earth? Do we not read
+of Him that His word is acquittal and His frown condemnation--that
+to 'be accepted of Him' is the highest aim and end of the Christian
+life? Do we not read that it is He who says, 'Come, ye blessed of My
+Father, enter into the kingdom prepared for you'? Do we not read
+that the apostle, dying, solaced himself with the thought that
+'there was laid up for him a crown of glory, which the Lord, the
+righteous Judge, would give him at that day'? And do we not read in
+the very last book of Scripture, written by one of those two
+brothers, and containing almost verbal reference to the words of my
+text, the promise seven times spoken from the immortal lips of the
+glorified Son of Man, walking in the midst of the candlesticks, 'To
+him that overcometh will I give'? The fruit of the tree of life is
+plucked by His hands for the wearied conquerors. The crown of life
+is set by Him on the faithful witnesses' brows. The hidden manna and
+the new name are bestowed by Him on those who hold fast His name. It
+is He who gives the victors kingly power over the nations. He
+clothes in white garments those who have not defiled their robes.
+His hand writes upon the triumphant foreheads the name of God. And
+highest of all, beyond which there is no bliss conceivable, 'To him
+that overcometh will I grant to sit with Me in My throne.'
+
+Christ is the bestower of the royalties of the heavens as of the
+redemptions of earth, and it is His to give that which we crave at
+His hands, when we ask pardon here and glory hereafter. 'To him that
+is athirst will He give of the water of life freely,' and to him
+that overcometh will He give the crown of glory.
+
+III. These words lead us, in the third place, to the further
+thought, that these glorious places are not given to mere wishing,
+nor by mere arbitrary will.
+
+'You would sit on My right hand and on My left? You think of that
+pre-eminence as conferred because you chose to ask it--as given by a
+piece of favouritism. Not so. I cannot make a man foremost in my
+kingdom in that fashion. There are conditions which must precede
+such an elevation.'
+
+And there are people who think thus still, as if the mere desire,
+without anything more, were enough--or as if the felicities of the
+heavenly world were dependent solely on Christ's arbitrary will, and
+could be bestowed by an exercise of mere power, as an Eastern prince
+may make this man his vizier and that other one his water-carrier.
+The same principles which we have already applied to the elucidation
+of the idea of varieties and stages of nearness to Christ in His
+heavenly kingdom have a bearing on this matter. If we rightly
+understand that the essential blessedness of heaven is likeness to
+Christ, we shall feel that mere wishing carries no man thither, and
+that mere sovereign will and power do not avail to set us there.
+There are conditions indispensable, from the very nature of the
+case, and unless they are realised it is as impossible for us to
+receive, as for Him to give, a place at His side. If, indeed, the
+future blessedness consisted in mere external circumstances and
+happier conditions of life, it might be so bestowed. But if place
+and surroundings, and a more exquisite and ethereal frame, are but
+subordinate sources of it, and its real fountain is union with Jesus
+and assimilation to Him, then something else than idle desires must
+wing the soul that soars thither, and His transforming grace, not
+His arbitrary will, must set us at His own right hand 'in the
+heavenly places.'
+
+Of all the profitless occupations with which men waste their lives,
+none are more utterly useless than wishing without acting. Our
+wishes are meant to impel us to the appropriate forms of energy by
+which they can be realised. When a pauper becomes a millionaire by
+sitting and vehemently wishing that he were rich, when ignorance
+becomes learning by standing in a library and wishing that the
+contents of all these books were in its head, there will be some
+hope that the gates of heaven will fly open to your desire. But till
+then, 'many, I say unto you, shall seek to enter in and not be
+able.' Many shall _seek_; you must _strive_. For wishing is one thing,
+and _willing_ is another, and _doing_ is yet another. And in regard
+to entrance into Christ's kingdom, our 'doing' is trusting in Him who
+has done all for us. 'This is the work of God, that ye should believe
+on Him whom He hath sent.' Does our wish lead us to the acceptance
+of the condition? Then it will be fulfilled. If not, it will remain
+fruitless, will die into apathy, or will live as a pang and a curse.
+
+You wish, or fancy you wish, to pass into heaven when you die, I
+suppose. Some of its characteristics attract you. You believe in
+punishment for sin, and you would willingly escape that. You believe
+in a place of rest after toil, of happiness after sorrow, where
+nipping frosts of disappointment, and wild blasts of calamity, and
+slow, gnawing decay no more harm and kill your joys--and you would
+like that. But do you wish to be pure and stainless, to have your
+hearts fixed on God alone, to have your whole being filled with Him,
+and emptied of self and sense and sin? The peace of heaven attracts
+you--but its praise repels, does it not? Its happiness draws your
+wishes--does its holiness seem inviting? It would be joyful to be
+far away from punishment--would it be as joyful to be near Christ?
+Ah! no; the wishes lead to no resolve, and therefore to no result,
+for this among other reasons, because they are only kindled by a
+part of the whole, and are exchanged for positive aversion when the
+real heaven of heaven is presented to your thoughts. Many a man who,
+by the set of his whole life, is drifting daily nearer and nearer to
+that region of outer darkness, is conscious of an idle wish for
+peace and joy beyond the grave. In common matters a man may be
+devoured by vain desires all his lifetime, because he will not pass
+beyond wishing to acting accordingly. 'The desire of the slothful
+killeth him; because his hands refused to labour, he coveteth
+greedily all the day long.' And with like but infinitely more
+tragical issues do these vain wishes for a place in that calm world,
+where nothing but holiness enters, gnaw at many a soul. 'Let me die
+the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his,' was
+the aspiration of that Gentile prophet, whose love of the world
+obscured even the prophetic illumination which he possessed--and his
+epitaph is a stern comment on the uselessness of such empty wishes,
+'Balaam, the son of Beor, they slew with the sword.' It needs more
+than a wish to set us at Christ's right hand in His kingdom.
+
+Nor can such a place be given by mere arbitrary will. Christ could
+not, if He would, set a man at His right hand whose heart was not
+the home of simple trust and thankful love, whose nature and desires
+were unprepared for that blessed world. It would be like taking one
+of those creatures--if there be such--that live on the planet whose
+orbit is farthest from the sun, accustomed to cold, organised for
+darkness, and carrying it to that great central blaze, with all its
+fierce flames and tongues of fiery gas that shoot up a thousand
+miles in a moment. It would crumble and disappear before its
+blackness could be seen against the blaze.
+
+His loving will embraces us all, and is the foundation of all our
+hopes. But it had to reach its purpose by a bitter road which He did
+not shrink from travelling. He desires to save us, and to realise
+the desire He had to die. 'It became Him for whom are all things, in
+bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain of their
+salvation perfect through suffering.' What He had to do, we have to
+accept. Unless we accept the mercy of God in Christ, no wish on our
+parts, nor any exercise of power on His, will carry us to the heaven
+which He has died to open, and of which He is at once the giver and
+the gift.
+
+IV. These glorious places are given as the result of a divine
+preparation.
+
+'To them for whom it is prepared of My Father.' We have seen that
+Christ is not to be regarded as abjuring the office, with which His
+disciples' confidence led them to invest Him--that of allotting to
+His servants their place in His kingdom. He neither refers it to the
+Father without Himself, nor claims it for Himself without the
+Father. The living unity of will and work which subsists between the
+Father and the Son forbids such a separation and distribution of
+office. And that unity is set forth on both its sides in His own
+deep words, 'The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth
+the Father do: for whatsoever things He doeth, these also doeth the
+Son likewise.'
+
+So, then, while the gift of thrones at His side is His act and the
+Father's, in like manner the preparation of the royal seats for
+their occupants, and of the kings for their thrones, is the Father's
+act and His.
+
+Our text does not tell us directly what that preparation is, any
+more than it tells us directly what the principles are on which
+entrance into and pre-eminence in the kingdom are granted. But we
+know enough in regard to both, for our practical guidance, for the
+vigour of our hope, and the grasp of our faith.
+
+There is a twofold divine preparation of the heavens for men. One is
+from of old. The kingdom is 'prepared for you before the foundation
+of the world.' That preparation is in the eternal counsel of the
+divine love, which calleth the things that are not as though they
+were, and before which all that is evolved in the generations of men
+and the epochs of time, lies on one plane, equally near to dim from
+whose throne diverge far beneath the triple streams of past,
+present, and future.
+
+And beside that preparation, the counsel of pardoning mercy and
+redeeming grace, there is the other preparation--the realisation of
+that eternal purpose in time through the work of Jesus Christ our
+Lord. His consolation to His disciples in the parting hour was, 'I
+go to prepare a place for you.' How much was included in these words
+we shall never know till we, like Him, see of the travail of His
+soul, and like Him are satisfied. But we can dimly see that on the
+one hand His death, and on the other hand His entrance into that
+holiest of all, make ready for us the many mansions of the Father's
+house. He was crucified for our offences, He was raised again for
+our justification, He is passed through the heavens to stand our
+Forerunner in the presence of God--and by all these mighty acts He
+prepares the heavenly places for us. As the sun behind a cloud,
+which hides it from us, is still pouring out its rays on far-off
+lands, so He, veiled in dark, sunset clouds of Calvary, sent the
+energy of His passion and cross into the unseen world and made it
+possible that we should enter there. 'When Thou didst overcome the
+sharpness of death, Thou didst open the gates of the kingdom of
+heaven to all believers.' As one who precedes a mighty host provides
+and prepares rest for their weariness, and food for their hunger, in
+some city on their line of march, and having made all things ready,
+is at the gates to welcome their travel-stained ranks when they
+arrive, and guide them to their repose; so He has gone before, our
+Forerunner, to order all things for us there. It may be that unless
+Christ were in heaven, our brother as well as our Lord, it were no
+place for mortals. It may be that we need to have His glorified
+bodily presence in order that it should be possible for human
+spirits to bear the light, and be at home with God. Be that as it
+may, this we know, that the Father prepares a place for us by the
+eternal counsel of His love, and by the all-sufficient work of
+Christ, by whom we have access to the Father.
+
+And as His work is the Father's preparation of the place for us by
+the Son, the issue of His work is the Father's preparation of us for
+the place, through the Son, by the Spirit. 'He that hath wrought us
+for the self-same thing is God.'
+
+If so, then what follows? This, among other things, that wishes are
+vain, for heaven is no gift of arbitrary favouritism, but that faith
+in Christ, and faith alone, leads us to His right hand--and the
+measure of our faith and growing Christlikeness here, will be the
+measure of our glory hereafter, and of our nearness to Him. It is
+possible to be 'saved, _yet so as by fire_.' It is possible to
+have 'an entrance ministered unto us _abundantly_ into the
+everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.' If we
+would be near Him then, we must be near Him now. If we would share
+His throne, we must bear His cross. If we would be found in the
+likeness of His resurrection, we must be 'conformable unto His
+death.' Then such desires as these true-hearted, and yet mistaken,
+disciples expressed will not be the voice of selfish ambition, but
+of dependent love. They will not be vain wishes, but be fulfilled by
+Him, who, stooping from amid the royalties of heaven, with love upon
+His face and pity in His heart, will give more than we ask. 'Seekest
+thou a place at My right hand? Nay, I give thee a more wondrous
+dignity. To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with Me in My
+throne.'
+
+
+
+
+THE SERVANT-LORD AND HIS SERVANTS
+
+
+    'Even as the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto,
+    but to minister.'--MATT. xx. 28.
+
+It seems at first sight strangely unsympathetic and irrelevant that
+the ambitious request of James and John and their foolish mother,
+that they should sit at Christ's right hand and His left in His
+kingdom, should have been occasioned by, and have followed
+immediately upon, our Lord's solemn and pathetic announcement of His
+sufferings. But the connection is not difficult to trace. The
+disciples believed that, in some inexplicable way, the sufferings
+which our Lord was shadowing forth were to be the immediate
+precursors of His assuming His regal dignity. And so they took time
+by the forelock, as they thought, and made haste to ensure their
+places in the kingdom, which they believed was now ready to burst
+upon them. Other occasions in the Gospels in which we find similar
+quarrelling among the disciples as to pre-eminence are similarly
+associated with references made by our Lord to His approaching
+crucifixion. On a former occasion He cured these misplaced ambitions
+by setting a child in the midst of them. On this He cures them by a
+still more pathetic and wonderful example, His own; and He says, 'I,
+in My lowliness and service, am to be your Pattern. In Me see the
+basis of all true greatness, and the right use of all influence and
+authority. The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to
+minister.'
+
+I. So, then, let us look first at the perfect life of service of the
+Servant-Lord.
+
+Now, in order to appreciate the significance of that life of service,
+we must take into account the introductory words, 'The Son of Man
+came.' They declare His pre-existence, His voluntary entrance into
+the conditions of humanity, and His denuding Himself of 'the glory
+which He had with the Father before the world was.' We shall never
+understand the Servant-Christ until we understand that He is the
+Eternal Son of the Father. His service began long before any of His
+acts of sympathetic and self-forgetting lowliness rendered help to
+the miserable here upon earth. His service began when He laid aside,
+not the garments of earth, but the vesture of the heavens, and
+girded Himself, not with the cincture woven in man's looms, but with
+the flesh of our humanity, 'and being found in fashion as a man,'
+bowed Himself to enter into the conditions of earth. This was the
+first, the chiefest of all His acts of service, and the sanctity and
+awfulness of it run through the list of all His deeds and make them
+unspeakably great. It was much that His hands should heal, that His
+lips should comfort, that His heart should bleed with sympathy for
+sorrow. But, oh! it was more that He _had_ hands to touch, lips to
+speak to human hearts, and the heart of a man and a brother to feel
+_with_ as well as _for_ us. 'The Son of Man came'--there is
+the transcendent example of the true use of greatness; there is the
+conspicuous instance of the true basis of authority and rule. For it
+was because He was 'found in fashion as a Man' that He has won a 'name
+that is above every name,' and that there have accrued to Him the
+'many crowns' which He wears at the Father's side.
+
+But then, passing beyond this, we may dwell, though all imperfectly,
+upon the features, familiar as they are, of that wonderful life of
+self-oblivious and self-sacrificing ministration to others. Think of
+the purity of the source from all which these wonders and
+blessednesses of service for man flowed. The life of Jesus Christ is
+self-forgetting love made visible. Scientists tell us that, by the
+arrangement of particles of sand upon plates of glass, there can be
+made, as it were, perceptible to the eye, the sweetness of musical
+sounds; and each note when struck will fling the particles into
+varying forms of beauty. The life of Jesus Christ presents in shapes
+of loveliness and symmetry the else invisible music of a divine
+love. He lets us see the rhythm of the Father's heart. The source
+from which His ministrations have flowed is the pure source of a
+perfect love. Ancient legends consolidated the sunbeams into the
+bright figure of the far-darting god of light. And so the sunbeams
+of the divine love have, as it were, drawn themselves together and
+shaped themselves into the human form of the Son of Man who 'came
+not to be ministered unto, but to minister.'
+
+No taint of bye-ends was in that service; no sidelong glances at
+possible advantages of influence or reputation or the like, which so
+often deform men's philanthropies and services to one another. No
+more than the sunbeam shines for the sake of collateral issues which
+may benefit itself, did Jesus Christ seek His own advantage in
+ministering to men. There was no speck of black in that lustrous
+white robe, but all was perfectly unselfish love. Like the clear
+sea, weedless and stainless, that laves the marble steps of the
+palaces of Venice, the deep ocean of Christ's service to man was
+pure to the depths throughout.
+
+That perfect ministry of the Servant-Lord was rendered with strange
+spontaneity and cheerfulness. One of the evangelists says, in a very
+striking and beautiful phrase, that 'He healed them that had need of
+healing,' as if the presence of the necessity evoked the supply, by
+the instinctive action of a perfect love. There was never in Him one
+trace of reluctance to have leisure broken in upon, repose
+disturbed, or even communion with God abbreviated. All men could
+come always; they never came inopportunely. We often cheerfully take
+up a burden of service, but find it very hard to continue bearing
+it. But He was willing to come down from the mountain of
+Transfiguration because there was a demoniac boy in the plain; and
+therefore He put aside the temptation--'Let us build here three
+tabernacles.' He was willing to abandon His desert seclusion because
+the multitude sought Him. Interrupted in His communion with the
+Father by His disciples, He had no impatient word to say, but 'Let
+us go into other cities also, for therefore am I sent.' When He
+stepped from the fishing-boat on the other side of the lake to which
+He had fled for a moment of repose, He was glad when He saw the
+multitude who had pertinaciously outrun Him, and were waiting for
+Him on the beach. On His Cross He had leisure to turn from His own
+physical sufferings and the weight of a world's sin, which lay upon
+Him, to look at that penitent by His side, and He ended His life in
+the ministry of mercy to a brigand. And thus cheerfully, and always
+without a thought of self, 'He came to minister.'
+
+Think, too, of the sweep of His ministrations. They took in all men;
+they were equally open to enemies and to friends, to mockers and to
+sympathisers. Think of the variety of the gifts which He brought in
+His ministry--caring for body and for soul; alleviating sorrow,
+binding up wounds, purifying hearts; dealing with sin, the fountain,
+and with miseries, its waters, with equal helpfulness and equal
+love.
+
+And think of how that ministering was always ministration by 'the
+LORD.' For there is nothing to me more remarkable in the Gospel
+narrative than the way in which, side by side, there lie in Christ's
+life the two elements, so difficult to harmonise in fact, and so
+impossible to have been harmonised in a legend, the consciousness of
+authority and the humility of a servant. The paradox with which John
+introduces his sweet pathetic story of our Lord's washing the
+disciples' feet is true of, and is illustrated by, every instance of
+more than ordinary lowliness and self-oblivion which the Gospel
+contains. 'Jesus, knowing that He had come from God, and went to
+God, and that the Father had given all things into His hand'--did
+what? 'Laid aside His garments and took a towel and girded Himself.'
+The two things ever go together. And thus, in His lowliest
+abasement, as in a star entangled in a cloud, there shine out, all
+the more broad and conspicuous for the environment which wraps them,
+the beams of His uncreated lustre.
+
+That ministration was a service that never shrank from stern rebuke.
+His service was no mere soft and pliant, sympathetic helpfulness,
+but it could smite and stab, and be severe, and knit its brow, and
+speak stern words, as all true service must. For it is not service
+but cruelty to sympathise with the sinner, and say nothing in
+condemnation of his sin. And yet no sternness is blessed which is
+not plainly prompted by desire to help.
+
+Now, I know far better than you do how wretchedly inadequate all
+these poor words of mine have been to the great theme that I have
+been trying to speak of, but they may at least--like a little water
+poured into a pump--have set your minds working upon the theme, and,
+I hope, to better purpose. 'The Son of Man came ... to minister.'
+
+II. Now, secondly, note the service that should be modelled on His.
+
+Oh! brethren, if we, however imperfectly, have taken into mind and
+heart that picture of Him who was and is amongst us as 'One that
+serveth,' how sharp a test, and how stringent, and, as it seems to
+us sometimes, impossible, a commandment are involved in the 'even
+as' of my text. When we think of our grudging services; when we
+think of how much more apt we are to insist upon what men owe to us
+than of what we owe to them; how ready we are to demand, how slow we
+are to give; how we flame up in what we think is warranted
+indignation if we do not get the observance, or the sympathy, or the
+attention that we require, and yet how little we give of these, we
+may well say, 'Thou hast set a pattern that can only drive us to
+despair.' If we would read our Gospels more than we do with the
+feeling, as we trace that Master through each of His phases of
+sympathy and self-oblivion and self-sacrifice and service, 'that is
+what I should be,' what a different book the New Testament would be
+to us, and what different people you and I would be!
+
+There is no ground on which we can rest greatness or superiority in
+Christ's kingdom except this ground of service. And there is no use
+that we can make either of money or of talents, of acquirements or
+opportunities, except the use of helping our fellows with them,
+which will stand the test of this model and example. 'It is more
+blessed to give than to receive.' The servant who serves for love is
+highest in the hierarchy of Heaven. God, who is supreme, has stooped
+lower than any that are beneath Him, and His true rule follows, not
+because He is infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, or any
+of those other pompous Latin words which describe what men call His
+attributes, but because He loves best, and does most for the most.
+And that is what you and I ought to be. We may well take the lesson
+to ourselves. I have no space, and, I hope, no need to enlarge upon
+it; but be sure of this, that if we are ever to be near the right
+and the left of the Master in His kingdom, there is one way, and
+only one way, to come thither, and that is to make self abdicate its
+authority as the centre of our lives, and to enthrone there Christ,
+and for His sake all our brethren. Be ambitious to be first, but
+remember, _Noblesse oblige_. He that is first must become last.
+He that is Servant of all is Master of all. That is the only mastery
+that is worth anything, the devotion of hearts that circle round the
+source from which they draw light and warmth. What is it that makes
+a mother the queen of her children? Simply that all her life she has
+been their servant, and never thought about herself, but always
+about them.
+
+Now much might be said as to the application of these threadbare
+principles in the Church and in society, but I do not enlarge on
+that; only let me say in a word--that here is the one law on which
+preeminence in the Church is to be allocated.
+
+What becomes of sacerdotal hierarchies, what becomes of the 'lords
+over God's heritage,' if the one ground of pre-eminence is service?
+I know, of course, that there may be different forms embodying one
+principle, but it seems to me that that form of Church polity is
+nearest the mind of Christ in which the only dignity is dignity of
+service, and the only use of place is the privilege of stooping and
+helping.
+
+This fruitful principle will one day shape civil as well as
+ecclesiastical societies. For the present, our Lord draws a contrast
+between the worldly and the Christian notions of rank and dignity.
+'It shall not be so among you,' says He. And the nobler conception
+of eminence and service set forth in His disciples, if they are true
+to their Lord and their duty, will leaven, and we may hope finally
+transform society, sweeping away all vulgar notions of greatness as
+depending on birth, or wealth, or ruder forms of powers, and
+marshalling men according to Christ's order of precedence, in which
+helpfulness is preeminence and service is supremacy, while
+conversely pre-eminence is used to help and superiority stoops to
+serve.
+
+One remark will close my sermon. You have to take the last words of
+this verse if you are ever going to put in practice its first words.
+'Even as the Son of Man came, not to be ministered unto, but to
+minister,'--if Jesus Christ had stopped there He would only have
+been one more of the long roll of ineffectual preachers and prophets
+who show men the better way, and leave them struggling in the mire.
+But He did not stop there: 'Even as the Son of Man came ... to give
+His life a ransom for many.'
+
+Ah! the Cross, with its burden of the sacrifice for the world's sin,
+is the only power which will supply us with a sufficient motive for
+the loftiness of Christlike service. I know that there is plenty of
+entirely irreligious and Christless beneficence in the world. And
+God forbid that I should say a word to seem to depreciate that. But
+sure I am that for the noblest, purest, most widely diffused and
+blessedly operative kinds of service of man, there is no motive and
+spring anywhere except 'He loved me, and gave Himself for me.' And,
+bought by that service and that blood, it will be possible, and it
+is obligatory upon all of us, to 'do unto others,' as He Himself
+said, 'as I have done to you.' 'The servant is not greater than his
+Lord.'
+
+
+
+
+WHAT THE HISTORIC CHRIST TAUGHT ABOUT HIS DEATH
+
+
+    'The Son of Man came... to give His life a ransom for
+    many.'--Matt. xx. 28.
+
+We hear a great deal at present about going back to 'the Christ of
+the Gospels.' In so far as that phrase and the movement of thought
+which it describes are a protest against the substitution of
+doctrines for the Person whom the doctrines represent, I, for one,
+rejoice in it. But I believe that the antithesis suggested by the
+phrase, and by some of its advocates avowed, between the Christ of
+the Gospels and the Christ of the Epistles, is false. The Christ of
+the Gospels is the Christ of the Epistles, as I humbly venture to
+believe. And I cannot but see that there is a possibility of a
+movement which, carried out legitimately, should command the fullest
+sympathy of every Christian heart, degenerating into the rejection
+of all the supernatural elements in the nature and work of our Lord,
+and leaving us with a meagre human Christ, shrunken and impotent.
+The Christ of the Gospels, by all means; but let it be the whole
+Christ of all the Gospels, the Christ over whose cradle angels sang,
+by whose empty grave angels watched, whose ascending form angels
+beheld and proclaimed that He should come again to be our Judge. Go
+back to that Christ, and all will be well.
+
+Now it seems to me that one direction in which there is a
+possibility of such movement as I have referred to being one-sided
+and harmful is in reference to the conception which we form of the
+death of Jesus Christ. And therefore I ask you to listen for a few
+moments to me at this time whilst I try to bring out what is plain
+in the words before us; and is, as I humbly believe, interwoven in
+the whole texture of all the Gospels--viz., the conception which
+Jesus Christ Himself formed of the meaning of His death.
+
+I. The first thing that I notice is that the Christ of the Gospels
+thought and taught that His death was to be His own act.
+
+I do not think that it is an undue or pedantic pressing of the
+significance of the words before us, if I ask you to notice two of
+the significant expressions in this text. 'The Son of Man
+_came_,' and came 'to _give_ His life.' The one word refers to the act
+of entrance into, the other to the act of departure from, this earthly
+life. They correspond in so far as that both bring into prominence
+Christ's own consent, volition, and action in the very two things
+about which men are least consulted, their being born and their dying.
+
+'The Son of Man came.' Now if that expression occurred but once it
+might be minimised as being only a synonym for birth, having no
+special force. But if you will notice that it is our Lord's habitual
+word about Himself, only varied occasionally by another one equally
+significant when he says that He 'was sent'; and if you will further
+notice that all through the Gospels He never but once speaks of
+Himself as being 'born,' I think you will admit that I am not making
+too much of a word when I say that when Christ, out of the depths of
+His consciousness, said 'the Son of Man _came_,' He was teaching
+us that He lived before He was born, and that behind the natural fact
+of birth there lay the supernatural fact of His choosing to be
+incarnated for man's redemption.  The one instance in which He does
+speak of Himself as 'being born' is most instructive in this
+connection. For it was before the Roman governor; and He accompanied
+the clause in which He said, 'To this end was I born'--which was
+adapted to Pilate's level of intelligence--with another one which
+seemed to be inserted to satisfy His own sense of fitness, rather
+than for any light that it would give to its first hearer, 'And for
+this cause came I into the world.' The two things were not synonymous;
+but before the birth there was the coming, and Jesus was born because
+the Eternal Word willed to come. So says the Christ of the Gospels;
+and the Christ of the Epistles is represented as 'taking upon Him
+the form of a servant, and being found in fashion as a man.' Do you
+accept that as true of 'the historic Christ'?
+
+With precise correspondence, if we turn to the other end of His
+life, we find the equally significant expression in my text which
+asserts for it, too, that the other necessity to which men
+necessarily and without their own volition bow was to Christ a
+matter of choice. 'The Son of Man came to _give_.' 'No man
+taketh it from Me,' as He said on another occasion. 'I lay it down
+of Myself.' 'The Good Shepherd giveth His life for the sheep.' 'My
+flesh ... I give for the world's life.' Now, brethren, we are not to
+regard these words as mere vague expressions for a willing surrender
+to the necessity of death, but as expressing what I believe is
+taught us all through Scripture, and is fundamental to any real
+grasp of the real Christ, that He died because He chose, and chose
+because He loved. What meant that 'loud voice' with which He said
+'It is finished,' but that there was no physical exhaustion, such as
+was usually the immediate occasion of death by crucifixion? What
+meant that surprising rapidity with which the last moment came in
+His case, to the astonishment of the stolid bystanders? They meant
+the same thing as I believe that the Evangelists meant when they,
+with one consent, employed expressions to describe Christ's death,
+which may indeed be only euphemisms, but are apparently declarations
+of its voluntary character. 'He gave up the ghost.' 'He yielded His
+Spirit.' He breathed forth His life, and so He died.
+
+As one of the old fathers said, 'Who is this that thus falls asleep
+when He wills? To die is weakness, but thus to die is power.' 'The
+weakness of God is stronger than man.' The desperate king of Israel
+bade his slave kill him, and when the menial shrunk from such
+sacrilege he fell upon his own sword. Christ bade His servant Death,
+'Do this,' and he did it; and dying, our Lord and Master declared
+Himself the Lord and Master of Death. This is a part of the history
+of the historic Christ. Do you believe it?
+
+II. Then, secondly, the Christ of the Gospels thought and taught
+that His death was one chief aim of His coming.
+
+I have omitted words from my text which intervene between its first
+and its last ones; not because I regard them as unimportant, but
+because they would lead us into too wide a field to cover in one
+sermon. But I would pray you to observe how the re-insertion of them
+throws immense light upon the significance of the words which I have
+chosen. 'The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to
+minister.' That covers the whole ground of His gracious and gentle
+dealings here on earth, His tenderness, self-abnegation, sympathy,
+healing, and helpfulness. Then, side by side with that, and as the
+crowning manifestation of His work of service, without which His
+life--gracious, radiant, sweet as it is--would still want something
+of its power, He sets His death.
+
+Surely that is an altogether unexampled phenomenon; altogether a
+unique and unparalleled thing, that a _man_ should regard that
+which for all workers, thinkers, speakers, poets, philanthropists,
+is the sad term of their activity, as being a part of His work; and
+not only a part, but so conspicuous a part that it was a purpose
+which He had in view from the very beginning, and before the
+beginning, of His earthly life. So Calvary was to Jesus Christ no
+interruption, tragic and premature, of His life's activities. His
+death was no mere alternative set before Him, which He chose rather
+than be unfaithful or dumb. He did not die because He was hounded by
+hostile priests, but He came on purpose that He might so end His
+career.
+
+I need not remind you of, and space would not permit me to dwell
+upon, other instances in the Gospels in which our Lord speaks the
+same language. At the very beginning of His public ministry He told
+the inquiring rabbi, who came to Him with the notion that He would
+be somewhat flattered by His recognition by one of the authoritative
+and wise pundits of the nation, that 'the Son of Man must be lifted
+up.' The necessity was before Him, but it was no unwelcome
+necessity, for it sprung from His own love. It was the very aim of
+His coming, to live a Servant and to die a Ransom.
+
+Dear brethren, let me press upon you this plain truth, that no
+conception of Christ's death which looks upon it merely as the
+close, by pathetic sufferings, of a life to the activities of which
+it adds nothing but pathos, approaches the signification of it which
+inheres in the thought that this was the aim and purpose with which
+Jesus Christ was incarnate, that He should live indeed the pure and
+sweet life which He lived, but equally that He should die the
+painful and bitter death which He died. He was not merely a martyr,
+though the first of them, but something far more, as we shall see
+presently. If to you the death of Jesus Christ is the same in kind,
+however superior in degree, as those of patriots and reformers and
+witnesses for the truth and martyrs for righteousness, then I humbly
+venture to represent that, instead of going back to, you have gone
+away from, the Christ of the Gospels, who said, 'The Son of Man came
+... to give His life'; and that such a Christ is not a historic but
+an imaginary one.
+
+III. So, thirdly, notice that the Christ of the Gospels thought and
+taught that His death was a ransom.
+
+A ransom is a price paid in exchange for captives that they may be
+liberated; or for culprits that they may be set free. And that was
+Christ's thought of what He had to die for. There lay the 'must.'
+
+I do not dwell upon the conception of our condition involved in that
+word. We are all bound and held by the chain of our sins. We all
+stand guilty before God, and, as I believe, there is a necessity in
+that loving divine nature whereby it is impossible that without a
+ransom there can be, in the interests of mankind and in the
+interests of righteousness, forgiveness of sins. I do not mean that
+in the words before us there is a developed theory of atonement, but
+I do mean that no man, dealing with them fairly, can strike out of
+them the notion of vicarious suffering in exchange for, or instead
+of, 'the many.' This is no occasion for theological discussion, nor
+am I careful now to set forth a fully developed doctrine; but I am
+declaring, as God helps me, what is to me, and I pray may be to you,
+the central thought about that Cross of Calvary, that on it there is
+made the sacrifice for the world's sins.
+
+And, dear brethren, I beseech you to consider, how can we save the
+character of Jesus Christ, accepting these Gospels, which on the
+hypothesis about which I am now speaking are valid sources of
+knowledge, without recognising that He deliberately led His
+disciples to believe that He died for--that is, instead of--them
+that put their trust in Him? For remember that not only such words
+as these of my text are to be taken into account. Remember that it
+was the Christ of the Gospels who established that last rite of the
+Lord's Supper, in which the broken bread, and the separation between
+the bread and the wine, both indicated a violent death, and who said
+about both the one and the other of the double symbols, 'For you.' I
+do not understand how any body of professing believers, rejecting
+Christ's death as the sacrifice for sin, can find a place in their
+beliefs or in their practice for that institution of the Lord's
+Supper, or can rightly interpret the sacred words then spoken. This
+is why the Cross was Christ's aim. This is why He said, with His
+dying breath, 'It is finished.' This truth is the explanation of His
+words, 'The Good Shepherd giveth His life for the sheep.'
+
+And this truth of a ransom-price lies at the basis of all vigorous
+Christianity. A Christianity without a dying Christ is a dying
+Christianity. And history shows us that the expansiveness and
+elevating power of the Gospel depend on the prominence given to the
+sacrifice on the Cross. An old fable says that the only thing that
+melts adamant is the blood of a lamb. The Gospel reveals the
+precious blood of Jesus Christ, His death for us as a ransom, as the
+one power which subdues hostility and binds hearts to Him. The
+Christ of the Gospels is the Christ who taught that He died for us.
+
+IV. Lastly, the Christ of the Gospels thought and taught that His
+death had world-wide power.
+
+He says here, 'A ransom for _many_.' Now that word is not used
+in this instance in contradistinction to 'all,' nor in
+contradistinction to 'few.' It is distinctly employed as emphasising
+the contrast between the single death and the wide extent of its
+benefits; and in terms which, rigidly taken, simply express
+indefiniteness, it expresses universality. That that is so seems to
+me to be plain enough, if we notice other places of Scripture to
+which, at this stage of my sermon, I can but allude. For instance,
+in Romans v. the two expressions, 'the many' and the 'all,'
+alternate in reference to the extent of the power of Christ's
+sacrifice for men. And the Apostle in another place, where probably
+there may be an allusion to the words of the text, so varies them as
+that he declares that Jesus Christ in His death was the ransom
+'instead of all.' But I do not need to dwell upon these. 'Many' is a
+vague word, and in it we see dim crowds stretching away beyond our
+vision, for whom that death was to be the means of salvation. I take
+it that the words of our text have an allusion to those in the great
+prophecy in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, in which we read, 'By
+His knowledge shall My righteous Servant' (mark the allusion in our
+text, 'Who came to _minister_') 'justify many, for He shall
+bear their iniquities.'
+
+So, brethren, I believe that I am not guilty of unduly widening out our
+Lord's thought when I say that the indefinite 'many' is practically
+'all.' And, brother, if 'all,' then _you_; if all, then _me_; if
+all, then _each_. Think of a man, nineteen centuries ago, away
+in a little insignificant corner of the world, standing up and saying,
+'My death is the price paid in exchange for the world!' That is
+meekness and lowliness of heart, is it? That is humility, so beautiful
+in a teacher, is it? How any man can accept the veracity of these
+narratives, believe that Jesus Christ said anything the least like
+this, not believe that He was the Divine Son of the Father, the
+Sacrifice for the world's sin, and yet profess--and honestly profess,
+I doubt not, in many cases--to retain reverence and admiration, all
+but adoration, for Him, I confess that I, for my poor part, cannot
+understand.
+
+But I ask you, what you are going to do with these thoughts and
+teachings of the Christ of the Gospels. Are you going to take them
+for true? Are, you going to trust your salvation to Him? Are you
+going to accept the ransom and say, 'O Lord, truly I am Thy servant;
+Thou hast loosed my bonds'? Brethren, the Christ of the Gospels, by
+all means; but the Christ that said, 'The Son of Man came to ...
+give His life a ransom for many.' My Christ, and your Christ, and
+the world's Christ is 'the Christ that died; yea, rather, that is
+risen again; who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh
+intercession for us.'
+
+
+
+
+THE COMING OF THE KING TO HIS PALACE
+
+
+    'And when they drew nigh unto Jerusalem, and were come
+    to Bethphage, unto the mount of Olives, then sent Jesus
+    two disciples, 2. Saying unto them, Go into the village
+    over against you, and straightway ye shall find an ass
+    tied, and a colt with her: loose them, and bring them
+    unto Me. 3. And if any man say ought unto you, ye shall
+    say, The Lord hath need of them; and straightway he
+    will send them. 4. All this was done, that it might he
+    fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying,
+    5. Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy King
+    cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a
+    colt the foal of an ass. 6. And the disciples went, and
+    did as Jesus commanded them, 7. And brought the ass,
+    and the colt, and put on them their clothes, and they
+    set Him thereon. 8. And a very great multitude spread
+    their garments in the way; others cut down branches
+    from the trees, and strawed them in the way. 9. And the
+    multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried,
+    saying, Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is He that
+    cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.
+    10. And when He was come into Jerusalem, all the city
+    was moved, saying, Who is this? 11. And the multitude
+    said, This is Jesus the prophet of Nazareth of Galilee.
+    12. And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out
+    all them that sold and bought in the temple, and
+    overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the
+    seats of them that sold doves, 13. And said unto them,
+    It is written, My house shall be called the house of
+    prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves. 14. And
+    the blind and the lame came to Him in the temple; and
+    He healed them. 15. And when the chief priests and
+    scribes saw the wonderful things that He did, and the
+    children crying in the temple, and saying, Hosanna to
+    the Son of David, they were sore displeased, 16. And
+    said unto Him, Hearest Thou what these say? And Jesus
+    saith unto them, Yea; have ye never read, Out of the
+    mouth of babes and sucklings Thou hast perfected praise?'
+    --MATT. xxi. 1-16.
+
+Jesus spent His last Sabbath in the quiet home at Bethany with
+Lazarus and his sisters. Some sense of His approaching death tinged
+the modest festivities of that evening with sadness, and spoke in
+Mary's 'anointing of His body for the burying.' The pause was brief,
+and, with the dawn of Sunday, He set Himself again to tread the road
+to the cross. Who can doubt that He felt the relief of that
+momentary relaxation of the strain on His spirit, and the
+corresponding pressure of its renewed tightening? This passage shows
+Him putting out from the quiet haven and facing the storm again. It
+is in two main sections, dealing respectively with the royal
+procession, and the acts of the King in the temple.
+
+I. The procession of the King. The first noteworthy point is that
+our Lord initiates the whole incident, and deliberately sets Himself
+to evoke the popular enthusiasm, by a distinct voluntary fulfilment
+of a Messianic prophecy. The allusion to the prophecy, in His
+sending for the colt and mounting it, may have escaped the disciples
+and the crowds of pilgrims; but they rightly caught His intention to
+make a solemn triumphal entry into the city, and responded with a
+burst of enthusiasm, which He expected and wished. The poor garments
+flung hastily on the animals, the travel-stained cloaks cast on the
+rocky path, the branches of olive and palm waved in the hands, and
+the tumult of acclaim, which shrilly echoed the words of the psalm,
+and proclaimed Him to be the Son of David, are all tokens that the
+crowds hailed Him as their King, and were all permitted and welcomed
+by Him. All this is in absolute opposition to His usual action,
+which had been one long effort to damp down inflammable and
+unspiritual Messianic hopes, and to avoid the very enthusiasm which
+now surges round Him unchecked. Certainly that calm figure, sitting
+on the slow-pacing ass, with the noisy multitude pressing round Him,
+is strangely unlike Him, who hid Himself among the hills when they
+sought to make Him a King. His action is the more remarkable, if it
+be remembered that the roads were alive with pilgrims, most of whom
+passing through Bethany would be Galileans; that they had seen
+Lazarus walking about the village, and knew who had raised him; that
+the Passover festival was _the_ time in all the year when
+popular tumults were to be expected; and that the crowds going to
+Jerusalem were met by a crowd coming from it, bent on seeing the
+doer and the subject of the great miracle. Into this heap of
+combustibles our Lord puts a light. He must have meant that it
+should blaze as it did.
+
+What is the reason for this contrast? The need for the former
+reticence no longer existed. There was no fear now of His teaching
+and ministry being interrupted by popular outburst. He knew that it
+was finished, and that His hour had come. Therefore, the same motive
+of filial obedience which had led Him to avoid what would prevent
+His discharging His Father's commission, now impelled Him to draw
+the attention of the nation and its rulers to the full extent of His
+claims, and to put the plain issue of their acceptance or rejection
+in the most unmistakable manner. A certain divine decorum, if we may
+so call it, required that once He should enter the city as its King.
+Some among the shouting crowds might have their enthusiasm purified
+and spiritualised, if once it were directed to Him. It was for us,
+no less than for them, that this one interruption of His ordinary
+method was adopted by Him, that we too might ponder the fact that He
+laid His hand on that magnificent prophecy, and said, 'It is mine. I
+am the King.'
+
+The royal procession is also a revelation of the character of the
+King and the nature of His kingdom. A strange King this, indeed, who
+has not even an ass of His own, and for followers, peasants with
+palm branches instead of swords! What would a Roman soldier or one
+of Herod's men have thought of that rustic procession of a pauper
+prince on an ass, and a hundred or two of weaponless, penniless men?
+Christ's one moment of royal pomp is as eloquent of His humiliation
+as the long stretch of His lowly life is. And yet, as is always the
+case, side by side with the lowliness there gleams the veiled
+splendour. He had to borrow the colt, and the message in which He
+asks for it is a strange paradox. 'The Lord hath need of him'--so
+great was the poverty of so great a King. But it spoke, too, of a
+more than human knowledge, and of an authority which had only to
+require in order to receive. Some farming villager, no doubt, who
+was a disciple but secretly, gladly yielded his beasts. The prophecy
+which Matthew quotes, with the omission of some words, from
+Zechariah, and the addition of the first clause from Isaiah, is
+symbolic, and would have been amply fulfilled in the mission and
+character of Christ, though this event had never taken place. But
+just as it is symbolic, so this external fulfilment, which is
+intended to point to the real fulfilment, is also symbolic. The
+chariot and the horse are the emblems of conquerors. It is fitting
+that the Prince of Peace should make His state entry on a colt,
+unridden before, and saddled only with a garment. Zechariah meant
+that Zion's King should not reign by the right of the strongest, and
+that all His triumphs should be won by lowly meekness. Christ meant
+the same by His remarkable act. And has not the picture of Him,
+throned thus, stamped for ever on the imagination of the world a
+profounder sense of the inmost nature of His kingdom than many words
+would have done? Have we learned the lesson of the gentleness which
+belongs to His kingdom, and of the unchristian character of war and
+violence? Do we understand what the Psalmist meant when he sang, 'In
+thy majesty ride on prosperously, because of ... meekness'? Let us
+not forget the other picture, 'Behold, a white horse, and He that
+sat thereon, called Faithful and True; and in righteousness He doth
+judge and make war.'
+
+The entry may remind us also of the worthlessness of mere enthusiastic
+feeling in reference to Jesus Christ. The day was the Sunday. How many
+of that crowd were shouting as loudly, 'Crucify Him!' and 'Not this
+man, but Barabbas!' on the Friday? The palm-branches had not faded,
+where they had been tossed, before the fickle crowd had swung round
+to the opposite mood. Perhaps the very exuberance of feeling at the
+beginning, had something to do with the bitterness of the execrations
+at the end, of the week. He had not answered their expectations, but,
+instead of heading a revolt, had simply taught in the temple, and
+meekly let Himself be laid hold of. Nothing succeeds like success,
+and no idol is so quickly forsaken as the idol of a popular rising.
+All were eager to disclaim connection with Him, and to efface the
+remembrance of their Sunday's hosannas by their groans round His
+gibbet. But there is a wider lesson here. No enthusiasm can be too
+intense which is based upon a true sense of our need of Christ, and
+of His work for us; but it is easy to excite apparently religious
+emotion by partial presentations of Him, and such excitement foams
+itself away by its very violence, like some Eastern river that in
+winter time dashes down the wady with irresistible force, and in
+summer is bone dry. Unless we know Christ to be the Saviour of our
+souls and the Lamb of God, we shall soon tire of singing hosannas in
+His train, and want a king with more pretensions; but if we have
+learned who and what He is to us, then let us open our mouths wide,
+and not be afraid of letting the world hear our shout of praise.
+
+II. The coming of the King in the temple. The discussion of the
+accuracy of Matthew's arrangement of events here is unnecessary. He
+has evidently grouped, as usual, incidents which have a common
+bearing, and wishes to put these three, of the cleansing, the
+healing, and the pleasure in the children's praise, as the
+characteristic acts of the King in the temple. We can scarcely avoid
+seeing in the first of the three a reference to Malachi's prophecy,
+'The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to His temple ... And
+He shall purify the sons of Levi.' His first act, when in manhood He
+visited the temple, had been to cleanse. His first act when He
+enters it as its Lord is the same. The abuse had grown again apace.
+Much could be said in its vindication, as convenient and harmless,
+and it was too profitable to be lightly abandoned. But the altar of
+Mammon so near the altar of God was sacrilege in His eyes, and
+though He had passed the traders unmolested many times since that
+first driving out, now that He solemnly comes to claim His rights,
+He cannot but repeat it. It is perhaps significant that His words
+now have both a more sovereign and a more severe tone than before.
+Then He had spoken of 'My Father's house,' now it is 'My house,'
+which are a part of His quotation indeed, but not therefore
+necessarily void of reference to Himself. He is exercising the
+authority of a son over His own house, and bears Himself as Lord of
+the temple. Before, He charged them with making it a 'house of
+merchandise'; now, with turning it into a robber's cave. Evil
+rebuked and done again is worse than before. Trafficking in things
+pertaining to the altar is even more likely than other trading to
+cross the not always very well defined line which separates trade
+from trickery and commerce from theft. That lesson needs to be laid
+to heart in many quarters now. There is always a fringe of moneyed
+interests round Christ's Church, seeking gain out of religious
+institutions; and their stands have a wonderful tendency to creep
+inwards from the court of the Gentiles to holier places. The
+parasite grows very quickly, and Christ had to deal with it more
+than once to keep down its growth. The sellers of doves and changers
+of money into the sacred shekel were venial offenders compared with
+many in the Church, and the race is not extinct. If Christ were to
+come to His house to-day, in bodily form, who doubts that He would
+begin, as He did before, by driving the traders out of His temple?
+How many 'most respectable' usages and people would have to go, if
+He did!
+
+The second characteristic, or we might say symbolical, act is the
+healing of the blind and lame. Royal state and cleansing severity
+are wonderfully blended with tender pity and the gentle hand of
+sovereign virtue to heal. The very manifestation of the former drew
+the needy to Him; and the blind, though they could not see, and the
+lame, though they could not walk, managed to grope and hobble their
+way to Him, not afraid of His severity, nor daunted by His royalty.
+No doubt they haunted the temple precincts as beggars, with perhaps
+as little sense of its sacredness as the money-changers; but their
+misery kindled a flicker of confidence and desire, to which He who
+tends the dimmest wick till it breaks into clear flame could not but
+respond. Though in His house He casts out the traders, He will heal
+the cripples and the blind, who know their need, and faintly trust
+His heart and power. Such a trait could not be wanting in this
+typical representation of the acts of the King.
+
+Finally, He encourages and casts the shield of His approval round
+the children's praises. How natural it is that the children, pleased
+with the stir and not yet drilled into conventionalism, should have
+kept up their glad shouts, even inside the temple enclosure! How
+their fresh treble voices ring yet through all these centuries! The
+priests had, no doubt, been nursing their wrath at all that had been
+going on, but they had not dared to interfere with the cleansing,
+nor, for very shame, with the healings; but now they see their
+opportunity. This is a clear breach of all propriety, and that is
+the crime of crimes in the eyes of such people. They had kept quite
+cool and serenely contemptuous, amid the stir of the glad
+procession, and they did not much care though He healed some
+beggars; but to have this unseemly noise, though it was praise, was
+more than they could stand. Ecclesiastical martinets, and men whose
+religion is mostly ceremony, are, of course, more 'moved with
+indignation' at any breach of ceremonial regulations than at holes
+made in graver laws. Nothing makes men more insensitive to the ring
+of real worship than being accustomed to the dull decorum of formal
+worship. Christ answers their 'hearest thou?' with a 'did ye never
+read?' and shuts their mouths with words so apposite in their
+plainest meaning that even they are silenced. To Him these young
+ringing hosannas are 'perfect praise,' and worth any quantity of
+rabbis' preachments. In their deeper sense, His words declare that
+the ears of God and of His Son, the Lord of the temple, are more
+gladly filled with the praises of the 'little ones,' who know their
+weakness, and hymn His goodness with simple tongue, than with
+heartless eloquence of words or pomp of worship. The psalm from
+which the words are taken declares man's superiority over the
+highest works of God's hands, and the perfecting of the divine
+praise from his lips. We are but as the little children of creation,
+but because we know sin and redemption, we lead the chorus of
+heaven. As St. Bernard says, 'Something is wanting to the praise of
+heaven, if those be wanting who can say, "We went through fire and
+through water; and Thou broughtest us out into a wealthy place."' In
+like manner, those praise Him most acceptably among men who know
+their feebleness, and with stammering lips humbly try to breathe
+their love, their need, and their trust.
+
+
+
+
+A NEW KIND OF KING
+
+
+    'All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which
+    was spoken by the prophet, saying, Tell ye the daughter
+    of Zion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and
+    sitting upon an ass.'--MATT. xxi. 4, 5.
+
+Our Lord's entrance into Jerusalem is one of the comparatively few
+events which are recorded in all the four Gospels. Its singular
+unlikeness to the rest of His life, and its powerful influence in
+bringing about the Crucifixion, may account for its prominence in
+the narratives. It took place probably on the Sunday of Passion
+Week. Before the palm branches were withered the enthusiasm had died
+away, and the shouting crowd had found out that this was not the
+sort of king that they wanted. They might have found that out, even
+by the very circumstances of the entrance, for they were profoundly
+significant; though their meaning, like so much of the rest of
+Christ's life, was less clear to the partakers and spectators than
+it is to us. 'These things understood not the disciples at the
+first,' says John in closing his narrative of the entrance, 'but
+when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that they had done
+these things unto Him.'
+
+My object in this sermon is not at all to attempt a pictorial
+treatment of this narrative, for these Gospels tell it us a great
+deal better than any of us can tell it after them; but to seek to
+bring out, if it may be, two or three aspects of its significance.
+
+I. First, then, I ask you to consider its significance as an
+altogether exceptional fact in Christ's life.
+
+Throughout the whole of the preceding period, He had had two aims
+distinctly in view. One was to shun publicity; and the other was to
+damp down the heated, vulgar anticipations of the multitude, who
+expected a temporal king. And now here He deliberately, and of set
+purpose, takes a step which is like flinging a spark into a powder
+barrel. The nation was assembled in crowds, full of the unwholesome
+excitement which attended their meeting for the annual feast. All
+were in a quiver of expectation; and knowing that, Jesus Christ
+originates this scene by His act of sending the two disciples into
+the village over against them, to 'bring the ass, and the colt the
+foal of an ass.' The reasons for a course so entirely opposed to all
+the preceding must have been strong. Let us try to see what they
+were.
+
+First, He did it in order to precipitate the conflict which was to end
+in His death. Now, had He any right to do that? Knowing as He did the
+ferment of expectation into which He was thrusting this new element
+of disturbance, and foreseeing, as He must have done, that it would
+sharpen the hostility of the rulers of the people to a murderous
+degree, how can He be acquitted of one of two things--either singular
+shortsightedness or rash foolhardiness in taking such a step? Was He
+justified, or was He not?
+
+If we are to look at His conduct from ordinary points of view, the
+answer must certainly be that He was not. And we can only understand
+this, and all the rest of His actions during the fateful three or
+four days that followed it, if we recognise in them the fixed
+resolve of One who knew that His mission was not only to live and to
+teach by word and life, but to die, and by death to deliver the
+world. I take it that it is very hard to save the character of Jesus
+Christ for our reverence if we refuse to regard His death as for our
+redemption. But if He came, and knew that He came, not only 'to
+minister' but 'to give His life a ransom for many,' then we can
+understand how He hastened to the Cross, and deliberately set a
+light to the train which was to end in that great explosion. On any
+other hypothesis it seems to me immensely hard to account for His
+act here.
+
+Then, still further, looking at this distinctly exceptional fact in
+our Lord's life, we see in it a very emphatic claim to very singular
+prerogative and position. He not only thereby presented Himself
+before the nation in their collective capacity as being the King of
+Israel, but He also did a very strange thing. He dressed Himself, so
+to speak, in order to fulfil a prophecy. He posed before the world
+as being the Person who was meant by sacred old words. And His
+Entrance upon the slow-pacing colt was His voluntary and solemn
+assertion that He was the Person of whom the whole stream and
+current of divinely sent premonitions and forecasts had been
+witnessing from the beginning. He claimed thereby to be the King of
+Israel and the Fulfiller of the divine promises that were of old.
+
+Now again, I have to ask the question, Was He right, or was He
+wrong? If He was right, then He is a great deal more than a wise
+Teacher, and a perfect Example of excellence. If He was wrong, He is
+a great deal less. There is no escape from that alternative, as it
+seems to me, but by the desperate expedient of denying that He ever
+did this thing which this narrative tells us that He did. At all
+events I beseech you all, dear friends, to take fairly into your
+account of the character of Jesus Christ, this fact, that He, the
+meek, the gentle, said that He was meek, and everybody has believed
+Him; and that once, in the very crisis of His life, and in
+circumstances which make the act most conspicuous, He who always
+shunned publicity, nor 'caused His voice to be heard in the
+streets,' and steadfastly put away from Himself the vulgar homage
+that would have degraded Him into a mere temporal monarch, did
+assert that He was the King of Israel and the Fulfiller of prophecy.
+Ask yourselves, What does that fact mean?
+
+And then, still further, looking at the act as exceptional in our
+Lord's life, note that it was done in order to make one final,
+solemn appeal and offer to the men who beheld Him. It was the last
+bolt in His quiver. All else had failed, perhaps this might succeed.
+We know not the depths of the mysteries of that divine foreknowledge
+which, even though it foresees failure, ceases not to plead and to
+woo obstinate hearts. But this we may thankfully learn, that, just
+as with despairing hope, but with unremitting energy, Jesus Christ,
+often rejected, offered Himself once more if perchance He might win
+men to repentance, so the loving patience and long-suffering of our
+God cease not to plead ever with us. 'Last of all He sent unto them
+His Son, saying, They will reverence My Son when they see Him'; and
+yet the expectation was disappointed, and the Son was slain. We
+touch deep mysteries, but the persistence of the pleading and
+rejected love and pity of our God shine through this  strange fact.
+
+II. And now, secondly, let me ask you to note its significance as a
+symbol.
+
+The prophecy which two out of the four evangelists--viz., Matthew and
+John--regard as having been, in some sense, fulfilled by the Entrance
+into Jerusalem, would have been fulfilled quite as truly if there had
+been no Entrance. For the mere detail of the prophecy is but a
+picturesque way of setting forth its central and essential point--viz.,
+the meekness of the King. So our Lord's fulfilment is only an external,
+altogether subsidiary, accomplishment of the prophecy; and in fact,
+like some other of the external correspondences between His life and
+the outward details of Old Testament prophecy, is intended for little
+more than a picture or a signpost which may direct our thoughts to the
+inward correspondence, which is the true fulfilment.
+
+So then, the deed, like the prophecy after which it is moulded, is
+wholly and entirely of importance in its symbolical aspect.
+
+The symbolism is clear enough. This is a new kind of King. He comes,
+not mounted on a warhorse, or thundering across the battlefield in a
+scythe-armed chariot, like the Pharaohs and the Assyrian monarchs,
+who have left us their vainglorious monuments, but mounted on the
+emblem of meekness, patience, gentleness, and peace. And He is a
+pauper King, for He has to borrow the beast on which He rides, and
+His throne is draped with the poor, perhaps ragged, robes of a
+handful of fishermen. And His attendants are not warriors bearing
+spears, but peasants with palm branches. And the salutation of His
+royalty is not the blare of trumpets, but the 'Hosanna!' from a
+thousand throats. That is not the sort of King that the world calls
+a King. The Roman soldiers might well have thought they were
+perpetrating an exquisite jest when they thrust the reed into His
+unresisting hand, and crushed down the crown of thorns on His
+bleeding brows.
+
+But the symbol discloses the very secret of His Kingdom, the
+innermost mysteries of His own character and of the forces to which
+He intrusts the further progress of His word. Gentleness is royal
+and omnipotent; force and violence are feeble. The Lord is in the
+still, small voice, not in the earthquake, nor the fire, nor the
+mighty wind. The dove's light pinion will fly further than the wings
+of Rome's eagles, with their strong talons and blood-dyed beaks. And
+the kingdom that is established in meekness, and rules by gentleness
+and for gentleness, and has for its only weapons the power of love
+and the omnipotence of patience, that is the kingdom which shall be
+eternal and universal.
+
+Now all that is a great deal more than pretty sentiment; it has the
+closest practical bearing upon our lives. How slow God's Church has
+been to believe that the strength of Christ's kingdom is meekness!
+Professing Christian men have sought to win the world to their side,
+and by wealth or force or persecution, or this, that, or the other
+of the weapons out of the world's armoury, to promote the kingdom of
+Christ. But it has all been in vain. There is only one power that
+conquers hate, and that is meek love. There is only one way by which
+Christ's kingdom can stand firm, and that is its unworldly contrast
+to all the manner of human dominion. Wheresoever God's Church has
+allied itself with secular sovereignties, and trusted in the arm of
+flesh, there has the fine gold become dimmed. Endurance wears out
+persecution, patient submission paralyses hostile violence, for you
+cannot keep on striking down unresisting crowds with the sword. The
+Church of Christ is an anvil that has been beaten upon by many
+hammers, and it has worn them all out. Meekness is victorious, and
+the kingdom of Christ can only be advanced by the faithful
+proclamation of His gentle love, from lips that are moved by hearts
+which themselves are conformed to His patient image.
+
+Then, still further, let me remind you that this symbol carries in
+it, as it seems to me, the lesson of the radical incompatibility of
+war with Christ's kingdom and dominion. It has taken the world all
+these centuries to begin to learn that lesson. But slowly men are
+coming to it, and the day will dawn when all the pomp of warfare,
+and the hell of evil passions from which it comes, and which it
+stimulates, will be felt to be as utterly incompatible with the
+spirit of Christianity as slavery is felt to-day. The prophecy which
+underlies our symbol is very significant in this respect.
+Immediately upon that vision of the meek King throned on the colt
+the foal of an ass, follows this: 'And I will cut off the chariot
+from Ephraim, and the horses from Jerusalem; and the battle bow
+shall be cut off, and He shall speak peace unto the heathen.'
+
+Let me beseech you, Christian men and women, to lay to heart the
+duty of Christ's followers in reference to the influence and
+leavening of public opinion upon this matter, and to see to it that,
+in so far as we can help, we set ourselves steadfastly against that
+devilish spirit which still oppresses with an incubus almost
+intolerable, the nations of so-called Christendom. Lift up your
+voices be not afraid, but cry, 'We are the followers of the Prince
+of Peace, and we war against the war that is blasphemy against His
+dominion.'
+
+And so, still further, note the practical force of this symbol as
+influencing our own conduct. We are the followers of the meek
+Christ. It becomes _us_ to walk in all meekness and gentleness.
+'Spirited conduct' is the world's euphemism for unchristian conduct,
+in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred. The perspective of virtue
+has altered since Jesus Christ taught us how to love. The old
+heathen virtues of magnanimity, fortitude, and the like have 'with
+shame to take a lower room.' There is something better than these.
+The saint has all the virtues of the old heathen hero, and some more
+besides, which are higher than these, and those which he has in
+common, he has in different proportion. The flaunting tulips and
+peonies of the garden of the world seem to outshine the white
+snowdrops and the glowing, modest little violets below their leaves,
+but the former are vulgar, and they drop very soon, and the latter,
+if paler and more delicate, are refined in their celestial beauty.
+The slow-pacing steed on which Jesus Christ rides will out-travel
+the fiery warhorse, and will pursue its patient, steadfast path till
+He 'bring forth righteousness unto judgment,' and 'all the upright
+in heart shall follow Him.'
+
+III. Lastly, notice the significance of this fact as a prophecy. It
+was, as I have pointed out, the last solemn appeal to the nation,
+and in a very real sense it was Christ's coming to judgment. It is
+impossible to look at it without seeing, besides all its other
+meanings, gleaming dimly through it, the anticipations of that other
+coming, when the Lord Himself 'shall descend with a shout, with the
+voice of the Archangel, and the trump of God.'
+
+Let me bring into connection with the scene of my text three others,
+gathered from various parts of Scripture. In the forty-fifth Psalm
+we find, side by side with the great words, 'Ride on prosperously
+because of truth and _meekness_ and righteousness,' the others,
+'Thine arrows are sharp in the hearts of the king's enemies; the
+people shall fall under Thee.' Now, though it is possible that that
+later warlike figure may be merely the carrying out of the thought
+which is more gently put before us in the former words, still it
+looks as if there were two sides to the conquering manifestation of
+the king--one being in 'meekness and truth and righteousness,' and
+the other in some sense destructive and punitive.
+
+But, however that may be, my second scene is drawn from the last
+book of Scripture, where we read that, when the first seal was
+opened, there rode forth a Figure, crowned, mounted upon a white
+steed, bearing bow and arrow, 'conquering and to conquer.' And,
+though that again may be but an image of the victorious progress of
+the gentle Gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the whole earth, still
+it comes as one in a series of judgments, and may rather be taken to
+express the punitive effects which follow its proclamation even here
+and now.
+
+But there can be no doubt with regard to the third of the scenes
+which I connect with the incident of which we are discoursing: 'And
+I saw heaven opened, and beheld a white horse; and He that sat upon
+Him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness doth He judge
+and make war.... And out of His mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with
+it He should smite the nations; and He shall rule them with a rod of
+iron; and He treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of
+Almighty God.' That is the Christ who came into Jerusalem on the colt
+the foal of an ass. That is the Christ who is meek and long-suffering.
+There is a reserve of punitive and destructive power in the meek King.
+And oh I what can be so terrible as the anger of meekness, the wrath
+of infinite gentleness? In the triumphal entry, we find that, when
+the procession turned the rocky shoulder of Olivet, and the long line
+of the white city walls, with the gilding of the Temple glittering in
+the sunshine, burst upon their view, the multitude lifted up their
+voices in gladness. But Christ sat there, and as He looked across the
+valley, and beheld, with His divine prescience, the city, now so
+joyous and full of stir, sitting solitary and desolate, He lifted up
+His voice in loud wailing. The Christ wept because He must punish,
+but He punished though He wept.
+
+Our Judge is the gentle Jesus, therefore we can hope. The gentle
+Jesus is our Judge, therefore let us not presume. I beseech you,
+brethren, lay, as these poor people did their garments, your lusts
+and proud wills in His way, and join the welcoming shout that hails
+the King, 'meek and having salvation.' And then, when He comes forth
+to judge and to destroy, you will not be amongst the ranks of the
+enemies, whom He will ride down and scatter, but amongst 'the armies
+that follow Him, ... clothed in fine linen, clean and pure.'
+
+'Kiss the Son lest He be angry, and ye perish from the way when His
+wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their
+trust in Him.'
+
+
+
+
+THE VINEYARD AND ITS KEEPERS
+
+
+    'Hear another parable: There was a certain householder,
+    which planted a vineyard, and hedged it round about,
+    and digged a winepress in it, and built a tower, and
+    let it out to husbandmen, and went into a far country:
+    34. And when the time of the fruit drew near, he sent
+    his servants to the husbandmen, that they might receive
+    the fruits of it. 35. And the husbandmen took his
+    servants, and beat one, and killed another, and stoned
+    another. 36. Again, he sent other servants more than
+    the first: and they did unto them likewise. 37. But
+    last of all he sent unto them his son, saying, They
+    will reverence my son. 38. But when the husbandmen saw
+    the son, they said among themselves, This is the heir;
+    come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his
+    inheritance. 39. And they caught him, and cast him out
+    of the vineyard, and slew him. 40. When the lord
+    therefore of the vineyard cometh what will he do unto
+    those husbandmen? 41. They say unto him, He will
+    miserably destroy those wicked men, and will let out
+    his vineyard unto other husbandmen, which shall render
+    him the fruits in their seasons. 42. Jesus saith unto
+    them, Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone
+    which the builders rejected, the same is become the
+    head of the corner: this is the Lord's doing, and it is
+    marvellous in our eyes? 43. Therefore say I unto you,
+    The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given
+    to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof. 44. And
+    whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but
+    on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to
+    powder. 45. And when the chief priests and Pharisees
+    had heard His parables, they perceived that He spake of
+    them. 46. But when they sought to lay hands on Him,
+    they feared the multitude, because they took Him for a
+    prophet.'--MATT. xxi. 33-46.
+
+This parable was apparently spoken on the Tuesday of the Passion
+Week. It was a day of hand-to-hand conflict with the Jewish
+authorities and of exhausting toil, as the bare enumeration of its
+incidents shows. It included all that Matthew records between verse
+20 of this chapter and the end of the twenty-fifth chapter--the
+answer to the deputation from the Sanhedrin; the three parables
+occasioned by it, namely, those of the two sons, this one, and that
+of the marriage of the king's son; the three answers to the traps of
+the Pharisees and Herodians about the tribute, of the Sadducees
+about the resurrection, and of the ruler about the chief
+commandment; Christ's question to His questioners about the Son and
+Lord of David; the stern woes hurled at the unmasked hypocrites; to
+which must be added, from other gospels, the sweet eulogium on the
+widow's mite, and the deep saying to the Greeks about the corn of
+wheat, with, possibly, the incident of the woman taken in adultery;
+and then, following all these, the solemn prophecies of the end
+contained in Matthew xxiv. and xxv., spoken on the way to Bethany,
+as the evening shadows were falling. What a day! What a fountain of
+wisdom and love which poured out such streams! The pungent severity
+of this parable, with its transparent veil of narrative, is only
+appreciated by keeping clearly in view the circumstances and the
+listeners. They had struck at Jesus with their question as to His
+authority, and He parries the blow. Now it is His turn, and the
+sharp point goes home.
+
+I. The first stage is the preparation of the vineyard, in which
+three steps are marked. It is planted and furnished with all
+appliances needful for making wine, which is its great end. The
+direct divine origin of the religious ideas and observances of
+'Judaism' is thus asserted by Christ. The only explanation of them
+is that God enclosed that bit of the wilderness, and with His own
+hands set growing there these exotics. Neither the theology nor the
+ritual is of man's establishing. We need not seek for special
+meanings for wall, wine-press, and tower. They simply express the
+completeness of the equipment of the vineyard, as in Isaiah's song,
+which lies at the foundation of the parable, and suggest his
+question, 'What could have been done more?'
+
+Thus furnished, the vineyard is next handed over to the husbandmen,
+who, in Matthew, are exclusively the rulers, while in Luke they are
+the people. No doubt it was 'like people, like priest.' The strange
+dominion of the Pharisees rested entirely on popular consent, and
+their temper accurately indexed that of the nation. The Sanhedrin
+was the chief object at which Christ aimed the parable. But it only
+gave form and voice to the national spirit, and 'the people loved to
+have it so.' National responsibilities are not to be slipped out of
+by being shifted on to the broad shoulders of governments or
+influential men. Who lets them be governments and influential?
+
+  'Guv'ment ain't to answer for it,
+   God will send the bill to you.'
+
+Christ here teaches both rulers and ruled the ground and purpose of
+their privileges. They prided themselves on these as their own, but
+they were only tenants. They made their 'boast of the law'; but they
+forgot that fruit was the end of the divine planting and equipment.
+Holiness and glad obedience were what God sought, and when He found
+them, He was refreshed as with 'grapes in the wilderness.'
+
+Having installed the husbandmen, the owner goes into another
+country. The cluster of miracles which inaugurate an epoch of
+revelation are not continued beyond its beginning. Centuries of
+comparative divine silence followed the planting of the vineyard.
+Having given us our charge, God, as it were, steps aside to leave us
+room to work as we will, and so to display what we are made of. He
+is absent in so far as conspicuous oversight and retribution are
+concerned. He is present to help, love, and bless. The faithful
+husbandman has Him always near, a joy and a strength, else no fruit
+would grow; but the sin and misery of the unfaithful are that they
+think of Him as far off.
+
+II. Then comes the habitual ill-treatment of the messengers. These
+are, of course, the prophets, whose office was not only to foretell,
+but to plead for obedience and trust, the fruits sought by God. The
+whole history of the nation is summed up in this dark picture.
+Generation after generation of princes, priests, and people had done
+the same thing. There is no more remarkable historical fact than
+that of the uniform hostility of the Jews to the prophets. That a
+nation of such a sort as always to hate and generally to murder them
+should have had them in long succession, throughout its history, is
+surely inexplicable on any naturalistic hypothesis. Such men were
+not the natural product of the race, nor of its circumstances, as
+their fate shows. How did they spring up? No 'philosophy of Jewish
+history' explains the anomaly except the one stated here,--'He sent
+His servants.' We are told nowadays that the Jews had a natural
+genius for religion, just as the Greeks for art and thought, and the
+Romans for law and order, and that that explains the origin of the
+prophets. Does it explain their treatment?
+
+The hostility of the husbandmen grows with indulgence. From beating
+they go on to killing, and stoning is a specially savage form of
+killing. The opposition which began, as the former parable tells us,
+with polite hypocrisy and lip obedience, changed, under the stimulus
+of prophetic appeals, to honest refusal, and from that to violence
+which did not hesitate to slay. The more God pleads with men, the
+more self-conscious and bitter becomes their hatred; and the more
+bitter their hatred, the more does He plead, sending other
+messengers, more perhaps in number, or possibly of more weight, with
+larger commission and clearer light. Thus both the antagonistic
+forces grow, and the worse men become, the louder and more
+beseeching is the call of God to them. That is always true; and it
+is also ever true that he who begins with 'I go, sir, and goes not,
+is in a fair way to end with stoning the prophets.
+
+Christ treats the whole long series of violent rejections as the
+acts of the same set of husbandmen. The class or nation was one, as
+a stream is one, though all its particles are different; and the
+Pharisees and scribes, who stood with frowning hatred before Him as
+He spoke, were the living embodiment of the spirit which had
+animated all the past. In so far as they inherited their taint, and
+repeated their conduct, the guilt of all the former generations was
+laid at their door. They declared themselves their predecessors'
+heirs; and as they reproduced their actions, they would have to bear
+the accumulated weight of the consequences.
+
+III. Verses 37-39 tell of the mission of the Son and of its fatal
+issue. Three points are prominent in them. The first is the unique
+position which Christ here claims, with unwonted openness and
+decisiveness, as apart from and far above all the prophets. They
+constitute one order, but He stands alone, sustaining a closer
+relation to God. They were faithful 'as servants,' but He 'as a
+Son,' or, as Mark has it, 'the only and beloved Son.' The listeners
+understood Him well enough. The assertion, which seemed audacious
+blasphemy to them, fitted in with all His acts in that last week,
+which was not only the crisis of His life, but of the nation's fate.
+Rulers and people must decide whether they will own or reject their
+King, and they must do it with their eyes open. Jesus claimed to
+fill a unique position. Was He right or wrong in His claim? If He
+was wrong, what becomes of His wisdom, His meekness, His religion?
+Is a religious teacher, who made the mistake of thinking that He was
+the Son of God in a sense in which no other man is so, worthy of
+admiration? If He was right, what becomes of a Christianity which
+sees in Him only the foremost of the prophets?
+
+The next point marked is the owner's vain hope, in sending his Son. He
+thought that He would be welcomed, and He was disappointed. It was His
+last attempt. Christ knew Himself to be God's last appeal, as He is to
+all men, as well as to that generation. He is the last arrow in God's
+quiver. When it has shot that bolt, the resources even of divine love
+are exhausted, and no more can be done for the vineyard than He has
+done for it. We need not wonder at unfulfilled hopes being here
+ascribed to God. The startling thought only puts into language the
+great mystery which besets all His pleadings with men, which are
+carried on, though they often fail, and which must, therefore, in view
+of His foreknowledge, be regarded as carried on with the knowledge that
+they will fail. That is the long-suffering patience of God. The
+difficulty is common to the words of the parable and to the facts of
+God's unwearied pleading with impenitent men. Its surface is a
+difficulty, its heart is an abyss of all-hoping charity.
+
+The last point is the vain calculation of the husbandmen. Christ
+puts hidden motives into plain words, and reveals to these rulers
+what they scarcely knew of their own hearts. Did they, in their
+secret conclaves, look each other in the face, and confess that He
+was the Heir? Did He not Himself ground His prayer for their pardon
+on their ignorance? But their ignorance was not entire, else they
+had had no sin; neither was their knowledge complete, else they had
+had no pardon. Beneath many an obstinate denial of Him lies a secret
+confession, or misgiving, which more truly speaks the man than does
+the loud negation. And such strange contradictions are men, that the
+secret conviction is often the very thing which gives bitterness and
+eagerness to the hostility. So it was with some of those whose
+hidden suspicions are here set in the light. How was the rulers' or
+the people's wish to 'seize on His inheritance' their motive for
+killing Jesus? Their great sin was their desire to have their
+national prerogatives, and yet to give no true obedience. The ruling
+class clung to their privileges and forgot their responsibilities,
+while the people were proud of their standing as Jews, and careless
+of God's service. Neither wished to be reminded of their debt to the
+Lord of the vineyard, and their hostility to Jesus was mainly
+because He would call on them for fruits. If they could get this
+unwelcome and persistent voice silenced, they could go on in the
+comfortable old fashion of lip-service and real selfishness. It is
+an account, in vividly parabolic language, not only of _their_
+hostility, but of that of many men who are against Him. They wish to
+possess life and its good, without being for ever pestered with
+reminders of the terms on which they hold it, and of God's desire
+for their love and obedience. They have a secret feeling that Christ
+has the right to ask for their hearts, and so they often turn from
+Him angrily, and sometimes hate Him.
+
+With what sad calmness does Jesus tell the fate of the son, so
+certain that it is already as good as done! It _was_ done in
+their counsels, and yet He does not cease to plead, if perchance
+some hearts may be touched and withdraw themselves from the
+confederacy of murder.
+
+IV. We have next the self-condemnation from unwilling lips. Our Lord
+turns to the rulers with startling and dramatic suddenness, which
+may have thrown them off their guard, so that their answer leaped
+out before they had time to think whom it hit. His solemn
+earnestness laid a spell on them, which drew their own condemnation
+from them, though they had penetrated the thin veil of the parable,
+and knew full well who the husbandmen were. Nor could they refuse to
+answer a question about legal punishments for dishonesty, which was
+put to them, the fountains of law, without incurring a second time
+the humiliation just inflicted when He had forced them to
+acknowledge that they, the fountains of knowledge, did not know
+where John came from. So from all these motives, and perhaps from a
+mingling of audacity, which would brazen it out and pretend not to
+see the bearing of the question, they answer. Like Caiaphas in his
+counsel, and Pilate with his writing on the Cross, and many another,
+they spoke deeper things than they knew, and confessed beforehand
+how just the judgments were, which followed the very lines marked
+out by their own words.
+
+V. Then come the solemn application and naked truth of the parable.
+We have no need to dwell on the cycle of prophecies concerning the
+corner-stone, nor on the original application of the psalm. We must
+be content with remarking that our Lord, in this last portion of His
+address, throws away even the thin veil of parable, and speaks the
+sternest truth in the nakedest words. He puts His own claim in the
+plainest fashion, as the corner-stone on which the true kingdom of
+God was to be built. He brands the men who stood before Him as
+incompetent builders, who did not know the stone needed for their
+edifice when they saw it. He declares, with triumphant confidence,
+the futility of opposition to Himself--even though it kill Him. He
+is sure that God will build on Him, and that His place in the
+building, which shall rise through the ages, will be, to even
+careless eyes, the crown of the manifest wonders of God's hand.
+Strange words from a Man who knew that in three days He would be
+crucified! Stranger still that they have come true! He is the
+foundation of the best part of the best men; the basis of thought,
+the motive for action, the pattern of life, the ground of hope, for
+countless individuals; and on Him stands firm the society of His
+Church, and is hung all the glory of His Father's house.
+
+Christ confirms the sentence just spoken by the rulers on
+themselves, but with the inversion of its clauses. All disguise is
+at an end. The fatal 'you' is pronounced. The husbandmen's
+calculation had been that killing the heir would make them lords of
+the vineyard; the grim fact was that they cast themselves out when
+they cast him out. He is the heir. If we desire the inheritance, we
+must get it through Him, and not kill or reject, but trust and obey
+Him. The sentence declares the two truths, that possession of the
+vineyard depends on honouring the Son, and on bringing forth the
+fruits. The kingdom has been taken from the churches of Asia Minor,
+Africa, and Syria, because they bore no fruit. It is not held by us
+on other conditions. Who can venture to speak of the awful doom set
+forth in the last words here? It has two stages: one a lesser
+misery, which is the lot of him who stumbles against the stone,
+while it lies passive to be built on; one more dreadful, when it has
+acquired motion and comes down with irresistible impetus. To stumble
+at Christ, or to refuse His grace, and not to base our lives and
+hopes on Him is maiming and damage, in many ways, here and now. But
+suppose the stone endowed with motion, what can stand against it?
+And suppose that the Christ, who is now offered for the rock on
+which we may pile our hopes and never be confounded, comes to judge,
+will He not crush the mightiest opponent as the dust of the summer
+threshing-floor?
+
+
+
+
+THE STONE OF STUMBLING
+
+
+    'Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken:
+    but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to
+    powder.'--MATT. xxi. 44.
+
+As Christ's ministry drew to its close, its severity and its
+gentleness both increased; its severity to the class to whom it was
+always severe, and its gentleness to the class from whom it never
+turned away. Side by side, through all His manifestation of Himself,
+there were the two aspects: 'He showed Himself _froward_' (if I
+may quote the word) to the self-righteous and the Pharisee; and He
+bent with more than a woman's tenderness of yearning love over the
+darkness and sinfulness, which in its great darkness dimly knew
+itself blind, and in its sinfulness stretched out a lame hand of
+faith, and groped after a divine deliverer. Here, in my text, there
+are only words of severity and awful foreboding. Christ has been
+telling those Pharisees and priests that the kingdom is to be taken
+from them, and given to a nation that brings forth the fruits
+thereof. He interprets for them an Old Testament figure, often
+recurring, which we read in the 118th Psalm (and I may just say, in
+passing, that we get here His interpretation of that psalm, and the
+vindication of our application of it, and other similar ones, to Him
+and His office); 'The stone which the builders rejected,' said He,
+'is become the head of the corner'; and then, falling back on other
+Old Testament uses of the same figure, He weaves into one the whole
+of them--that in Isaiah about the 'sure foundation,' and that in
+Daniel about 'the stone cut out without hands, which became a great
+mountain,' crushing down all opposition,--and centres them all in
+Himself; as fulfilled in Himself, in His person and His work.
+
+The two clauses of my text figuratively point to two different
+classes of operation on the rejecters of the Gospel. What are these
+two classes? 'Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken:
+but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.' In
+the one case, the stone is represented as passive, lying quiet; in
+the other, it has acquired motion. In the one case, the man stumbles
+and hurts himself; a remediable injury, a self-inflicted injury, a
+natural injury, without the active operation of Christ to produce it
+at all; in the other case the injury is worse than remediable, it is
+utter, absolute, grinding destruction, and it comes from the active
+operation of the 'stone of stumbling.' That is to say, the one class
+represents the present hurts and harms which, by the natural
+operation of things, without the action of Christ judicially at all,
+every man receives in the very act of rejecting the Gospel; and the
+other represents the ultimate issue of that rejection, which
+rejection is darkened into opposition and fixed hostility, when the
+stone that was laid 'for a foundation' has got wings (if I may so
+say), and comes down in judgment, crushing and destroying the
+antagonist utterly. 'Whosoever falls on this stone is broken,' here
+and now; and 'on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to
+powder,' hereafter and yonder.
+
+Taking, then, into account the weaving together in this passage of
+the three figures from the Old Testament to which I have already
+referred,--the rejected stone, the foundation, and the mountain-stone
+of Daniel, and looking in the light of these, at the twofold issues,
+one present and one future, which the text distinctly brings before
+us,--we have just three points to which I ask your attention now.
+First, Every man has some kind of contact with Christ. Secondly,
+Rejection of Him, here and now, is harm and maiming. And, lastly,
+Rejection of Him, hereafter and yonder, is hopeless, endless, utter
+destruction.
+
+I. In the first place, every man has some kind of connection with
+Christ.
+
+I am not going to enter at all now upon any question about the
+condition of the 'dark places of the earth' where the Gospel has not
+come as a well-known preached message; we have nothing to do with
+that; the principles on which _they_ are judged is not the
+question before us now. I am speaking exclusively about persons who
+have heard the word of salvation, and are dwelling in the midst of
+what we call a Christian land. Christ is offered to each of us, in
+good faith on God's part, as a means of salvation, a foundation on
+which we may build. A man is free to accept or to reject that offer.
+If he reject it, he has not thereby cut himself off from all contact
+and connection with that rejected Saviour, but he still sustains a
+relation to Him; and the message that he has refused to believe, is
+exercising an influence upon his character and his destiny.
+
+Christ comes, I say, offered to us all in good faith on the part of
+God, as a foundation upon which we may build. And then comes in that
+strange mystery, that a man, consciously free, turns away from the
+offered mercy, and makes Him that was intended to be the basis of
+his life, the foundation of his hope, the rock on which, steadfast
+and serene, he should build up a temple-home for his soul to dwell
+in,--makes Him a stumbling-stone against which, by rejection and
+unbelief, he breaks himself!
+
+My friend, will you let me lay this one thing upon your heart,--you
+cannot hinder the Gospel from influencing you somehow. Taking it in
+its lowest aspects, it is one of the forces of modern society, an
+element in our present civilisation. It is everywhere, it obtrudes
+itself on you at every turn, the air is saturated with its
+influence. To be unaffected by such an all-pervading phenomenon is
+impossible. To no individual member of the great whole of a nation
+is it given to isolate himself utterly from the community. Whether
+he oppose or whether he acquiesce in current opinions, to denude
+himself of the possessions which belong in common to his age and
+state of society is in either case impracticable. 'That which cometh
+into your mind,' said one of the prophets to the Jews who were
+trying to cut themselves loose from their national faith and their
+ancestral prerogatives, 'That which cometh into your mind shall not
+be at all, that ye say, We will be as the heathen, as the families
+of the countries to serve wood and stone.' Vain dream! You can no
+more say, I will pass the Gospel by, and it shall be nothing to me,
+I will simply let it alone, than you can say, I will shut myself up
+from other influences proper to my time and nation. You cannot go
+back to the old naked barbarism, and you cannot reduce the influence
+of Christianity, even considered merely as one of the characteristics
+of the times, to zero. You may fancy you are letting it alone, but
+it does not let you alone; it is here, and you cannot shut yourself
+off from it.
+
+But it is not merely as a subtle and diffused influence that the
+Gospel exercises a permanent effect upon us. It is presented to each
+of us here individually, in the definite form of an actual offer of
+salvation for each, and of an actual demand of trust from each. The
+words pass into our souls, and thenceforward we can never be the
+same as if they had not been there. The smallest ray of light
+falling on a sensitive plate produces a chemical change that can
+never be undone again, and the light of Christ's love, once brought
+to the knowledge and presented for the acceptance of a soul, stamps
+on it an ineffaceable sign of its having been there. The Gospel once
+heard, is always the Gospel which has been heard. Nothing can alter
+that. Once heard, it is henceforward a perpetual element in the
+whole condition, character, and destiny of the hearer.
+
+Christ does something to every one of us. His Gospel will tell upon
+you, it _is_ telling upon you. If you disbelieve it, you are
+not the same as if you had never heard it. Never is the box of
+ointment opened without some savour from it abiding in every nostril
+to which its odour is wafted. Only the alternative, the awful
+'either, or,' is open for each--the 'savour of life unto life,
+_or_ the savour of death unto death.' To come back to the
+illustration of the text, Christ is something, and does something to
+every one of us. He is either the rock on which I build, poor, weak,
+sinful creature as I am, getting security, and sanctity, and
+strength from Him, I being a living stone' built upon 'the living
+stone,' and partaking of the vitality of the foundation; or else He
+is the other thing, 'a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence to
+them which stumble at the word.' Christ stands for ever in some kind
+of relation to, and exercises for ever some kind of influence on,
+every man who has heard the Gospel.
+
+II. The immediate issue of rejection of Him is loss and maiming.
+
+'Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken.' Just think for
+a moment, by way of illustrating this principle, first of all, of
+the _positive_ harm which you do to yourself in the act of
+turning away from the mercy offered you in Christ; and then think
+for a moment of the _negative_ loss which you sustain by the
+same act.
+
+Note the _positive_ harm. Am I uncharitable when I say that no
+man ever yet _passively neglected_ the message of love in God's
+Son; but that always _this_ is the rude outline of the experience
+of people who know what it is to have a Saviour offered to them, and
+know what it is to put Him away,--that there is a feeble and transitory
+movement of heart and will; that Conscience says, 'Thou oughtest'; that
+Will says, 'I would'; that the heart is touched by some sense of that
+great and gentle vision of light and love which passes before the eye;
+that the man, as it were, like some fever-ridden patient, lifts himself
+up for an instant from the bed on which he is lying, and puts out a
+hand, and then falls back again, the vacillating, fevered, paralysed
+will recoiling from the resolution, and the conscience having power to
+say, 'Thou oughtest,' but no power to enforce the execution of its
+decrees, and the heart turning away from the salvation that it would
+have found in the love of love, to the loss that it finds in the love
+of self and earth? Or in other words, is it not true that every man
+who rejects Christ does in simple verity _reject_ Him, and not
+merely neglect Him; that there is always an effort, that there is a
+struggle, feeble, perhaps, but real, which ends in the turning away? It
+is not that you stand there, and simply let Him go past. That were bad
+enough; but the fact is worse than that. It is that you turn your back
+upon Him. It is not that His hand is laid on yours, and yours remains
+dead and cold, and does not open to clasp it; but it is that His hand
+being laid on yours, you clench yours the tighter, and _will not_
+have it. And so every man (I believe) who rejects Christ does these
+things thereby--wounds his own conscience, hardens his own heart,
+makes himself a worse man, just because he has had a glimpse, and
+has willingly, and almost consciously, 'loved darkness rather than
+light.' Oh, brethren, the message of love can never come into a
+human soul, and pass away from it unreceived, without leaving that
+spirit worse, with all its lowest characteristics strengthened, and
+all its best ones depressed, by the fact of rejection. I have nothing
+to do now with pursuing that process to its end; but the natural
+result--if there were no future Judgment at all, if there were no
+movement ever given to the stone that you ought to build on--the
+natural result of the simple rejection of the Gospel is that, bit by
+bit, all the lingering remains of nobleness that hover about the man,
+like scent about a broken vase, pass away; and that, step by step,
+through the simple process of saying, 'I will not have Christ to rule
+over me,' the whole being degenerates, until manhood becomes
+devil-hood, and the soul is lost by its own want of faith. Unbelief
+is its own judgment; unbelief is its own condemnation; unbelief, as
+sin, is punished, like all other sins, by the perpetuation of deeper
+and darker forms of itself. Every time that you stifle a conviction,
+fight down a conviction, or drive away a conviction; and every time
+that you feebly move towards the decision, 'I _will_ trust Him, and
+love Him, and be His,' yet fail to realise it, you have harmed your
+soul, you have made yourself a worse man, you have lowered the tone
+of your conscience, you have enfeebled your will, you have made your
+heart harder against love, you have drawn another horny scale over
+the eye, that will prevent you from seeing the light that is yonder;
+you have, as much as in you is, withdrawn from God, and approximated
+to the other pole of the universe (if I may say that), to the dark
+and deadly antagonist of mercy, and goodness, and truth, and grace.
+'Whosoever falls on this stone,' by the natural result of his
+unbelief, 'shall be broken' and maimed, and shall mar his own nature.
+
+I need not dwell on the _negative_ evil results of unbelief;
+the loss of that which is the only guide for a man, the taking away,
+or rather the failing to possess, that great love above us, that
+divine Spirit in us, by which only we are ever made what we ought to
+be. This only I would leave with you, in this part of my subject,
+Whoever is not in Christ is maimed. Only he that is 'a man in Christ'
+has come 'to the measure of the stature of a perfect man.' There,
+and there alone, do we get the power which will make us full-grown.
+There alone is the soul planted in that good soil in which, growing,
+it becomes as a rounded, perfect tree, with leaves and fruits in
+their season. All other men are half-men, quarter-men, fragments of
+men, parts of humanity exaggerated and contorted and distorted from
+the reconciling whole which the Christian ought to be, and in
+proportion to his Christianity is on the road to be, and one day will
+assuredly and actually be, a 'complete and entire man, wanting
+nothing'; nothing maimed, nothing broken, the realisation of the
+ideal of humanity, the renewed copy 'of the second Adam, the Lord
+from heaven.'
+
+There is another consideration closely connected with this second
+part of my subject, that I just mention and pass on. Not only by the
+act of rejection of Christ do we harm and maim ourselves, but also
+all attempts at opposition--formal opposition--to the Gospel as a
+system, stand self-convicted and self-condemned to speedy decay.
+What a commentary upon that word, 'Whosoever falls on this stone
+shall be broken,' is the whole history of the heresies of the Church
+and the assaults of unbelief! Man after man, rich in gifts, endowed
+often with far larger and nobler faculties than the people who
+oppose him, with indomitable perseverance, a martyr to his error,
+sets himself up against the truth that is sphered in Jesus Christ;
+and the great divine message simply goes on its way, and all the
+babblement and noise are like so many bats flying against a light,
+or like the sea-birds that come sweeping up in the tempest and the
+night, to the hospitable Pharos that is upon the rock, and smite
+themselves dead against it. Sceptics well known in their generation,
+who made people's hearts tremble for the ark of God, what has become
+of them? Their books lie dusty and undisturbed on the top shelf of
+libraries; whilst there the Bible stands, with all the scribblings
+wiped off the page, as though they had never been! Opponents fire
+their small shot against the great Rock of Ages, and the little
+pellets fall flattened, and only scale off a bit of the moss that
+has gathered there! My brother, let the history of the past teach
+you and me, with other deeper thoughts, a very calm and triumphant
+confidence about all that opponents say nowadays; for all the modern
+opposition to this Gospel will go as all the past has done, and the
+newest systems which cut and carve at Christianity, will go to the
+tomb where all the rest have gone; and dead old infidelities will
+rise up from their thrones, and say to the bran-new ones of this
+generation, when their day is worked out, 'Are ye also become weak
+as we? art thou also become like one of us?' 'Whosoever shall fall
+on this stone shall be broken': personally, he will be harmed; and
+his opinions, and his books, and his talk, and all his
+argumentation, will come to nothing, like the waves that break into
+impotent foam against the rocky cliffs.
+
+III. Last of all, the issue, the ultimate issue, of unbelief is
+irremediable destruction when Christ begins to move.
+
+The former clause has spoken about the harm that naturally follows
+unbelief whilst the Gospel is being preached; the latter clause speaks
+about the active agency of Christ when the end shall have come, and
+the preaching of the Gospel shall have merged into the act of judgment.
+I do not mean to dwell, brethren, upon that thought; it seems to me
+far too awful a one to be handled by my hands, at any rate. Let us
+leave it in the vagueness and dreadfulness of the words of Him who
+never spoke exaggerated words, and who, when He said, 'It shall grind
+him to powder,' meant (as it seems to me) nothing less than a
+destruction which, contrasted with the former remediable wounding and
+breaking, was a destruction utter, and hopeless, and everlasting, and
+without remedy. Ground--ground to powder! Any life left in that? any
+gathering up of that, and making a man of it again? All the humanity
+battered out of it, and the life clean gone from it! Does not that
+sound very much like 'everlasting destruction from the presence of God
+and from the glory of His power'? Christ, silent now, will begin to
+speak; passive now, will begin to act. The stone comes down, and the
+fall of it will be awful. I remember, away up in a lonely Highland
+valley, where beneath a tall black cliff, all weather-worn, and cracked,
+and seamed, there lies at the foot, resting on the greensward that
+creeps round its base, a huge rock, that has fallen from the face of
+the precipice. A shepherd was passing beneath it; and suddenly, when
+the finger of God's will touched it, and rent it from its ancient bed
+in the everlasting rock, it came down, leaping and bounding from pinnacle
+to pinnacle--and it fell; and the man that was beneath it is there now!
+'Ground to powder.' Ah, my brethren, that is not _my_ illustration--that
+is Christ's. Therefore I say to you, since all that stand against Him
+shall become 'as the chaff of the summer threshing-floor,' and be swept
+utterly away, make Him the foundation on which you build; and when the
+storm sweeps away every 'refuge of lies,' you will be safe and serene,
+builded upon the Rock of Ages.
+
+
+
+
+TWO WAYS OF DESPISING GOD'S FEAST
+
+
+    'And Jesus answered and spake unto them again by
+    parables, and said, 2. The kingdom of heaven is like
+    unto a certain king, which made a marriage for his son,
+    3. And sent forth his servants to call them that were
+    bidden to the wedding: and they would not come.
+    4. Again, he sent forth other servants, saying, Tell
+    them which are bidden, Behold, I have prepared my
+    dinner: my oxen and my fatlings are killed, and all
+    things are ready: come unto the marriage. 6. But they
+    made light of it, and went their ways, one to his farm,
+    another to his merchandise; 6. 'And the remnant took
+    his  servants, and entreated them spitefully, and slew
+    them. 7. But when the king heard thereof, he was wroth:
+    and he sent forth his armies, and destroyed those
+    murderers, and burned up their city. & Then saith he to
+    his servants, The wedding is ready, but they which were
+    bidden were not worthy. 9. Go ye therefore into the
+    highways, and as many as ye shall find, bid to the
+    marriage.  10. So those servants went out into the
+    highways, and gathered together all as many as they
+    found, both bad and good: and the wedding was furnished
+    with guests. 11. And when the king came in to see the
+    guests, he saw there a man which had not on a
+    wedding-garment: 12. And he saith unto him, Friend, how
+    earnest thou in hither not having a wedding-garment?
+    And he was speechless. 13. Then said the king to the
+    servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away,
+    and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be
+    weeping and gnashing of teeth. 14. For many are called,
+    but few are chosen.'--MATT. xxii. 1-14.
+
+This parable, and the preceding one of the vine-dressers, make a
+pair. They are closely connected in time, as well as subject. 'Jesus
+answered.' What? Obviously, the unspoken murderous hate, restrained
+by fear, which had been raised in the rulers' minds, and flashed in
+their eyes, and moved in their gestures. Christ answers it by
+repeating His blow; for the present parable is, in outline,
+identical with the preceding, though differing in colouring, and
+carrying its thoughts farther. That stopped with the transference of
+the kingdom to the Gentiles; this passes on to speak also of the
+development among the Gentiles, and ends with the law 'many called,
+few chosen,' which is exemplified in Jew and Gentile. There are,
+then, two parts in it: verses 1-9 covering the same ground as the
+former; verses 10-14 adding new matter.
+
+I. The judgment on those who refuse the offered joys of the kingdom.
+In the previous parable, the kingdom was presented on the side of
+duty and service. The call was to render obedience. The vineyard was
+a sphere for toil. The owner had given it indeed, but, having given,
+he required. That is only half the truth, and the least joyful half.
+So this parable dismisses all ideas of work, duty, service,
+requirement, and instead gives the emblem of a marriage feast as the
+picture of the kingdom. It therein unites two familiar prophetic
+images for the Messianic times--those of a festival and of a
+marriage. As Luther says, 'He calls it a marriage feast, not a time
+of toil or a time of sorrow, but a time of holiday and a time of
+joy; in which we make ourselves fine, sing, play, dance, eat, drink,
+are glad, and have a good time; else it would not be a wedding
+feast, if people were to be working, mourning, or crying. Therefore,
+Christ calls His Christianity and gospel by the name of the highest
+joy on earth; namely, by the name of a marriage feast.' How pathetic
+this designation of His kingdom is on Christ's lips, when we
+remember how near His bitter agony He stood, and that He tasted its
+bitterness already! It is not the whole truth any more than the
+vineyard emblem is. Both must be united in our idea of the kingdom,
+as both may be in experience. It is possible to be at once toiling
+among the vines in the hot sunshine, and feasting at the table. The
+Christian life is not all grinding at heavy tasks, nor all enjoyment
+of spiritual refreshment; but our work may be so done as to be our
+'meat'--as it was His--and our glad repose may be unbroken even in
+the midst of toil. We are, at one and the same time, labourers in
+the king's vineyard, and guests at the king's table; and the same
+duality will, in some unknown fashion, continue in the perfect
+kingdom, where there will be both work and feasting, and all the
+life shall be both in one.
+
+The second point to be noticed is the invitations of the king. There
+had been an invitation before the point at which the parable begins,
+for the servants are sent to summon those who had already been
+'called.' That calling, which lies beyond the horizon of our
+parable, is the whole series of agencies in Old Testament times. So
+this parable begins almost where the former leaves off. They only
+slightly overlap. The first servants here are Christ Himself, and
+His followers in their ministry during His life; and the second set
+are the apostles and preachers of the gospel during the period
+between the completion of the preparation of the feast (that is, the
+death of Christ) and the destruction of Jerusalem. The characteristic
+difference of their message from that of the servants in the former
+parable, embodies the whole difference between the preaching of the
+prophets, as messengers demanding the fruit of righteousness, and the
+glad tidings of a gospel of free grace which does not demand, but
+offers, and does not say 'obey' until it has said 'eat, and be glad.'
+The reiterated invitations not only correspond to the actual facts,
+but, like the facts, set the miracle of God's patience in a still
+brighter light than the former story did; for while it is wonderful
+that the lord of the vineyard should stoop to ask so often for fruit,
+it is far more wonderful that the founder of the feast, who is king
+too, should stoop to offer over and over again the refused abundance
+of his table.
+
+Mark, further, the refusal of the invitations: 'They would not (or
+"did not wish to") come.' That is Christ's gentle way of describing
+the unbelief of His generation. It is the second set of refusers who
+are painted in darker colours. We are accustomed to think that the
+sin of His contemporaries was great beyond parallel, but he seems
+here to hint that the sin of those who reject Him after the Cross
+and the Resurrection, is blacker than theirs. At any rate, it
+clearly is so. But note that the parable speaks as if the refusers
+were the same persons throughout, thus taking the same point of view
+as the former one did, and regarding the generations of the Jews as
+one whole. There is a real unity, though the individuals be
+different, if the spirit actuating successive generations be the
+same.
+
+Note the two classes of rejecters. The first simply pay no
+attention, because their heads are full of business. They do not
+even speak more or less lame excuses, as the refusers in Luke's
+similar parable had the decency to do. The king's messenger
+addresses a group, who pause on their road for a moment, to listen
+listlessly to what he has to say, and, when he has done, disperse
+without a word, each man going on his road, as if nothing had
+happened. The ground of their indifference lies in their absorption
+with this world's good, and their belief that it is best. 'His own
+farm,' as the original puts it emphatically, holds one man by the
+solid delight of possessing acres that he can walk over and till;
+his merchandise draws another, by the excitement of speculation and
+the lust of acquiring. It is not only the hurry and fever of a great
+commercial city, but the quiet and leisure of country life, which
+shut out taste for God's feast. Strange preference of toil and risk
+of loss to abundance, repose, and joy! Savages barter gold for glass
+beads. We choose lives of weary work and hunting after uncertain
+riches, rather than listen to His call, despising the open-handed
+housekeeping of our Father's house, and trying to fill our hunger
+with the swine's husks. The suicidal madness of refusing the kingdom
+is set in a vivid light in these quiet words.
+
+But stranger still is the conduct of the rest. Why should they kill
+men whose only fault was bringing them a hospitable invitation? The
+incongruity of the representation has given offence to some
+interpreters, who are not slow to point out how Christ could have
+improved His parable. But the reality is more incongruous still, and
+the unmotived outburst of wrath against the innocent bearers of a
+kindly invitation is only too true to life. Mark the distinction
+drawn by our Lord between the bulk of the people who simply
+neglected, and the few who violently opposed. He does not charge the
+guilt on all. The murderers of Him and of His first followers were
+not the mass of the nation, who, left to themselves, would not have
+so acted, but the few who stirred up the many. But, though He does
+not lay the guilt at the doors of all, yet the punishment falls on
+all, and, when the city is burned, the houses of the negligent and
+of the slayers are equally consumed; for simple refusal of the
+message and slaying the messengers were but the positive and
+superlative degrees of the same crime--rebellion against the king,
+whose invitation was a command.
+
+The fatal issue is presented, as in the former parable, in two
+parts: the destruction of the rebels, and the passing over of the
+kingdom to others. But the differences are noteworthy. Here we read
+that 'the king was wroth.' Insult to a king is worse than dishonesty
+to a landlord. The refusal of God's proffered grace is even more
+certain to awake that awful reality, the wrath of God, than the
+failure to render the fruits of the good possessed. Love repelled
+and thrown back on itself cannot but become wrath. That refusal,
+which is rebellion, is fittingly described as punished by force of
+arms and the burning of the city. We can scarcely help seeing that
+our Lord here, in a very striking and unusual way, mingles prose
+prediction with parabolic imagery. Some commentators object to this,
+and take the armies and the burning to be only part of the imagery,
+but it is difficult to believe that. Note the forcible pronouns,
+'His armies,' and 'their city.' The terrible Roman legions were His
+soldiers for the time being, the axe which He laid to the root of
+the tree. The city had ceased to be His, just as the temple ceased
+to be 'My house,' and became, by their sin, 'your house.' The legend
+told that, before their destruction, a mighty voice was heard
+saying, 'Let us depart,' and, with the sound of rushing wings, His
+presence left sanctuary and city. When He was no longer 'the glory
+in the midst,' He was no longer 'a wall of fire round about,' and
+the Roman torches worked their will on the city which was no longer
+'the city of our God.'
+
+The command to gather in others to fill the vacant places follows on
+the destruction of the city. This may seem to be opposed to the
+facts of the transference of the kingdom to the Gentiles, which
+certainly was begun long before Jerusalem fell. But its fall was the
+final and complete severance of Christianity from Judaism, and not
+till then had the messengers to give up the summons to Israel as
+hopeless. Perhaps Paul had this parable floating in his memory when
+he said to the howling blasphemers at Antioch in Pisidia, 'Seeing ye
+... judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, lo, we turn to the
+Gentiles. For so hath the Lord commanded us.' 'They which were
+bidden were not worthy,' and their unworthiness consisted not in any
+other moral demerit, but solely in this, that they had refused the
+proffered blessings. That is the only thing which makes any of us
+unworthy. And that will make the best of us unworthy.
+
+II. Verses 10-14 carry us beyond the preceding parable, and show us
+the judgment on the unworthy accepters of the invitation. There are
+two ways of sinning against God's merciful gift: the one is refusing
+to accept it; the other is taking it in outward seeming, but
+continuing in sin. The former was the sin of the Jews; the latter is
+the sin of nominal Christians. We may briefly note the points of
+this appendix to the parable. The first is the indiscriminate
+invitation, which is more emphatically marked as being so, by the
+mention of the 'bad' before the good among the guests. God's offer
+is for all, and, in a very real sense, is specially sent to the
+worst, just as the doctor goes first to the most severely wounded.
+So the motley crew, without the least attempt at discrimination, are
+seated at the table. If the Church understands its business, it will
+have nothing to do in its message with distinctions of character any
+more than of class, but, if it makes any difference, will give the
+outcast and disreputable the first place in its efforts. Is that
+what it does?
+
+The next point is the king's inspection. The word rendered 'behold'
+implies a fixed and minute observation. When does that scrutiny take
+place? Obviously, from the sequel, the final judgment is referred
+to, and it is remarkable that here there is no mention of the king's
+son as the judge. No parable can shadow forth all truth, and though
+the Father 'has committed all judgment to the Son,' the Son's
+judgment is the Father's, and the exigencies of the parable required
+that the son as bridegroom should not be brought into view as judge.
+Note that there is only one guest without the dress needed. That may
+be an instance of the lenity of Christ's charity, which hopeth all
+things; or it may rather be intended to suggest the keenness of the
+king's glance, which, in all the crowded tables, picks out the one
+ragged losel who had found his way there--so individual is his
+knowledge, so impossible for us to hide in the crowd.
+
+Mark that the feast has not begun, though the guests are seated. The
+judgment stands at the threshold of the heavenly kingdom. The king
+speaks with a certain coldness, very unlike the welcome fit for a
+guest; and his question is one of astonishment at the rude boldness
+of the man who came there, knowing that he had not the proper dress.
+(That knowledge is implied in the form of the sentence in the
+Greek.) What, then, is the wedding garment? It can be nothing else
+than righteousness, moral purity, which fits for sitting at His
+table in His kingdom. And the man who has it not, is the nominal
+Christian, who says that he has accepted God's invitation, and lives
+in sin, not putting off 'the old man with his deeds,' nor putting on
+'the new man, which is created in righteousness.' How that garment
+was to be obtained is no part of this parable. We know that it is
+only to be received by faith in Jesus Christ, and that if we are to
+pass the scrutiny of the king, it must be as 'not having our own
+righteousness,' but His made ours by faith which makes us righteous,
+and then by all holy effort, and toil in His strength, we must
+clothe our souls in the dress which befits the banqueting hall; for
+only they who are washed and clothed in fine linen, clean and white,
+shall sit there. But Christ's purpose here was not to explain how
+the robe was to be procured, but to insist that it must be worn.
+
+'He was speechless,'--or, as the word means, 'muzzled.' The man is
+self-condemned, and, having nothing to say in extenuation, the
+solemn promise is pronounced of ejection from the lighted hall, with
+limbs bound so that he cannot struggle, and consignment to the
+blackness outside, of which our Lord adds, in words not put into the
+king's mouth, but which we have heard from Him before, 'There shall
+be the [well-known and terrible] weeping and gnashing of teeth--awful
+though figurative expressions for despair and passion.
+
+Both parts of the parable come under one law, and exemplify one
+principle of the kingdom, that its invitations extend more widely
+than the real possession of its gifts. The unbelieving Jew, in one
+direction, and the unrighteous Christian in another, are instances
+of this.
+
+This is not the place to discuss that wide and well-worn question of
+the ground of God's choice. That does not enter into the scope of
+the parable. For it, the choice is proved by the actual
+participation in the feast. They who do not choose to receive the
+invitation, or to put on the wedding garment, do, in different ways,
+show that they are not 'chosen' though 'called.' The lesson is, not
+of interminable and insoluble questionings about God's secrets, but
+of earnest heed to His gracious call, and earnest, believing effort
+to make the fair garment our very own, 'if so be that being clothed
+we shall not be found naked.'
+
+
+
+
+THE TABLES TURNED: THE QUESTIONERS QUESTIONED
+
+
+    'But when the Pharisees had heard that He had put the
+    Sadducees to silence, they were gathered together.
+    35. Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked Him a
+    question, tempting Him, and saying, 36. Master, which
+    is the great commandment in the law? 37. Jesus said
+    unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy
+    heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
+    38. This is the first and great commandment. 39. And
+    the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy
+    neighbour as thyself. 40. On these two commandments
+    hang all the law and the prophets. 41. While the
+    Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them,
+    42. Saying, What think ye of Christ? whose Son is He?
+    They say unto Him, The son of David. 43. He saith unto
+    them, How then doth David in spirit call Him Lord,
+    saying, 44. The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit Thou on My
+    right hand, till I make Thine enemies Thy footstool?
+    45. If David then call Him Lord, how is He his son?
+    46. And no man was able to answer Him a word; neither
+    durst any man, from that day forth, ask Him any more
+    questions.'--MATT.xxii.34-46.
+
+Herodians, Sadducees, Pharisees, who were at daggers drawn with each
+other, patched up an alliance against Jesus, whom they all hated.
+Their questions were cunningly contrived to entangle Him in the
+cobwebs of casuistry and theological hair-splitting, but He walked
+through the fine-spun snares as a lion might stalk away with the
+nooses set for him dangling behind him. The last of the three
+questions put to Jesus, and the one question with which He turned
+the tables and silenced His questioners, are our subject. In the
+former, Jesus declares the essence of the law or of religion; in the
+latter, He brings to light the essential loftiness of the Messiah.
+
+I. The two preceding questions are represented to have been asked by
+deputations; this is specially noted as emanating from an
+individual. The 'lawyer' seems to have anticipated his colleagues,
+and possibly his question was not that which they had meant to put.
+His motive in asking it was that of 'tempting' Jesus, but we must
+not give that word too hostile a sense, for it may mean no more than
+'testing' or trying. The legal expert wished to find out the
+attainments and standpoint of this would-be teacher, and so he
+proposed a question which would bring out the whereabouts of Jesus,
+and give opportunity for a theological wrangle. He did not ask the
+question for guidance, but as an inquisitor cross-examining a
+suspected heretic. Probably the question was a stereotyped one, and
+there are traces in the Gospels that the answer recognised as
+orthodox was that which Jesus gave (Luke x. 27). The two
+commandments are quoted from Deuteronomy vi. 5 and Leviticus xix. 18
+respectively. The lawyer probably only desired to raise a discussion
+as to the relative worth of isolated precepts. Jesus goes deep down
+below isolated precepts, and unifies, as well as transforms, the
+law. Supreme and undivided love to God is not only the great, but
+also the first, commandment. In more modern phrase, it is the sum of
+man's duty and the germ of all goodness. Note that Jesus shifts the
+centre from conduct to character, from deeds to affections. 'As a
+man _thinketh_ in his heart, so is he,' said the sage of old;
+Christ says, 'As a man loves, so is he.' Two loves we have,--either
+the dark love of self and sense, or the white love of God, and all
+character and conduct are determined by which of these sways us.
+Note, further, that love to God must needs be undivided. God is one
+and all; man is one and finite. To love such an object with half a
+heart is not to love. True, our weakness leads astray, but the only
+real love corresponding to the natures of the lover and the loved is
+whole-hearted, whole-souled, whole-minded. It must be 'all in all,
+or not at all.'
+
+'A second is like unto it,'--love to man is the under side, as it
+were, of love to God. The two commandments are alike, for both call
+for love, and the second is second because it is a consequence of
+the first. Each sets up a lofty standard; 'with all thy heart' and
+'as thyself' sound equally impossible, but both result necessarily
+from the nature of the case. Religion is the parent of all morality,
+and especially of benevolent love to men. Innate self-regard will
+yield to no force but that of love to God. It is vain to try to
+create brotherhood among men unless the sense of God's fatherhood is
+its foundation. Love of neighbours is the second commandment, and to
+make it the first, as some do now, is to end all hope of fulfilling
+it. Still further, Jesus hangs law and prophets on these two
+precepts, which, at bottom, are one. Not only will all other duties
+be done in doing these, since 'love is the fulfilling of the law,'
+but all other precepts, and all the prophets' appeals and
+exhortations, are but deductions from, or helps to the attainment
+of, these. All our forms of worship, creeds, and the like, are of
+worth in so far as they are outcomes of love to God, or aid us in
+loving Him and our neighbours. Without love, they are 'as sounding
+brass, or a tinkling cymbal.'
+
+II. The Pharisees remained 'gathered together,' and may have been
+preparing another question, but Jesus had been long enough
+interrogated. It was not fitting that He should be catechised only.
+His questions teach. He does not seek to 'entangle' the Pharisees
+'in their speech,' nor to make them contradict themselves, but
+brings them full up against a difficulty, that they may open their
+eyes to the great truth which is its only solution. His first
+question, 'What think ye of the Christ?' is simply preparatory to
+the second. The answer which He anticipated was given,--as, of
+course, it would be, for the Davidic descent of the Messiah was a
+commonplace universally accepted. One can fancy that the Pharisees
+smiled complacently at the attempt to puzzle them with such an
+elementary question, but the smile vanished when the next one came.
+They interpreted Psalm 110 as Messianic, and David in it called
+Messiah 'my Lord.' How can He be both? Jesus' question is in two
+forms,--'If He is son, how does David call Him Lord?' or, if He is
+Lord, 'how then is He his son?' Take either designation, and the
+other lands you in inextricable difficulties.
+
+Now what was our Lord's purpose in thus driving the Pharisees into a
+corner? Not merely to 'muzzle' them, as the word in verse 34,
+rendered 'put to silence,' literally means, but to bring to light
+the inadequate conceptions of the Messiah and of the nature of His
+kingdom, to which exclusive recognition of his Davidic descent
+necessarily led. David's son would be but a king after the type of
+the Herods and Casars, and his kingdom as 'carnal' as the wildest
+zealot expected, but David's Lord, sitting at God's right hand, and
+having His foes made His footstool by Jehovah Himself,--what sort of
+a Messiah King would that be? The majestic image, that shapes itself
+dimly here, was a revelation that took the Pharisees' breath away,
+and made them dumb. Nor are the words without a half-disclosed claim
+on Christ's part to be that which He was so soon to avow Himself
+before the high priest as being. The first hearers of them probably
+caught that meaning partly, and were horrified; we hear it clearly
+in the words, and answer, 'Thou art the King of glory, O Christ!
+Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father.'
+
+Jesus here says that Psalm 110 is Messianic, that David was the
+author, and that he wrote it by divine inspiration. The present
+writer cannot see how our Lord's argument can be saved from collapse
+if the psalm is not David's.
+
+
+
+
+THE KING'S FAREWELL
+
+
+    'Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for
+    ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear
+    beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's
+    bones, and of all uncleanness. 28. Even so ye also
+    outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are
+    full of hypocrisy and iniquity. 29. Woe unto you,
+    scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the
+    tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of
+    the righteous, 30. And say, If we had been in the days
+    of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with
+    them in the blood of the prophets. 31. Wherefore ye be
+    witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of
+    them which killed the prophets. 32. Fill ye up then the
+    measure of your fathers. 33. Ye serpents, ye generation
+    of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell!
+    34. Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and
+    wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill
+    and crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in your
+    synagogues, and persecute them from city to city;
+    35. That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed
+    upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto
+    the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew
+    between the temple and the altar. 36. Verily I say unto
+    you, All these things shall come upon this generation.
+    37. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the
+    prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee,
+    how often would I have gathered thy children together,
+    even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings,
+    and ye would not! 38. Behold, your house is left unto
+    you desolate.  39. For I say unto you, Ye shall not see
+    Me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is He that
+    cometh in the name of the Lord.'--MATT.  xxiii. 27-39.
+
+If, with the majority of authorities, we exclude verse 14 from the
+text, there are, in this chapter, seven woes, like seven thunders,
+launched against the rulers. They are scathing exposures, but, as
+the very word implies, full of sorrow as well as severity. They are
+not denunciations, but prophecies warning that the end of such
+tempers must be mournful. The wailing of an infinite compassion,
+rather than the accents of anger, sounds in them; and it alone is
+heard in the outburst of lamenting in which Christ's heart runs
+over, as in a passion of tears, at the close. The blending of
+sternness and pity, each perfect, is the characteristic of this
+wonderful climax of our Lord's appeals to His nation. Could such
+tones of love and righteous anger joined have been sent echoing
+through the ages in this Gospel, if they had not been heard?
+
+I. The woe of the 'whited sepulchres.' The first four woes are
+directed mainly to the teachings of the scribes and Pharisees; the
+last three to their characters. The two first of these fasten on the
+same sin, of hypocritical holiness. There is, however, a difference
+between the representation of hypocrites under the metaphor of the
+clean outside of the cup and platter, and that of the whited
+sepulchre. In the former, the hidden sin is 'extortion and excess';
+that is, sensual enjoyment wrongly procured, of which the emblems of
+cup and plate suggest that good eating and drinking are a chief
+part. In the latter, it is 'iniquity'--a more general and darker
+name for sin. In the former, the Pharisee is 'blind,' self-deceived
+in part or altogether; in the latter, stress is rather laid on his
+'appearance unto men.' The repetition of the same charge in the two
+woes teaches us Christ's estimate of the gravity and frequency of
+the sin.
+
+The whitened tombs of Mohammedan saints still gleam in the strong
+sunlight on many a knoll in Palestine. If the Talmudical practice is
+as old as our Lord's time, the annual whitewashing was lately over.
+Its purpose was not to adorn the tombs, but to make them
+conspicuous, so that they might be avoided for fear of defilement.
+So He would say, with terrible irony, that the apparent holiness of
+the rulers was really a sign of corruption, and a warning to keep
+away from them. What a blow at their self-complacency! And how
+profoundly true it is that the more punctiliously white the
+hypocrite's outside, the more foul is he within, and the wider berth
+will all discerning people give him! The terrible force of the
+figure needs no dwelling on. In Christ's estimate, such a soul was
+the very dwelling-place of death; and foul odours and worms and
+corruption filled its sickening recesses. Terrible words to come
+from His lips into which grace was poured, and bold words to be
+flashed at listeners who held the life of the Speaker in their
+hands! There are two sorts of hypocrites, the conscious and the
+unconscious; and there are ten of the latter for one of the former,
+and each ten times more dangerous. Established religion breeds them,
+and they are specially likely to be found among those whose business
+is to study the documents in which it is embodied. These woes are
+not like thunder-peals rolling above our heads, while the lightning
+strikes the earth miles away. A religion which is mostly whitewash
+is as common among us as ever it was in Jerusalem; and its foul
+accompaniments of corruption becoming more rotten every year, as the
+whitewash is laid on thicker, may be smelt among us, and its fatal
+end is as sure.
+
+II. The woe of the sepulchre builders (vs. 29-36). In these verses
+we have, first, the specification of another form of hypocrisy,
+consisting in building the prophets' tombs, and disavowing the
+fathers' murder of them. Honouring dead prophets was right; but
+honouring dead ones and killing living ones was conscious or
+unconscious hypocrisy. The temper of mind which leads to glorifying
+the dead witnesses, also leads to supposing that all truth was given
+by them; and hence that the living teachers, who carry their message
+farther, are false prophets. A generation which was ready to kill
+Jesus in honour of Moses, would have killed Moses in honour of
+Abraham, and would not have had the faintest apprehension of the
+message of either.
+
+It is a great deal easier to build tombs than to accept teachings,
+and a good deal of the posthumous honour paid to God's messengers
+means, 'It's a good thing they are dead, and that we have nothing to
+do but to put up a monument.' Bi-centenaries and ter-centenaries and
+jubilees do not always imply either the understanding or the
+acceptance of the principles supposed to be glorified thereby. But
+the magnifiers of the past are often quite unconscious of the
+hollowness of their admiration, and honest in their horror of their
+fathers' acts; and we all need the probe of such words as Christ's
+to pierce the skin of our lazy reverence for our fathers' prophets,
+and let out the foul matter below--namely, our own blindness to
+God's messengers of to-day.
+
+The statement of the hypocrisy is followed, in verses 31-33, with
+its unmasking and condemnation. The words glow with righteous wrath
+at white heat, and end in a burst of indignation, most unfamiliar to
+His lips. Three sentences, like triple lightning flash from His
+pained heart. With almost scornful subtlety He lays hold of the
+words which He puts into the Pharisees' mouths, to convict them of
+kindred with those whose deeds they would disown. 'Our fathers, say
+you? Then you do belong to the same family, after all. You confess
+that you have their blood in your veins; and, in the very act of
+denying sympathy with their conduct, you own kindred. And, for all
+your protestations, spiritual kindred goes with bodily descent.'
+Christ here recognises that children probably 'take after their
+parents,' or, in modern scientific terms, that 'heredity' is the
+law, and that it works more surely in the transmission of evil than
+of good.
+
+Then come the awful words bidding that generation 'fill up the
+measure of the fathers.' They are like the other command to Judas to
+do his work quickly. They are more than permission, they are
+command; but such a command as, by its laying bare of the true
+character of the deed in view, is love's last effort at prevention.
+Mark the growing emotion of the language. Mark the conception of a
+nation's sins as one through successive generations, and the other,
+of these as having a definite measure, which being filled, judgment
+can no longer tarry. Generation after generation pours its
+contributions into the vessel, and when the last black drop which it
+can hold has been added, then comes the catastrophe. Mark the fatal
+necessity by which inherited sin becomes darker sin. The fathers'
+crimes are less than the sons'. This inheritance increases by each
+transmission. The cloak strikes one more at each revolution of the
+hands.
+
+It is hard to recognise Christ in the terrible words that follow. We
+have heard part of them from John the Baptist; and it sounded
+natural for him to call men serpents and the children of serpents,
+but it is somewhat of a shock to hear Jesus hurling such names at
+even the most sinful. But let us remember that He who sees hearts,
+has a right to tell harsh truths, and that it is truest kindness to
+strip off masks which hide from men their own real character, and
+that the revelation of the divine love in Jesus would be a partial
+and impotent revelation if it did not show us the righteous love
+which is wrath. There is nothing so terrible as the anger of gentle
+compassion, and the fiercest and most destructive wrath is 'the
+wrath of the Lamb.' Seldom, indeed, did He show that side of His
+character; but it is there, and the other side would not be so
+blessed as it is, unless that were there too.
+
+The woe ends with the double prophecy that that generation would
+repeat and surpass the fathers' guilt, and that on it would fall the
+accumulated penalties of past bloodshed. Note that solemn
+'therefore,' which looks back to the whole preceding context, and
+forward to the whole subsequent. Because the rulers professed
+abhorrence of their fathers' deeds, and yet inherited their spirit,
+they too would have their prophets, and would slay them. God goes on
+sending His messengers, because we reject them; and the more deaf
+men are, the more does He peal His words into their ears. That is
+mercy and compassion, that all men may be saved and come to the
+knowledge of the truth; but it is judgment too, and its foreseen
+effect must be regarded as part of the divine purpose in it.
+Christ's desire is one thing, His purpose another. His desire is
+that all should find in His gospel 'the savour of life'; but His
+purpose is that, if it be not that to any, it shall be to them the
+savour of death. Mark, too, the authority with which He, in the face
+of these scowling Pharisees, assumes the distinct divine prerogative
+of sending forth inspired men, who, as His messengers, shall stand
+on a level with the prophets of old. Mark His silence as to His own
+fate, which is only obscurely hinted at in the command to fill up
+the measure of the fathers. Observe the detailed enumeration of His
+messengers' gifts,--'prophets' under direct inspiration, like those
+of old, which may especially refer to the apostles; 'wise men,' like
+a Stephen or an Apollos; 'scribes,' such as Mark and Luke and many a
+faithful servant since, whose pen has loved to write the name above
+every name. Note the detailed prophecy of their treatment, which
+begins with _slaying_ and goes down to the less severe _scourging_,
+and thence to the milder _persecution_. Do the three punishments
+belong to the three classes of messengers, the severest falling to
+the lot of the most highly endowed, and even the quiet penman being
+hunted from city to city?
+
+We need not wriggle and twist to try to avoid admitting that the
+calling of the martyred Zacharias, 'the son of Barachias,' is an
+error of some one who confused the author of the prophetic book with
+the person whose murder is narrated in 2 Chronicles xxiv. We do not
+know who made the mistake, or how it appears in our text, but it is
+not honest to try to slur it over. The punishment of long ages of
+sin, carried on from father to son, does in the course of that
+history of the world, which is a part of the judgment of the world,
+fall upon one generation. It takes long for the mass of heaped-up
+sin to become top-heavy; but when it is so, it buries one generation
+of those who have worked at piling it up, beneath its down-rushing
+avalanche.
+
+  'The mills of God grind slowly,
+   But they grind exceeding small.'
+
+The catastrophes of national histories are prepared for by continuous
+centuries. The generation that laid the first powder-hornful of the
+train is dead and buried, long before the explosion which sends
+constituted order and institutions sky-high. The misery is that often
+the generation which has to pay the penalty has begun to awake to the
+sin, and would be glad to mend it, if it could. England in the
+seventeenth century, France in the eighteenth, America in the
+nineteenth, had to reap harvests from sins sown long before. Such is
+the law of the judgment wrought out by God's providence in history.
+But there is another judgment, begun here and perfected hereafter, in
+which fathers and sons shall each bear their own burden, and reap
+accurately the fruit of what they have sown. 'The soul that sinneth,
+it shall die.'
+
+III. The parting wail of rejected love. The lightning flashes of the
+sevenfold woes end in a rain of pity and tears. His full heart
+overflows in that sad cry of lamentation over the long-continued
+foiling of the efforts of a love that would fain have fondled and
+defended. What intensity of feeling is in the redoubled naming of
+the city! How yearningly and wistfully He calls, as if He might still
+win the faithless one, and how lingeringly unwilling He is to give up
+hope! How mournfully, rather than accusingly, He reiterates the acts
+which had run through the whole history, using a form of the verbs
+which suggests continuance. Mark, too, the matter-of-course way in
+which Christ assumes that He sent all the prophets whom, through
+the generations, Jerusalem had stoned.
+
+So the lament passes into the solemn final leave-taking, with which
+our Lord closes His ministry among the Jews, and departs from the
+temple. As, in the parable of the marriage-feast, the city was
+emphatically called 'their city,' so here the Temple, in whose
+courts He was standing, and which in a moment He was to quit for
+ever, is called 'your house,' because His departure is the
+withdrawing of the true Shechinah. It had been the house of God: now
+He casts it off, and leaves it to them to do as they will with it.
+The saddest punishment of long-continued rejection of His pleading
+love, is that it ceases at last to plead. The bitterest woe for
+those who refuse to render to Him the fruits of the vineyard, is to
+get the vineyard for their own, undisturbed. Christ's utmost
+retribution for obstinate blindness is to withdraw from our sight.
+All the woes that were yet to fall, in long, dreary succession on
+that nation, so long continued in its sin, so long continued in its
+misery, were hidden in that solemn departure of Christ from the
+henceforward empty temple. Let us fear lest our unfaithfulness meet
+the like penalty! But even the departure does not end His yearnings,
+nor close the long story of the conflict between God's beseeching
+love and their unbelief. The time shall come when the nation shall
+once more lift up, with deeper, truer adoration, the hosannas of the
+triumphal entry. And then a believing Israel shall see their King,
+and serve Him. Christ never takes final leave of any man in this
+world. It is ever possible that dumb lips may be opened to welcome
+Him, though long rejected; and His withdrawals are His efforts to
+bring about that opening. When it takes place, how gladly does He
+return to the heart which is now His temple, and unveil His beauty
+to the long-darkened eyes!
+
+
+
+
+TWO FORMS OF ONE SAYING
+
+
+    'He that endureth to the end, the same shall be saved.'
+    --Matt. xxiv. 13, R.V.
+
+    'In your patience possess ye your souls.'--Luke xxi. 19.
+
+These two sayings, different as they sound in our Version, are
+probably divergent representations of one original. The reasons for
+so supposing are manifold and obvious on a little consideration. In
+the first place, the two sayings occur in the Evangelists' reports
+of the same prophecy and at the same point therein. In the second
+place, the verbal resemblance is much greater than appears in our
+Authorised Version, because the word rendered 'patience' in Luke is
+derived from that translated 'endureth' in Matthew; and the true
+connection between the two versions of the saying would have been
+more obvious if we had had a similar word in both, reading in the
+one 'he that endureth,' and in the other 'in your endurance.' In the
+third place, the difference between these two sayings presented in
+our Version, in that the one is a promise and the other a command,
+is due to an incorrect reading of St. Luke's words. The Revised
+Version substitutes for the imperative 'possess' the promise 'ye
+shall possess,' and with that variation the two sayings are brought
+a good deal nearer each other. In both endurance is laid down as the
+condition, which in both is followed by a promise. Then, finally,
+there need be no difficulty in seeing that 'possessing,' or, more
+literally, 'gaining your souls,' is an exact equivalent of the other
+expression, 'ye shall be saved.' One cannot but remember our Lord's
+solemn antithetical phrase about a man 'losing his own soul.' To
+'win one's soul' is to be saved; to be saved is to win one's soul.
+
+So I think I have made out my thesis that the two sayings are
+substantially one. They carry a great weight of warning, of
+exhortation, and of encouragement to us all. Let us try now to reap
+some of that harvest.
+
+I. First, then, notice the view of our condition which underlies
+these sayings.
+
+It is a sad and a somewhat stern one, but it is one to which, I
+think, most men's hearts will respond, if they give themselves
+leisure to think; and if they 'see life steadily, and see it whole.'
+For howsoever many days are bright, and howsoever all days are good,
+yet, on the whole, 'man is a soldier, and life is a fight.' For some
+of us it is simple endurance; for all of us it has sometimes been
+agony; for all of us, always, it presents resistance to every kind of
+high and noble career, and especially to the Christian one. Easy-going
+optimists try to skim over these facts, but they are not to be so
+lightly set aside. You have only to look at the faces that you
+meet in the street to be very sure that it is always a grave and
+sometimes a bitter thing to live. And so our two texts presuppose
+that life on the whole demands endurance, whatever may be included
+in that great word.
+
+Think of the inward resistance and outward hindrances to every lofty
+life. The scholar, the man of culture, the philanthropist--all who
+would live for anything else than the present, the low, and the
+sensual--find that there is a banded conspiracy, as it were, against
+them, and that they have to fight their way by continual antagonism,
+by continual persistence, as well as by continual endurance. Within,
+weakness, torpor, weariness, levity, inconstant wills, bright
+purposes clouding over, and all the cowardice and animalism of our
+nature war continually against the better, higher self. And without,
+there is a down-dragging, as persistent as the force of gravity,
+coming from the whole assemblage of external things that solicit,
+and would fain seduce us. The old legends used to tell us how,
+whensoever a knight set out upon any great and lofty quest, his path
+was beset on either side by voices, sometimes whispering seductions,
+and sometimes shrieking maledictions, but always seeking to withdraw
+him from his resolute march onwards to his goal. And every one of
+us, if we have taken on us the orders of any lofty chivalry, and
+especially if we have sworn ourselves knights of the Cross, have to
+meet the same antagonism. Then, too, there are golden apples rolled
+upon our path, seeking to draw us away from our steadfast endurance.
+
+Besides the hindrances in every noble path, the hindrances within
+and the hindrances without, the weight of self and the drawing of
+earth, there come to us all--in various degrees no doubt, and in
+various shapes--but to all of us there come the burdens of sorrows
+and cares, and anxieties and trials. Wherever two or three are
+gathered together, even if they gather for a feast, there will be
+some of them who carry a sorrow which they know well will never be
+lifted off their shoulders and their hearts, until they lay down all
+their burdens at the grave's mouth; and it is weary work to plod on
+the path of life with a weight that cannot be shifted, with a wound
+that can never be stanched.
+
+Oh, brethren, rosy-coloured optimism is all a dream. The recognition
+of the good that is in the evil is the devout man's talisman, but
+there is always need for the resistance and endurance which my texts
+prescribe. And the youngest of us, the gladdest of us, the least
+experienced of us, the most frivolous of us, if we will question our
+own hearts, will hear their Amen to the stern, sad view of the facts
+of earthly life which underlies this text.
+
+Though it has many other aspects, the world seems to me sometimes to
+be like that pool at Jerusalem in the five porches of which lay,
+groaning under various diseases, but none of them without an ache, a
+great multitude of impotent folk, halt and blind. Astronomers tell
+us that one, at any rate, of the planets rolls on its orbit swathed
+in clouds and moisture. The world moves wrapped in a mist of tears.
+God only knows them all, but each heart knows its own bitterness and
+responds to the words, 'Ye have need of patience.'
+
+II. Now, secondly, mark the victorious temper.
+
+That is referred to in the one saying by 'he that endureth,' and in
+the other 'in your endurance.' Now, it is very necessary for the
+understanding of many places in Scripture to remember that the
+notion either of patience or of endurance by no means exhausts the
+power of this noble Christian word. For these are passive virtues,
+and however excellent and needful they may be, they by no means sum
+up our duty in regard to the hindrances and sorrows, the burdens and
+weights, of which I have been trying to speak. For you know it is
+only 'what cannot be cured' that 'must be endured,' and even
+incurable things are not merely to be endured, but they ought to be
+utilised. It is not enough that we should build up a dam to keep the
+floods of sorrow and trial from overflowing our fields; we must turn
+the turbid waters into our sluices, and get them to drive our mills.
+It is not enough that we should screw ourselves up to lie
+unresistingly under the surgeon's knife; though God knows that it is
+as much as we can manage sometimes, and we have to do as convicts
+under the lash do, get a bit of lead or a bullet into our mouths,
+and bite at it to keep ourselves from crying out. But that is not
+all our duty in regard to our trials and difficulties. There is
+required something more than passive endurance.
+
+This noble word of my texts does mean a great deal more than that. It
+means active persistence as well as patient submission. It is not
+enough that we should stand and bear the pelting of the pitiless storm,
+unmurmuring and unbowed by it; but we are bound to go on our course,
+bearing up and steering right onwards. Persistent perseverance in the
+path that is marked out for us is especially the virtue that our Lord
+here enjoins. It is well to sit still unmurmuring; it is better to
+march on undiverted and unchecked. And when we are able to keep
+straight on in the path which is marked out for us, and especially in
+the path that leads us to God, notwithstanding all opposing voices, and
+all inward hindrances and reluctances; when we are able to go to our
+tasks of whatever sort they are and to do them, though our hearts are
+beating like sledge-hammers; when we say to ourselves, 'It does not
+matter a bit whether I am sad or glad, fresh or wearied, helped or
+hindered by circumstances, this one thing I do,' then we have come to
+understand and to practise the grace that our Master here enjoins. The
+endurance which wins the soul, and leads to salvation, is no mere
+passive submission, excellent and hard to attain as that often is;
+but it is brave perseverance in the face of all difficulties, and in
+spite of all enemies.
+
+Mark how emphatically our Lord here makes the space within which
+that virtue has to be exercised conterminous with the whole duration
+of our lives. I need not discuss what 'the end' was in the original
+application of the words; that would take us too far afield. But
+this I desire to insist upon, that right on to the very close of
+life we are to expect the necessity of putting forth the exercise of
+the very same persistence by which the earlier stages of any noble
+career must necessarily be marked. In other departments of life
+there may be relaxation, as a man goes on through the years; but in
+the culture of our characters, and in the deepening of our faith,
+and in the drawing near to our God, there must be no cessation or
+diminution of earnestness and of effort right up to the close.
+
+There are plenty of people, and I dare say that I address some of
+them now, who began their Christian career full of vigour and with a
+heat that was too hot to last. But, alas, in a year or two all the
+fervency was past, and they settled down into the average, easygoing,
+unprogressive Christian, who is a wet blanket to the devotion and
+work of a Christian church. I wonder how many of us would scarcely
+know our own former selves if we could see them. Christian people,
+to how many of us should the word be rung in our ears: 'Ye did run
+well; _what_ did hinder you'? The answer is--Myself.
+
+But may I say that this emphatic 'to the end' has a special lesson
+for us older people, who, as natural strength abates and enthusiasm
+cools down, are apt to be but the shadows of our old selves in many
+things? But there should be fire within the mountain, though there
+may be snow on its crest. Many a ship has been lost on the harbour
+bar; and there is no excuse for the captain leaving the bridge, or
+the engineer coming up from the engine-room, stormy as the one
+position and stifling as the other may be, until the anchor is down,
+and the vessel is moored and quiet in the desired haven. The desert,
+with its wild beasts and its Bedouin, reaches right up to the city
+gates, and until we are within these we need to keep our hands on
+our sword-hilts and be ready for conflict. 'He that endureth to the
+end, the same shall be saved.'
+
+III. Lastly, note the crown which endurance wins.
+
+Now, I need not spend or waste your time in mere verbal criticism,
+but I wish to point out that that word 'soul' in one of our two
+texts means both the soul and the life of which it is the seat; and
+also to remark that the being saved and the winning of the life or
+the soul has distinct application, in our Lord's words, primarily to
+corporeal safety and preservation in the midst of dangers; and,
+still further, to note the emphatic '_in_ your patience,' as
+suggesting not only a future but a present acquisition of one's own
+soul, or life, as the result of such persevering endurance and
+enduring perseverance. All which things being kept in view, I may
+expand the great promise that lies in my text, as follows:--
+
+First, by such persevering persistence in the Christian path, we gain
+ourselves. Self-surrender is self-possession.  We never own ourselves
+till we have given up owning ourselves, and yielded ourselves to that
+Lord who gives us back saints to ourselves. Self-control is
+self-possession. We do not own ourselves as long as it is possible
+for any weakness in flesh, sense, or spirit to gain dominion over us
+and hinder us from doing what we know to be right. We are not our own
+masters then. 'Whilst they promise them liberty, they themselves are
+the bond-slaves of corruption.' It is only when we have the bit well
+into the jaws of the brutes, and the reins tight in our hands, so
+that a finger-touch can check or divert the course, that we are truly
+lords of the chariot in which we ride and of the animals that impel it.
+
+And such self-control which is the winning of ourselves is, as I
+believe, thoroughly realised only when, by self-surrender of
+ourselves to Jesus Christ, we get His help to govern ourselves and
+so become lords of ourselves. Some little petty Rajah, up in the
+hills, in a quasi-independent State in India, is troubled by
+mutineers whom he cannot subdue; what does he do? He sends a message
+down to Lahore or Calcutta, and up come English troops that
+consolidate his dominion, and he rules securely, when he has
+consented to become a feudatory, and recognise his overlord. And so
+you and I, by continual repetition, in the face of self and sin, of
+our acts of self-surrender, bring Christ into the field; and then,
+when we have said, 'Lord, take me; I live, yet not I, but Christ
+liveth in me'; and when we daily, in spite of hindrances, stand to
+the surrender and repeat the consecration, then 'in our perseverance
+we acquire our souls.'
+
+Again, such persistence wins even the bodily life, whether it
+preserves it or loses it. I have said that the words of our texts
+have an application to bodily preservation in the midst of the
+dreadful dangers of the siege and destruction of Jerusalem. But so
+regarded they are a paradox. For hear how the Master introduces
+them: 'Some of you shall they cause to be put to death, but there
+shall not a hair of your heads perish. In your perseverance ye shall
+win your lives.' 'Some of you they will put to death,' but ye 'shall
+win your lives,'--a paradox which can only be solved by experience.
+Whether this bodily life be preserved or lost, it is gained when it
+is used as a means of attaining the higher life of union with God.
+Many a martyr had the promise, 'Not a hair of your head shall
+perish,' fulfilled at the very moment when the falling axe shore his
+locks in twain, and severed his head from his body.
+
+Finally, full salvation, the true possession of himself, and the
+acquisition of the life which really is life, comes to a man who
+perseveres to the end, and thus passes to the land where he will
+receive the recompense of the reward. The one moment the runner,
+with flushed cheek and forward swaying body, hot, with panting
+breath, and every muscle strained, is straining to the winning-post;
+and the next moment, in utter calm, he is wearing the crown.
+
+'To the end,' and what a contrast the next moment will be! Brethren,
+may it be true of you and of me that 'we are not of them that draw
+back unto perdition, but of them that believe to the winning of
+their souls!'
+
+
+
+
+THE CARRION AND THE VULTURES
+
+
+    'Wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be
+    gathered together.'--MATT. xxiv. 28.
+
+This grim parable has, of course, a strong Eastern colouring. It is
+best appreciated by dwellers in those lands. They tell us that no
+sooner is some sickly animal dead, or some piece of carrion thrown
+out by the way, than the vultures--for the eagle does not prey upon
+carrion--appear. There may not have been one visible a moment before
+in the hot blue sky, but, taught by scent or by sight that their
+banquet is prepared, they come flocking from all corners of the
+heavens, a hideous crowd round their hideous meal, fighting with
+flapping wings and tearing it with their strong talons. And so, says
+Christ, wherever there is a rotting, dead society, a carcase
+hopelessly corrupt and evil, down upon it, as if drawn by some
+unerring attraction, will come the angels, the vultures of the
+divine judgment.
+
+The words of my text were spoken, according to the version of them
+in Luke's Gospel, in answer to a question from the disciples. Our
+Lord had been discoursing, in very solemn words, which, starting
+from the historical event of the impending fall of Jerusalem, had
+gradually passed into a description of the greater event of His
+second coming. And all these solemn warnings had stirred nothing
+deeper in the bosoms of the disciples than a tepid and idle
+curiosity which expressed itself in the one almost irrelevant
+question, 'Where, Lord?' He answers--Not here, not there, but
+everywhere where there is a carcase. The great event which is
+referred to in our Lord's solemn words is a future judgment, which
+is to be universal. But the words are not exhausted in their
+reference to that event. There have been many 'comings of the Lord,'
+many 'days of the Lord,' which on a smaller scale have embodied the
+same principles as are to be displayed in world-wide splendour and
+awfulness at the last.
+
+I. The first thing, then, in these most true and solemn words is
+this, that they are to us a revelation of a law which operates with
+unerring certainty through all the course of the world's history.
+
+We cannot tell, but God can, when evil has become incurable; or
+when, in the language of my text, the mass of any community has
+become a carcase. There may be flickerings of life, all unseen by
+our eyes, or there may be death, all unsuspected by our shallow
+vision. So long as there is a possibility of amendment, 'sentence
+against an evil work is not executed speedily'; and God dams back,
+as it were, the flow of His retributive judgment, 'not willing that
+any should perish, but that all should come to the knowledge of the
+truth.' But when He sees that all is vain, that no longer is
+restoration or recovery possible, then He lets loose the flood; or,
+in the language of my text, when the thing has become a carcase,
+then the vultures, God's scavengers, come and clear it away from off
+the face of the earth.
+
+Now that is the law that has been working from the beginning,
+working as well in regard to the long delays as in regard to the
+swift execution. There is another metaphor, in the Old Testament,
+that puts the same idea in a very striking form. It speaks about
+God's 'awakening,' as if His judgment slumbered. All round that dial
+the hand goes creeping, creeping, creeping slowly, but when it comes
+to the appointed line, then the bell strikes. And so years and
+centuries go by, all chance of recovery departs, and then the crash!
+The ice palace, built upon the frozen blocks, stands for a while,
+but when the spring thaws come, it breaks up.
+
+Let me remind you of some instances and illustrations. Take that
+story which people stumble over in the early part of the Old
+Testament revelation--the sweeping away of those Canaanitish nations
+whose hideous immoralities had turned the land into a perfect sty of
+abominations. There they had been wallowing, and God's Spirit, which
+strives with men ever and always, had been striving with them, we
+know not for how long, but when the time came at which, according to
+the grim metaphor of the Old Testament, 'the measure of their
+iniquity was full,' then He hurled upon them the fierce hosts out of
+the desert, and in a whirlwind of fire and sword swept them off the
+face of the earth.
+
+Take another illustration. These very people, who had been the
+executioners of divine judgment, settled in the land, fell into the
+snare--and you know the story. The captivities of Israel and Judah
+were other illustrations of the same thing. The fall of Jerusalem,
+to which our Lord pointed in the solemn context of these words, was
+another. For millenniums God had been pleading with them, sending
+His prophets, rising early and sending, saying, 'Oh, do not do this
+abominable thing which I hate!' 'And last of all He sent His Son.'
+Christ being rejected, God had shot His last bolt. He had no more
+that He could do. Christ being refused, the nation's doom was fixed
+and sealed, and down came the eagles of Rome, again God's scavengers,
+to sweep away the nation on which had been lavished such wealth of
+divine love, but which had now come to be a rotting abomination,
+and to this day remains in a living death, a miraculously preserved
+monument of God's Judgments.
+
+Take another illustration how, once more, the executants of the law
+fall under its power. That nation which crushed the feeble resources
+of Judaea, as a giant might crush a mosquito in his grasp, in its
+turn became honeycombed with abominations and immoralities; and then
+down from the frozen north came the fierce Gothic tribes over the
+Roman territory. One of their captains called himself the 'Scourge
+of God,' and he was right. Another swooping down of the vultures
+flashed from the blue heavens, and the carrion was torn to fragments
+by their strong beaks.
+
+Take one more illustration--that French Revolution at the end of the
+eighteenth century. The fathers sowed the wind, and the children
+reaped the whirlwind. Generations of heartless luxury, selfishness,
+carelessness of the cry of the poor, immoral separation of class
+from class, and all the sins which a ruling caste could commit
+against a subject people, had prepared for the convulsion. Then, in
+a carnival of blood and deluges of fire and sulphur, the rotten
+thing was swept off the face of the earth, and the world breathed
+more freely for its destruction.
+
+Take another illustration, through which many of us have lived. The
+bitter legacy of negro slavery that England gave to her giant son
+across the Atlantic, which blasted and sucked the strength out of
+that great republic, went down amidst universal execration. It took
+centuries for the corpse to be ready, but when the vultures came
+they made quick work of it.
+
+And so, as I say, all over the world, and from the beginning of
+time, with delays according to the possibilities of restoration and
+recovery which the divine eye discerns, this law is working. Verily
+there is a God that judgeth in the earth. 'The wheels of God grind
+slowly, but they grind exceeding small.' 'Wheresoever the carcase
+is, there will the eagles be gathered together.'
+
+And has the law exhausted its force? Are there going to be no more
+applications of it? Are there no European societies at this day that
+in their godlessness and social iniquities are hurrying fast to the
+condition of carrion? Look around us--drunkenness, sensual
+immorality, commercial dishonesty, senseless luxury amongst the
+rich, heartless indifference to the wail of the poor, godlessness
+over all classes and ranks of the community. Surely, surely, if the
+body politic be not dead, it is sick nigh unto death. And I, for my
+part, have little hesitation in saying that as far as one can see,
+European society is driving as fast as it can, with its godlessness
+and immorality, to such another 'day of the Lord' as these words of
+my text suggest. Let us see to it that we do our little part to be
+the 'salt of the earth' which shall keep it from rotting, and so
+drive away the vultures of judgment.
+
+II. But let me turn to another point. We have here a law which is to
+have a far more tremendous accomplishment in the future.
+
+There have been many comings of the Lord, many days of the Lord,
+when, as Isaiah says in his magnificent vision of one such, 'the
+loftiness of man has been bowed down, and the haughtiness of man
+made low, and the Lord alone exalted in that day when He arises to
+shake terribly the earth. And all these 'days of the Lord' are
+prophecies, and distinctly point to a future 'day' when the same
+principles which have been disclosed as working on a small scale in
+them, shall be manifested in full embodiment. These 'days of the
+Lord' proclaim '_the_ day of the Lord.' In the prophecies both
+of the Old and New Testaments that universal future judgment is seen
+glimmering through the descriptions of the nearer partial judgments.
+So interpreters are puzzled to say at what point in a prophecy the
+transition is made from the smaller to the greater. The prophecies
+are like the diagrams in treatises on perspective, in which
+diverging lines are drawn from the eye, enclosing a square or other
+figure, and which, as they recede further from the point of view,
+enclose a figure, the same in shape but of greater dimensions. There
+is a historical event foretold, the fall of Jerusalem. It is close
+up to the eyes of the disciples, and is comparatively small. Carry
+out the lines that touch its corners and define its shape, and upon
+the far distant curtain of the dim future there is thrown a like
+figure immensely larger, the coming of Jesus Christ to judge the
+world. All these little premonitions and foretastes and anticipatory
+specimens point onwards to the assured termination of the world's
+history in that great and solemn day, when all men shall be gathered
+before Christ's throne, and He shall judge all nations--judge you
+and me amongst the rest. That future judgment is distinctly a part
+of the Christian revelation. Jesus Christ is to come in bodily form
+as He went away. All men are to be judged by Him. That judgment is
+to be the destruction of opposing forces, the sweeping away of the
+carrion of moral evil.
+
+It is therefore distinctly a part of the message that is to be
+preached by us, under penalty of the awful condemnation pronounced
+on the watchman who seeth the sword coming and gives no warning. It
+is not becoming to make such a solemn message the opportunity for
+pictorial rhetoric, which vulgarises its greatness and weakens its
+power. But it is worse than an offence against taste; it is
+unfaithfulness to the preaching which God bids us, treason to our
+King, and cruelty to our hearers, to suppress the warning--'The day
+of the Lord cometh.' There are many temptations to put it in the
+background. Many of you do not want that kind of preaching. You want
+the gentle side of divine revelation. You say to us in fact, though
+not in words. 'Prophesy to us smooth things. Tell us about the
+infinite love which wraps all mankind in its embrace. Speak to us of
+the Father God, who "hateth nothing that He hath made." Magnify the
+mercy and gentleness and tenderness of Christ. Do not say anything
+about that other side. It is not in accordance with the tendencies
+of modern thought.'
+
+So much the worse, then, for the tendencies of modern thought. I
+yield to no man in the ardour of my belief that the centre of all
+revelation is the revelation of a God of infinite love, but I cannot
+forget that there is such a thing as 'the terror of the Lord,' and I
+dare not disguise my conviction that no preaching sounds every
+string in the manifold harp of God's truth, which does not strike
+that solemn note of warning of judgment to come.
+
+Such suppression is unfaithfulness. Surely, if we preachers believe
+that tremendous truth, we are bound to speak. It is cruel kindness
+to be silent. If a traveller is about to plunge into some gloomy
+jungle infested by wild beasts, he is a friend who sits by the
+wayside to warn him of his danger. Surely you would not call a
+signalman unfeeling because he held out a red lamp when he knew that
+just round the curve beyond his cabin the rails were up, and that
+any train that reached the place would go over in horrid ruin.
+Surely that preaching is not justly charged with harshness which
+rings out the wholesome proclamation of a day of judgment, when we
+shall each give account of ourselves to the divine-human Judge.
+
+Such suppression weakens the power of the Gospel, which is the
+proclamation of deliverance, not only from the power, but also from
+the future retribution of sin. In such a maimed gospel there is but
+an enfeebled meaning given to that idea of deliverance. And though
+the thing that breaks the heart and draws men to God is not terror,
+but love, the terror must often be evoked in order to lead to love.
+It is only 'judgment to come' which will make Felix tremble, and
+though his trembling may pass away, and he be none the nearer the
+kingdom, there will never any good be done to him unless he does
+tremble. So, for all these reasons, all faithful preaching of
+Christ's Gospel must include the proclamation of Christ as Judge.
+
+But, if I should be unfaithful, if I did not preach this truth, what
+shall we call you if you turn away from it? You would not think it a
+wise thing of the engine-driver to shut his eyes if the red lamp
+were shown, and to go along at full speed and to pay no heed to
+that? Do you think it would be right for a Christian minister to
+lock his lips and never say, 'There is a judgment to come'? And do
+you think it is wise of you not to think of that, and to shape your
+conduct accordingly?
+
+Oh, dear friends! I do not doubt that the centre of all divine
+revelation is the love of God, nor do I doubt that incomparably the
+highest representation of the power of Christ's Gospel is that it
+draws men away from the love and the practice of evil, and makes
+them pure and holy. But that is not all. There is not only the
+practice and the power of sin to be fought against, but there is the
+penalty of sin to be taken into account; and as sure as you are
+living, and as sure as there is a God above us, so sure is it that
+there is a Day of Judgment, when 'He will judge the world in
+righteousness by the Man whom He hath ordained.' The believing of
+that is not salvation, but the belief of that seems to me to be
+indispensable for any vigorous grasp of the delivering love of God
+in Jesus Christ our Lord.
+
+III. And so the last thing that I have to say is that this is a law
+which need never touch you, nor you know anything about but by the
+hearing of the ear.
+
+It is told us that we may escape it. When Paul reasoned of
+righteousness, and temperance, and judgment to come, his hearer
+trembled as he listened, but there was an end. But the true effect
+of this message is the effect that Paul himself attached to it when
+he said in the hearing of Athenian wisdom, 'God hath commanded all
+men everywhere _to repent_, because He hath appointed a day in
+the which He will judge the world in righteousness.' Judgment
+faithfully preached is the preparation for preaching that 'there is
+no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.' If we trust in
+that great Saviour, we shall be quickened from the death of sin, and
+so shall not be food for the vultures of judgment. Can these corpses
+live? Can this eating putrescence, which burrows its foul way
+through our souls, be sweetened? Is there any antiseptic for it?
+Yes, blessed be God, and the hand whose touch healed the leper will
+heal us, and 'our flesh will come again as the flesh of a little
+child.' Christ has bared His breast to the divine judgments against
+sin, and if by faith we shelter ourselves in Him, we shall never
+know the terrors of that awful day.
+
+Be sure that judgment to come is no mere figure dressed up to
+frighten children, nor the product of blind superstition, but that
+it is the inevitable issue of the righteousness of the All-ruling
+God. You and I and all the sons of men have to face it. 'Herein is
+our love made perfect, that we may have boldness before Him in the
+Day of Judgment.' Betake yourselves, as poor sinful creatures who
+know something of the corruption of your own hearts, to that dear
+Christ who has died on the Cross for you, and all that is obnoxious
+to the divine judgments will, by His transforming life breathed into
+you, be taken out of your hearts; and when that 'day of the Lord'
+shall dawn, you, trusting in the sacrifice of Him who is your Judge,
+will 'have a song as when a holy solemnity is kept.' Take Christ for
+your Saviour, and then, when the vultures of judgment, with their
+mighty black pinions, are wheeling and circling in the sky, ready to
+pounce upon their prey, He will gather you 'as a hen gathereth her
+chickens under her wings,' and beneath their shadow you will be
+safe.
+
+
+
+
+WATCHING FOR THE KING
+
+
+    'Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord
+    doth come. 43. But know this, that if the goodman of
+    the house had known in what watch the thief would come,
+    he would have watched, and would not have suffered his
+    house to be broken up. 44. Therefore be ye also ready:
+    for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of Man
+    cometh. 45. Who then is a faithful and wise servant,
+    whom his lord hath made ruler over his household, to
+    give them meat in due season! 46. Blessed is that
+    servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so
+    doing. 47. Verily I say unto you, That he shall make
+    him ruler over all his goods. 48. But and if that evil
+    servant shall say in his heart, My lord delayeth his
+    coming; 49. And shall begin to smite his fellow-
+    servants, and to eat and drink with the drunken;
+    50. The lord of that servant shall come in a day when
+    he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not
+    aware of, 51. And shall out him asunder, and appoint
+    him his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be
+    weeping and gnashing of teeth.'--MATT. xxiv. 42-51.
+
+The long day's work was nearly done. Christ had left the temple,
+never to return. He took His way across the Mount of Olives to
+Bethany, and was stayed by the disciples' question as to the date of
+the destruction of the temple, which He had foretold, and of the
+'end of the world,' which they attached to it. They could not fancy
+the world lasting without the temple! We often make a like mistake.
+So there, on the hillside, looking across to the city lying in the
+sad, fading evening light, He spoke the prophecies of this chapter,
+which begin with the destruction of Jerusalem, and insensibly merge
+into the final coming of the Son of Man, of which that was a prelude
+and a type. The difficulty of accurately apportioning the details of
+this prophecy to the future events which fulfil them is common to it
+with all prophecy, of which it is a characteristic to blend events
+which, in the fulfilment, are far apart. From the mountain top, the
+eye travels over great stretches of country, but does not see the
+gorges, separating points which seem close together, foreshortened
+by distance.
+
+There are many comings of the Son of Man before His final coming for
+final judgment, and the nearer and smaller ones are themselves
+prophecies. So, we do not need to settle the chronology of
+unfulfilled prophecy in order to get the full benefit of Christ's
+teachings here. In its moral and spiritual effect on us, the
+uncertainty of the time of our going to Christ is nearly identical
+with the uncertainty of the time of His coming to us.
+
+I. The command of watchfulness enforced by our ignorance of the time
+of His coming (vs. 42-44). The two commands at the beginning and end
+of the paragraph are not quite the same. 'Be ye ready' is the
+consequence of watchfulness. Nor are the two appended reasons the
+same; for the first command is grounded on His coming at a day when
+'ye _know_ not,' and the second on His coming 'in an hour that
+ye _think_ not,' that is to say, it not only is uncertain, but
+unexpected and surprising. There may also be a difference worth
+noting in the different designations of Christ as 'your Lord,'
+standing in a special relation to you, and as 'the Son of Man,' of
+kindred with all men, and their Judge. What is this 'watchfulness'?
+It is literally wakefulness. We are beset by perpetual temptations
+to sleep, to spiritual drowsiness and torpor. 'An opium sky rains
+down soporifics.' And without continual effort, our perception of
+the unseen realities and our alertness for service will be lulled to
+sleep. The religion of multitudes is a sleepy religion. Further, it
+is a vivid and ever-present conviction of His certain coming, and
+consequently a habitual realising of the transience of the existing
+order of things, and of the fast-approaching realities of the
+future. Further, it is the keeping of our minds in an attitude of
+expectation and desire, our eyes ever travelling to the dim distance
+to mark the far-off shining of His coming. What a miserable contrast
+to this is the temper of professing Christendom as a whole! It is
+swallowed up in the present, wide awake to interests and hopes
+belonging to this 'bank and shoal of time,' but sunk in slumber as
+to that great future, or, if ever the thought of it intrudes,
+shrinking, rather than desire, accompanies it, and it is soon
+hustled out of mind.
+
+Christ bases His command on our ignorance of the time of His coming.
+It was no part of His purpose in this prophecy to remove that
+ignorance, and no calculations of the chronology of unfulfilled
+predictions have pierced the darkness. It was His purpose that from
+generation to generation His servants should be kept in the attitude
+of expectation, as of an event that may come at any time and must
+come at some time. The parallel uncertainty of the time of death,
+though not what is meant here, serves the same moral end if rightly
+used, and the fact of death is exposed to the same danger of being
+neglected because of the very uncertainty, which ought to be one
+chief reason for keeping it ever in view. Any future event, which
+combines these two things, absolute certainty that it will happen,
+and utter uncertainty when it will happen, ought to have power to
+insist on being remembered, at least, till it was prepared for, and
+would have it, if men were not such fools. Christ's coming would be
+oftener contemplated if it were more welcome. But what sort of a
+servant is he, who has no glow of gladness at the thought of meeting
+his lord? True Christians are 'all them that have loved His
+appearing.'
+
+The illustrative example which separates these two commands is
+remarkable. The householder's ignorance of the time when the thief
+would come is the reason why he does not watch. He cannot keep awake
+all night, and every night, to be ready for him; so he has to go to
+sleep, and is robbed. But our ignorance is a reason for wakefulness,
+because we can keep awake all the night of life. The householder
+watches to prevent, but we to share in, that for which the watch is
+kept. The figure of the thief is chosen to illustrate the one point
+of the unexpected stealthy approach. But is there not deep truth in
+it, to the effect that Christ's coming is like that of a robber to
+those who are asleep, depriving them of earthly treasures? The word
+rendered 'broken up' means literally 'dug through,' and points to a
+clay or mud house, common in the East, which is entered, not by
+bursting open doors or windows, but by digging through the wall.
+Death comes to men sunk in spiritual slumber, to strip them of good
+which they would fain keep, and makes his entrance by a breach in
+the earthly house of this tabernacle. So St. Paul, in his earliest
+Epistle, refers to this saying (a proof of the early diffusion of
+the gospel narrative), and says, 'Ye, brethren, are not in darkness,
+that that day should overtake you as a thief.'
+
+II. The picture and reward of watchfulness. The general exhortation
+to watch is followed by a pair of contrasted parable portraits,
+primarily applicable to the apostles and to those 'set over His
+household.' But if we remember what Christ taught as the condition
+of pre-eminence in His kingdom, we shall not confine their
+application to an order.
+
+  'The least flower with a brimming cup may stand,
+   And share its dew-drop with another near,'
+
+and the most slenderly endowed Christian has some crumb of the bread
+of life intrusted to him to dispense. It is to be observed that
+watchfulness is not mentioned in this portraiture of the faithful
+servant. It is presupposed as the basis and motive of his service.
+So we learn the double lesson that the attitude of continual outlook
+for the Lord is needed, if we are to discharge the tasks which He
+has set us, and that the true effect of watchfulness is to harness
+us to the car of duty. Many other motives actuate Christian
+faithfulness, but all are reinforced by this, and where it is feeble
+they are more or less inoperative. We cannot afford to lose its
+influence. A Church or a soul which has ceased to be looking for Him
+will have let all its tasks drop from its drowsy hands, and will
+feel the power of other constraining motives of Christian service
+but faintly, as in a half-dream.
+
+On the other hand, true waiting for Him is best expressed in the
+quiet discharge of accustomed and appointed tasks. The right place
+for the servant to be found, when the Lord comes, is 'so doing' as
+He commands, however secular the task may be. That was a wise judge
+who, when sudden darkness came on, and people thought the end of the
+world was at hand, said, 'Bring lights, and let us go on with the
+case. We cannot be better employed, if the end has come, than in
+doing our duty.' Flighty impatience of common tasks is not watching
+for the King, as Paul had to teach the Thessalonians, who were
+'shaken' in mind by the thought of the day of the Lord; but the
+proper attitude of the watchers is 'that ye study to be quiet, and
+to do your own business.'
+
+Observe, further, the interrogative form of the parable. The
+question is the sharp point which gives penetrating power, and
+suggests Christ's high estimate of the worth and difficulty of such
+conduct, and sets us to ask for ourselves, 'Lord, is it I?' The
+servant is 'faithful' inasmuch as he does his Lord's will, and
+rightly uses the goods intrusted to him, and 'wise' inasmuch as he
+is 'faithful.' For a single-hearted devotion to Christ is the parent
+of insight into duty, and the best guide to conduct; and whoever
+seeks only to be true to his Lord in the use of his gifts and
+possessions, will not lack prudence to guide him in giving to each
+his food, and that in due season. The two characteristics are
+connected in another way also; for, if the outcome of faithfulness
+be taken into account, its wisdom is plain, and he who has been
+faithful even unto death will be seen to have been wise though he
+gave up all, when the crown of eternal life sparkles on his
+forehead. Such faithfulness and wisdom (which are at bottom but two
+names for one course of conduct) find their motive in that
+watchfulness, which works as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye, and
+as ever keeping in view His coming, and the rendering of account to
+Him.
+
+The reward of the faithful servant is stated in language similar to
+that of the parable of the talents. Faithfulness in a narrower
+sphere leads to a wider. The reward for true work is more work, of
+nobler sort and on a grander scale. That is true for earth and for
+heaven. If we do His will here, we shall one day exchange the
+subordinate place of the steward for the authority of the ruler, and
+the toil of the servant for the 'joy of the Lord.' The soul that is
+joined to Christ and is one in will with Him has all things for its
+servants; and he who uses all things for his own and his brethren's
+highest good is lord of them all, while he walks amid the shadows of
+time, and will be lifted to loftier dominion over a grander world
+when he passes hence.
+
+III. The picture and doom of the unwatchful servant. This portrait
+presupposes that a long period will elapse before Christ comes. The
+secret thought of the evil servant is the thought of a time far down
+the ages from the moment of our Lord's speaking. It would take
+centuries for such a temper to be developed in the Church. What is
+the temper? A secret dismissal of the anticipation of the Lord's
+return, and that not merely because He has been long in coming, but
+as thinking that He has broken His word, and has not come when He
+said that He would. This unspoken dimming over of the expectation
+and unconfessed doubt of the firmness of the promise, is the natural
+product of the long time of apparent delay which the Church has had
+to encounter. It will cloud and depress the religion of later ages,
+unless there be constant effort to resist the tendency and to keep
+awake. The first generations were all aflame with the glad hope
+'Maranatha'--'The Lord is at hand.' Their successors gradually lost
+that keenness of expectation, and at most cried, 'Will not He come
+soon?' Their successors saw the starry hope through thickening mists
+of years; and now it scarcely shines for many, or at least is but a
+dim point, when it should blaze as a sun.
+
+He was an 'evil' servant who said so in his heart. He was evil
+because he said it, and he said it because he was evil; for the
+yielding to sin and the withdrawal of love from Jesus dim the desire
+for His coming, and make the whisper that He delays, a hope; while,
+on the other hand, the hope that He delays helps to open the
+sluices, and let sin flood the life. So an outburst of cruel
+masterfulness and of riotous sensuality is the consequence of the
+dimmed expectation. There would have been no usurpation of authority
+over Christ's heritage by priest or pope, or any other, if that hope
+had not become faint. If professing Christians lived with the great
+white throne and the heavens and earth fleeing away before Him that
+sits on it, ever burning before their inward eye, how could they
+wallow amid the mire of animal indulgence? The corruptions of the
+Church, especially of its official members, are traced with sad and
+prescient hand in these foreboding words, which are none the less a
+prophecy because cast by His forbearing gentleness into the milder
+form of a supposition.
+
+The dreadful doom of the unwatchful servant is couched in terms of
+awful severity. The cruel punishment of sawing asunder, which,
+tradition says, was suffered by Isaiah and was not unfamiliar in old
+times, is his. What concealed terror of retribution it signifies we
+do not know. Perhaps it points to a fate in which a man shall be, as
+it were, parted into two, each at enmity with the other. Perhaps it
+implies a retribution in kind for his sin, which consisted, as the
+next clause implies, in hypocrisy, which is the sundering in twain
+of inward conviction and practice, and is to be avenged by a like
+but worse rending apart of conscience and will. At all events, it
+shadows a fearful retribution, which is not extinction, inasmuch as,
+in the next clause, we read that his portion--his lot, or that
+condition which belongs to him by virtue of his character--is with
+'the hypocrites.' He was one of them, because, while he said 'my
+lord,' he had ceased to love and obey, having ceased to desire and
+expect; and therefore whatever is their fate shall be his, even to
+the 'dividing asunder of soul and spirit,' and setting eternal
+discord among the thoughts and intents of the heart. That is not the
+punishment of unwatchfulness, but of what unwatchfulness leads to,
+if unawakened. Let these words of the King ring an alarum for us
+all, and rouse our sleepy souls to watch, as becomes the children of
+the day.
+
+
+
+
+THE WAITING MAIDENS
+
+
+    'Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten
+    virgins, which took their lamps, and went forth to meet
+    the bridegroom. 2. And five of them were wise, and five
+    were foolish. 3. They that were foolish took their
+    lamps, and took no oil with them: 4. But the wise took
+    oil in their vessels with their lamps. 5. While the
+    bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept. 6. And
+    at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom
+    cometh; go ye out to meet him. 7. Then all those virgins
+    arose, and trimmed their lamps. 8. And the foolish said
+    unto the wise, Give us of your oil; for our lamps are
+    gone out. 9. But the wise answered, saying, Not so; lest
+    there be not enough for us and you: but go ye rather to
+    them that sell, and buy for yourselves. 10. And while
+    they went to buy, the bridegroom came; and they that
+    were ready went in with him to the marriage: and the
+    door was shut. 11 Afterward came also the other virgins,
+    saying, Lord, Lord, open to us. 12. But he answered and
+    said, Verily I say unto you, I know you not. 13. Watch
+    therefore; for ye know neither the day nor the hour
+    wherein the Son of Man cometh.'--MATT. xxv. 1-13.
+
+We shall best understand this beautiful but difficult parable if we
+look on to its close. Our Lord appends to it the refrain of all this
+context, the exhortation to watch, based upon our ignorance of the
+time of His coming. But as in the former little parable of the wise
+servant it was his faithful, wise dispensing of his lord's goods,
+and not his watchfulness, which was the point of the eulogium passed
+on him, so here it is the readiness of the wise virgins to take
+their places in the wedding march which is commended. That readiness
+consists in their having their lamps burning and their oil in store.
+This, then, is the main thing in the parable. It is an exhibition,
+under another aspect, of what constitutes fitness for entrance into
+the festal chamber of the bridegroom, which had just been set forth
+as consisting in faithful stewardship. Here it is presented as being
+the possession of lamp and oil.
+
+I. The first consideration, then, must be, What is the meaning of
+these emblems? A great deal of fine-spun ingenuity has been expended
+on subordinate points in the parable, such as the significance of
+the number of maidens, the conclusions from the equal division into
+wise and foolish, the place from which they came to meet the
+bridegroom, the point in the marriage procession where they are
+supposed to join it, whether it was at going to fetch the bride, or
+at coming back with her; whether the feast is held in her house, or
+in his, and so on. But all these are unimportant questions, and as
+Christ has left them in the background, we only destroy the
+perspective by dragging them into the front. In no parable is it
+more important than in this to restrain the temptation to run out
+analogies into their last results. The remembrance that the virgins,
+as the emblem of the whole body of the visible Church, are the same
+as the bride, who does not appear in the parable, might warn against
+such an error. They were ten, as being the usual number for such a
+company, or as being the round number naturally employed when
+definiteness was not sought. They were divided equally, not because
+our Lord desired to tell, but because He wished to leave unnoticed,
+the numerical proportion of the two classes. One set are 'wise' and
+the other 'foolish,' because He wishes to show not only the sin, but
+the absurdity, of unreadiness, and to teach us that true wisdom is
+not of the head only, but far more of the heart. The conduct of the
+two groups of maidens is looked at from the prudent and common-sense
+standpoint, and the provident action of the one sets in relief the
+reckless stupidity of the other.
+
+There have been many opinions as to the meaning of the lamps and the
+oil, which it is needless to repeat. Surely the analogy of
+scriptural symbolism is our best guide. If we follow it, we get a
+meaning which perfectly suits the emblems and the whole parable. In
+the Sermon on the Mount, our Lord uses the same figure of the lamp,
+and explains it: 'Let your light shine before men, that they may see
+your good works.'
+
+II. Note the sleep of all the virgins. No blame is hinted on account
+of it. It is not inconsistent with the wisdom of the wise, nor does
+it interfere with their readiness to meet the bridegroom. It is,
+then, such a sleep as is compatible with watching. Our Lord's
+introduction of this point is an example of His merciful allowance
+for our weakness. There must be a certain slackening of the tension
+of expectation when the bridegroom tarries. Centuries of delay
+cannot but modify the attitude of the waiting Church, and Jesus here
+implies that there will be a long stretch of time before His advent,
+during which all His people will feel the natural effect of the
+deferring of hope. But the sleep which He permits, unblamed, is
+light, and such as one takes by snatches when waiting to be called.
+He does not ask us always to be on tiptoe of expectation, nor to
+refuse the teaching of experience; but counts that we have watched
+aright, if we wake from our light slumbers when the cry is heard,
+and have our lamps lit, ready for the procession.
+
+III. Then comes the midnight cry and the waking of the maidens. The
+hour, 'of night's black arch the keystone,' suggests the unexpectedness
+of His coming; the loudness of the cry, its all-awaking effect; the
+broken words of the true reading, 'Behold the bridegroom!' the
+closeness on the heels of the heralds with which the procession
+flashes through the darkness. The virgins had 'gone forth to meet him'
+at the beginning of the parable, but the going forth to which they are
+now summoned is not the same. The Christian soul goes forth once when,
+at the beginning of its Christian life, it forsakes the world to wait
+for and on Christ, and again, when it leaves the world to pass with
+Him into the banquet. Life is the slumber from which some are awaked
+by the voice of death, and some who 'remain' shall be awaked by the
+trumpet of judgment. There is no interval between the cry and the
+appearance of the bridegroom; only a moment to rouse themselves, to
+look to their lamps, and to speak the hurried words of the foolish
+and the answer of the wise, and then the procession is upon them. It
+is all done as in a flash, 'in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.'
+This impression of swiftness, which leaves no time for delayed
+preparation, is the uniform impression conveyed by all the Scripture
+references to the coming of the Lord. The swoop of the eagle, the
+fierce blaze of lightning from one side of the sky to the other, the
+bursting of the flood, that morning's work at Sodom, not begun till
+dawn and finished before the 'sun was risen on the earth,' are its
+types. Foolish indeed to postpone preparation till that moment when
+cry and coming are simultaneous, like lightning and thunder right
+overhead!
+
+The foolish virgins' imploring request and its answer are not to be
+pressed, as if they meant more than to set forth the hopelessness of
+then attempting to procure the wanting oil, and especially the
+hopelessness of attempting to get it from one's fellows. There is a
+world of suppressed terror and surprise in that cry, 'Our lamps are
+going out.' Note that they burned till the bridegroom came, and
+then, like the magic lamps in old legends, at his approach shivered
+into darkness. Is not that true of the formal, outward religion,
+which survives everything but contact with His all-seeing eye and
+perfect judgment? These foolish maidens were as much astonished as
+alarmed at seeing their lights flicker down to extinction; and it is
+possible for professing Christians to live a lifetime, and never to
+be found out either by themselves or by anybody else. But if there
+has been no oil in the lamp, it will be quenched when He appears.
+The atmosphere that surrounds His throne acts like oxygen on the
+oil-fed flame, and like carbonic acid gas on the other.
+
+The answer of the wise is not selfishness. It is not from our
+fellows, however bright their lamps, that we can ever get that
+inward grace. None of them has more than suffices for his own needs,
+nor can any give it to another. It may be bought, on the same terms
+as the pearl of great price was bought, 'without money'; but the
+market is closed, as on a holiday, on the day of the king's son's
+marriage. That is not touched upon here, except in so far as it is
+hinted at in the absence of the foolish when he enters the
+banqueting chamber, and in their fruitless prayer. They had no time
+to get the oil before he came, and they had not got it when they
+returned. The lesson is plain. We can only get the new life of the
+Spirit, which will make our lives a light, from God; and we can get
+it now, not then.
+
+IV. We see the wise virgins within and the foolish without. They
+are, indeed, no longer designated by these adjectives, but as
+'ready' and 'the others'; for preparedness is fitness, and they who
+are found of Him in possession of the outward righteousness and of
+its inward source, His own divine life in them, are prepared. To
+such the gates of the festal chamber fly open. In that day, place is
+the outcome of character, and it is equally impossible for the
+'ready' to be shut out, and for 'the others' to go in.
+
+'When the bridegroom with his feastful friends passes to bliss at
+the mid hour of night,' they who have 'filled their odorous lamps
+with deeds of light' have surely 'gained their entrance.' There is
+silence as to the unspeakable joys of the wedding feast. Some faint
+sounds of music and dancing, some gleams from the lighted windows,
+find their way out; but the closed door keeps its secret, and only
+the guests know the gladness.
+
+That closed door means security, perpetuity, untold blessedness, but
+it means exclusion too. The piteous reiterated call of the shut-out
+maidens, roused too late, and so suddenly, from songs and laughter
+to vain cries, evokes a stern answer, through which shines the awful
+reality veiled in the parable. We do not need to regard the prayer
+for entrance, and its refusal, as conveying more than the
+fruitlessness of wishes for entrance then, when unaccompanied with
+fitness to enter. Such desire as is expressed in this passionate
+beating at the closed door, with hoarse entreaties, is not fitness.
+If it were, the door would open; and the reason why it does not lies
+in the bridegroom's awful answer, 'I know you not.' The absence of
+the qualification prevents his recognising them as his. Surely the
+unalleviated darkness of a hopeless exclusion settles down on these
+sad five, standing, huddled together, at the door, with the
+extinguished lamps hanging in their despairing hands. 'Too late, too
+late, ye cannot enter now.' The wedding bell has become a funeral
+knell. They were not the enemies of the bridegroom, they thought
+themselves his friends. They let life ebb without securing the one
+thing needful, and the neglect was irremediable. There is a tragedy
+underlying many a life of outward religiousness and inward
+emptiness, and a dreadful discovery will flare in upon such, when
+they have to say to themselves,
+
+  'This might have been once,
+   And we missed it, lost it for ever.'
+
+
+
+
+DYING LAMPS
+
+
+    'Our lamps are gone out.'--MATT. xxv. 8.
+
+This is one of the many cases in which the Revised Version, by
+accuracy of rendering the tense of a verb, gives a much more
+striking as well as correct reproduction of the original than the
+Authorised Version does. The former reads 'going out,' instead of
+'gone out,' a rendering which the Old Version has, unfortunately,
+relegated to the margin. It is clearly to be preferred, not only
+because it more correctly represents the Greek, but because it sets
+before us a more solemn and impressive picture of the precise time
+at which the terrible discovery was made by the foolish five. They
+woke from their sleep, and hastily trimmed their lamps. These burned
+brightly for a moment, and then began to flicker and die down. The
+extinction of their light was not the act of a moment, but was a
+gradual process, which had advanced in some degree before it
+attracted the attention of the bearers of the lamps. At last it
+roused the half-sleeping five into startled, wide-awake
+consciousness. There is a tone of alarm and fear in their sudden
+exclamation, 'Our lamps are going out.' They see now the catastrophe
+that threatens, and understand that the only means of averting it is
+to replenish the empty oil-vessels before the flame has quite
+expired. But their knowledge and their dread were alike too late,
+and, as they went on their hopeless search for some one to give them
+what they once might have had in abundance, the last faint flicker
+ceased, and they had to grope their way in the dark, with their
+lightless lamps hanging useless in their slack hands, while far off
+the torches of the bridal procession, in which they might have had a
+part, flashed through the night. We have nothing to do with the
+tragical issue of the process of extinction; but solemn lessons of
+universal application gather round the picture of that process, as
+represented in our text, and to these we turn now.
+
+I. We must settle the meaning of the oil and the lamps.
+
+The Old Testament symbolism is our best guide as to the significance
+of the oil. Throughout it, oil symbolises the divine influences that
+come down on men appointed by God to their several functions, and
+which are there traced to the Spirit of the Lord. So the priests
+were set apart by unction with the holy oil; so Samuel poured oil on
+the black locks of Saul. So, too, the very name Messiah means
+'anointed,' and the great prophecy, which Jesus claimed for His own
+in His first sermon in the synagogue at Nazareth, put into the
+Messiah's lips the declaration, 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
+because He hath anointed Me.' But there are Old Testament symbols
+which bear still more closely on the emblems of our text. Zechariah
+saw in vision a golden lamp-stand with seven lamps, and on either
+side of it an olive tree, from which oil flowed through golden pipes
+to feed the flame. The interpretation of the vision was given by the
+'angel that talked with' the prophet as being, 'not by might nor by
+power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord.'
+
+So, then, we follow the plainly marked road and Scripture use of a
+symbol when we take the oil in this parable to be that which every
+listener to Jesus, who was instructed in the old things which he was
+bringing forth with new emphasis from the ancient treasure-house of
+the word of God, would take it to be--namely, the sum of the
+influences from Heaven which were bestowed through the Spirit of the
+Lord.
+
+Such being the meaning of the oil, what was meant by the lamp? We
+have no intention of discussing here the many varying interpretations
+which have been given to the symbol. To do so would lead us too far
+afield. We can only say that the interpretation of the oil as the
+influence of the Holy Spirit necessarily involves the explanation of
+the lamp which is fed by it, as being the spiritual life of the
+individual, which is nourished and made visible to the world as light,
+by the continual communication from God of these hallowing influences.
+Turning again to the Old Testament, I need only remind you of the
+great seven-branched lamp which stood in the Tabernacle, and afterwards
+in the Temple. It was the symbol of the collective Israel, as recipient
+of divine influences, and thereby made the light of a dark world. Its
+rays streamed out over the desert first, and afterwards shone from
+the mountain of the Lord's house, beaming illumination and invitation
+to those who sat in darkness to behold the great light, and to walk
+in the light of the Lord. Zechariah's emblem was based on the Temple
+lamp. In accordance with the greater prominence given by the Old
+Testament to national than to individual religion, both of these
+represented the people as a whole. In accordance with the more
+advanced individualism of the New Testament, our text so far varies
+the application of the emblem, that each of the ten virgins who, as
+a whole, stand for the collective professing Church, has her own
+lamp. But that is the only difference between the Old and the New
+Testament uses of the symbol.
+
+I need not remind you how the same metaphor recurs frequently in the
+teachings of our Lord and of the Apostles. Sometimes the Old
+Testament collective point of view is maintained, as in our Lord's
+saying in the Sermon on the Mount, 'Ye are the light of the world,'
+but more frequently, the characteristic individualising of the
+figure prevails, and we read of Christians shining 'as lights in the
+world,' and each holding forth, as a lamp does its light, 'the word
+of life.' Nor must we forget the climax of the uses of this emblem,
+in the vision of the Apocalypse, where John once more saw the Lord,
+on whose bosom his head had so often peacefully lain, 'walking in
+the midst of the seven golden candlesticks.' There, again, the
+collective rather than the individual bearing of the figure is
+prominent, but with significant differences from the older use of
+it. In Judaism there was a formal, outward unity, represented by the
+one lamp with its manifold lights, all welded together on the golden
+stem; but the churches of Asia Minor were distinct organisations,
+and their oneness came, not from outward union of a mechanical kind,
+but from the presence in their midst of the Son of God.
+
+The sum of all this course of thought is that the lamp is the
+Christian life of the individual sustained by the communication of
+the influences of God's Holy Spirit.
+
+II. We note next the gradual dying out of the light. 'Our lamps are
+going out.'
+
+All spiritual emotions and vitality, like every other kind of
+emotion and vitality, die unless nourished. Let no theological
+difficulties about 'the final perseverance of the saints,' or 'the
+indefeasibleness of grace,' and the impossibility of slaying the
+divine life that has once been given to a man, come in the way of
+letting this parable have its full, solemn weight. These foolish
+virgins had oil and had light, the oil failed by their fault, and so
+the light went out, and they were startled, when they awoke from
+their slumber, to see how, instead of brilliant flame, there was
+smoking wick.
+
+Dear brethren, let us take the lesson. There is nothing in our
+religious emotions which has any guarantee of perpetuity in it,
+except upon certain conditions. We may live, and our life may ebb. We
+may trust, and our trust may tremble into unbelief. We may obey, and
+our obedience may be broken by the mutinous risings of self-will. We
+may walk in the 'paths of righteousness,' and our feet may falter
+and turn aside. There is certainty of the dying out of all communicated
+life, unless the channel of communication with the life from which it
+was first kindled, be kept constantly clear. The lamp may be 'a burning
+and a shining light,' or, more accurately translating the phrase of
+our Lord, 'a light kindled and' (therefore) 'shining,' but it will be
+light 'for a season' only, unless it is fed from that from which it
+was first set alight; and that is from God Himself.
+
+'Our lamps are going out,'--a slow process that! The flame does not
+all die into darkness in a minute. There are stages in its death.
+The white portion of the flame becomes smaller and the blue part
+extends; then the flame flickers, and finally shudders itself, as it
+were, off the wick; then nothing remains but a charred red line
+along the top; then that line breaks up into little points, and one
+after another these twinkle out, and then all is black, and the lamp
+is gone out. And so, slowly, like the ebbing away of the tide, like
+the reluctant, long-protracted dying of summer days, like the
+dropping of the blood from some fatal wound, by degrees the process
+of extinction creeps, creeps, creeps on, and the lamp that was going
+is finally gone out.
+
+III. Again, we note that extinction is brought about simply by doing
+nothing.
+
+These five foolish virgins did not stray away into any forbidden
+paths. No positive sin is alleged against them. They were simply
+asleep. The other five were asleep too. I do not need to enter, here
+and now, into the whole interpretation of the parable, or there
+might be much to say about the difference between these two kinds of
+sleep. But what I wish to notice is that it was nothing except
+negligence darkening into drowsiness, which caused the dying out of
+the light.
+
+It was not of set purpose that the foolish five took no oil with
+them. They merely neglected to do so, not having the wit to look
+ahead and provide against the contingency of a long time of waiting
+for the bridegroom. Their negligence was the result, not of
+deliberate wish to let their lights go out, but of their
+heedlessness; and because of that negligence they earned the name of
+'foolish.' If we do not look forward, and prepare for possible
+drains on our powers, we shall deserve the same adjective. If we do
+not lay in stores for future use, we may be sent to school to the
+harvesting ant and the bee. That lesson applies to all departments
+of life; but it is eminently applicable to the spiritual life, which
+is sustained only by communications from the Spirit of God. For
+these communications will be imperceptibly lessened, and may be
+altogether intercepted, unless diligent attention is given to keep
+open the channels by which they enter the spirit. If the pipes are
+not looked to, they will be choked by masses of matted trifles,
+through which the 'rivers of living water,' which Christ took as a
+symbol of the Spirit's influences, cannot force a way.
+
+The thing that makes shipwreck of the faith of most professing
+Christians that do come to grief is no positive wickedness, no
+conduct which would be branded as sin by the Christian conscience or
+even by ordinary people, but simply torpor. If the water in a pond
+is never stirred, it is sure to stagnate, and green scum to spread
+over it, and a foul smell to rise from it. A Christian man has only
+to do what I am afraid a good many of us are in great danger of
+doing--that is, nothing--in order to ensure that his lamp shall go
+out.
+
+Do you try to keep yours alight? There is only one way to do it--that
+is to go to Christ and get Him to pour His sweetness and His power
+into our open hearts. When one of the old patriarchs had committed a
+great sin, and had unbelievingly twitched his hand out of God's hand,
+and gone away down into Egypt to help himself instead of trusting to
+God, he was commanded, on his return to Palestine, to go to the place
+where he dwelt at the first, and begin again, at the point where he
+began when he first entered the land. Which being translated is just
+this--the only way to keep our spirits vital and quick is by having
+recourse, again and again, to the same power which first imparted
+life to them, and this is done by the first means, the means of simple
+ reliance upon Christ in the consciousness of our own deep need, and
+of believingly waiting upon Him for the repeated communication of the
+gifts which we, alas! have so often misimproved. Negligence is enough
+to slay. Doing nothing is the sure way to quench the Holy Spirit.
+
+And, on the other hand, keeping close to Him is the sure way to
+secure that He will never leave us. You can choke a lamp with oil,
+but you cannot have in your hearts too much of that divine grace.
+And you receive all that you need if you choose to go and ask it
+from Him. Remember the old story about Elisha and the poor woman.
+The cruse of oil began to run. She brought all the vessels that she
+could rake together, big and little, pots and cups, of all shapes
+and sizes, and set them, one after the other, under the jet of oil.
+They were all filled; and when she brought no more vessels the oil
+stayed. If you do not take your empty hearts to God, and say, 'Here,
+Lord, fill this cup too; poor as it is, fill it with Thine own
+gracious influences,' be very sure that no such influences will come
+to you. But if you do go, be as sure of this, that so long as you
+hold out your emptiness to Him, He will flood it with His fulness,
+and the light that seemed to be sputtering to its death will flame
+up again. He will not quench the smoking wick, if only we carry it
+to Him; but as the priests in the Temple walked all through the
+night to trim the golden lamps, so He who walks amidst the seven
+candlesticks will see to each.
+
+IV. And now one last word. That process of gradual extinction may be
+going on, and may have been going on for a long while, and the
+virgin that carries the lamp be quite unaware of it.
+
+How could a sleeping woman know whether her lamp was burning or not?
+How can a drowsy Christian tell whether his spiritual life is bright
+or not? To be unconscious of our approximation to this condition is,
+I am afraid, one of the surest signs that we are in it. I suppose
+that a paralysed limb is quite comfortable. At any rate, paralysis
+of the spirit may be going on without our knowing anything about it.
+So, dear friends, do not put these poor words of mine away from you
+and say, 'Oh! they do not apply to me.'
+
+I am quite sure that the people to whom they do apply will be the
+last people to take them to themselves. And while I quite believe,
+thank God! that there are many of us who may feel and know that our
+lamps are not going out, sure I am that there are some of us whom
+everybody but themselves knows to be carrying a lamp that is so far
+gone out that it is smoking and stinking in the eyes and noses of
+the people that stand by. Be sure that nobody was more surprised
+than were the five foolish women when they opened their witless,
+sleepy eyes, and saw the state of things. So, dear friends, 'let
+your loins be girt about, and your lamps burning; and ye yourselves
+like unto men that wait for their Lord.'
+
+
+
+
+'THEY THAT WERE READY'
+
+
+    'They that were ready went in with him to the marriage.'
+    --MATT. xxv. 10.
+
+It is interesting to notice the variety of aspects in which, in this
+long discourse, Jesus sets forth His Second Coming. It is like the
+flood that swept away a world. It is like a thief stealing through
+the dark, and breaking up a house. It is like a master reckoning
+with his servants. These three metaphors suggest solemn, one might
+almost say alarming, images. But then this parable comes in and
+tells how that coming is like that of a bridegroom to the bride's
+house, with joy and music. I am afraid that the average Christian,
+when he thinks at all of Christ's coming, takes these three first
+aspects rather than the last one, and so loses what is meant to be a
+bright hope and a great stimulus. It is not in human nature to think
+much about a terrible future. It is not in human nature to avoid
+thinking a great deal about a blessed future. And although one does
+not wish to preach carelessness, or the ignoring of the solemn side
+of that coming, sure I am that our Christian lives would be stronger
+and purer, brighter and better able to front the solemn side, if the
+blessed side of it were more often the object of our contemplation.
+
+Turning to the words of my text, which seem to me to be the very
+centre and heart of this parable, I ask:--
+
+I. What makes readiness?
+
+There have been many answers given to that question. One has been
+that to be ready means to be perpetually having before us the
+thought of the coming of the Lord, and that has been taken to be the
+meaning of the watchfulness which is enjoined in the context. But
+the parable itself points in an altogether different direction. Who,
+according to it, were ready? The five who had lamps and oil. To have
+these was readiness.
+
+It is beautiful to notice how these five who _were_ ready when
+the Master came had 'slumbered and slept' like the other five. Ah!
+that touch in the picture shows that 'He knoweth our frame; He
+remembereth that we are dust.' It is not in human nature to keep up
+permanently a tension of expectation for a far-off good; and in
+profound knowledge of the weakness of humanity, our Lord, in this
+parable, says: 'While the Bridegroom tarried they _all_ slumbered'--and
+yet the five were ready when the Bridegroom came. In like manner,
+Christian men and women who have no expectation at all that the
+Second Coming of the Lord will occur during their lifetimes, may
+nevertheless be ready, if they have the burning lamps and the store
+of oil. The question then comes to be, What is meant by these?
+
+Perhaps harm has been done by insisting upon too minute and specific
+interpretation. But, at the same time, we must not forget that, from
+the very beginning of the Jewish Revelation, from the time when the
+seven-branched candlestick was appointed for the Tabernacle, right
+down to the day when the Apocalyptic Seer saw in Patmos the Son of
+Man walking in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks, the
+metaphor has had one meaning. The aggregate of God's people are
+intended to be, as Jesus told us immediately after He had drawn the
+character of a true disciple, in the wonderful outlines of the
+Beatitudes, 'the light of the world,' and they will be so in the
+measure in which the gentle radiance of that character shines
+through their lives, as the light of a lamp through frosted glass.
+But the aggregate is made up of units, and individual Christians are
+to shine 'as lights in the world,' and their separate brightnesses
+are to coalesce in the clustered light of the whole Church. What
+makes an individual Christian a light is a Christ-like life, derived
+from that Life which was 'the Light of men.' The lamp which the five
+wise virgins bear is the same as the light which the consistent
+Christian is. The inner self illuminated from Christ, the source of
+all our illumination, lights up the outward life, which each of us
+may be conceived as carrying in our hands. It is not ourselves, and
+yet it is ourselves made visible. It is not ourselves, but Christ in
+us; and so we shine as lights in the world, only by 'holding forth
+the word of life.'
+
+That modification of the figure by Paul is profoundly true and
+important, for after all we are not so much lights as candelabra,
+and only as we bear aloft the flashing light of Christ shall we
+shine 'in a naughty world.' Our lamps, then, are Christ-like
+characters derived from Christ, and to have and bear these is the
+first element in being ready for the Bridegroom.
+
+Dear friends, remember that this whole parable is spoken to
+professing Christians and real members of Christ's Church; and that
+there is no meaning in it unless it is possible to quench the light
+of the lamp. Remember that our Lord said once, 'Let your loins be
+girt,' and put that as the necessary condition of lamps burning.
+'Let your loins be girt' with resolved effort of faith and
+dependence, and make sure that you have the provision for the
+continuance of the light. So, and only so, shall any man be of the
+happy company of them that were ready.
+
+II. Note that this readiness is the condition of entrance.
+
+'They that were ready went in with Him to the marriage.' Now faith
+alone unites a man to Jesus Christ, and makes him an heir of
+salvation. But faith alone, if that were possible, would not admit a
+man to the marriage-feast. Of course the supposed case is an
+impossible case, for as James has taught us in his plain moral way,
+faith which is alone dies, or perhaps never lived. But what our Lord
+tells us here is that moral character, which is of such a sort as to
+shine in the world's darkness, is the condition of entrance. People
+say that salvation is by faith. Yes, that is true; but salvation is
+by works also, only that the works are made possible through faith.
+In the very necessity and nature of things nothing but the readiness
+which consists in continued Christ-like character will ever allow a
+man to pass the threshold. Now do you believe that? Or are you
+saying, 'I trust to Jesus Christ, and so I am sure I shall go to
+Heaven.' No, you will not, unless your faith is making you heavenly,
+in your temper and conduct. For to talk about the next world as a
+place of retribution is but an imperfect statement of the case. It
+is not a place of retribution so much as of outcome, and the apostle
+gives a completer view when he says, 'Whatsoever a man soweth, that
+shall he also reap.' That future life is not the reward of goodness
+so much as the necessary consequence of holiness. Holiness and
+blessedness are, in some measure, separated here; there they are two
+names for the one condition. 'No man shall see the Lord,' without
+that holiness. 'They that were ready went in.' Of course they did.
+Am I ready? That question means, Am I, by my faith in Jesus Christ,
+receiving into my heart the anointing which that great anointed One
+gives us? Am I living a life that is a light in the world? If so,
+and not else, my entrance is sure.
+
+We have seen what this readiness consists in, and how it is the
+condition of entrance. There is one last thought--
+
+III. To delay preparation is madness.
+
+There is nothing in all Christ's parables more tragical,  more
+pathetic, than this picture of the hapless five  when they woke up
+to find their lamps going out.  They heard the procession coming,
+the sound of feet drawing nearer, and the music borne every moment
+more loudly on the midnight air. And there were they, with dying
+lamps and empty oil-cans. Their shock, their alarm, their
+bewilderment, are all expressed in that preposterous request of
+theirs, Give us of your oil.'
+
+The answer of the wise virgins has been said to be cold and
+unfeeling. It is not that; it is simply a plain statement of facts.
+The oil that belongs to me cannot be given to you. That is the first
+lesson taught us by the request of the foolish and the answer of the
+wise. 'If thou be wise, thou shalt be wise for thyself; and if thou
+scornest, thou alone shalt bear it.' 'Every man shall bear his own
+burden.' There is no possible transference of moral character or
+spiritual gifts in that fashion. The awful individuality of each
+soul, and its unshareable personal responsibility, come solemnly to
+view in the words which superficial readers pass by: 'Not so, lest
+there be not enough for us and you.' You cannot share your brother's
+oil. You may share many of his possessions; not this.
+
+'Go to them that sell, and buy for yourselves.' The question of
+whether there was time to buy was not for the five wise to answer.
+There was not much chance that the would-be buyers would find a shop
+open and anybody waiting to sell them oil at twelve o'clock at
+night. But they risked it; and when they came back they were too
+late.
+
+Now, dear friends, all the lessons of this parable may be taken by
+us, though we do not believe, and think we have good reason for not
+believing, that the literal return of Jesus Christ is to take place
+in our time. It does not matter very much, in so far as the teaching
+of this parable is concerned, whether the Bridegroom comes to us, or
+whether we go to the Bridegroom. I do not for a moment say that
+there is no such thing as coming to Jesus Christ in the last hours
+of life, and becoming ready to enter even then, but I do say that it
+is a very rare case, and that there is a terrible risk in delaying
+till then. But I pray you to remember that our parable is addressed
+to, and contemplates the case of, not people who are away from Jesus
+Christ, but Christians, and that it is to them that its message is
+chiefly brought. It is they whom it warns not to put off making sure
+that they have provision for the continuance of the Christ-life. We
+have, day by day, to go to Him that sells and 'buy for ourselves.'
+And we know, what it did not fall within our Lord's purpose to say
+in this parable, that the price of the oil is the surrender of
+ourselves, and the opening of our hearts to the entrance of that
+divine Spirit. Then there will be no fear but that the lamp will
+hold out to burn, and no fear but that 'when the Bridegroom, with
+His feastful friends, passes to bliss, at the mid-hour of night,' we
+shall gain our entrance.
+
+
+
+
+TRADERS FOR THE MASTER
+
+
+    'For the kingdom of heaven la as a man travelling into a
+    far country, who called his own servants, and delivered
+    unto them his goods. 15. And unto one he gave five
+    talents, to another two, and to another one; to every
+    man according to his several ability; and straightway
+    took his journey. 16. Then he that had received the five
+    talents went and traded with the same, and made them
+    other five talents. 17. And likewise he that had received
+    two, he also gained other two. 18. But he that had
+    received one went and digged in the earth, and hid his
+    lord's money. 19. After a long time the lord of those
+    servants cometh, and reckoneth with them. 20. And so he
+    that had received five talents came and brought other
+    five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me
+    five talents: behold, I have gained beside them five
+    talents more. 21. His lord said unto him, Well done,
+    thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful
+    over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many
+    things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord. 22. He also
+    that had received two talents came and said, Lord, thou
+    deliveredst unto me two talents: behold, I have gained
+    two other talents beside them. 23. His lord said unto
+    him, Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast
+    been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler
+    over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.
+    24. Then to which had received the one talent came and
+    said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man,
+    reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where
+    thou hast not strawed: 25. And I was afraid, and went
+    and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast
+    that is thine. 26. His lord answered and said unto him,
+    Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I
+    reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not
+    strawed: 27. Thou oughtest therefore to have put my
+    money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should
+    have received mine own with usury. 28. Take therefore
+    the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten
+    talents. 29. For unto every one that hath shall be given,
+    and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not
+    shall be taken away even that which he hath. 30. And
+    cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness:
+    there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.'
+    --MATT. xxv. 14-30.
+
+The parable of the Ten Virgins said nothing about their working
+whilst they waited. This one sets forth that side of the duties of
+the servants in their master's absence, and so completes the former.
+It is clearly in its true historical connection here, and is closely
+knit to both the preceding and following context. It is a strange
+instance of superficial reading that it should ever have been
+supposed to be but another version of Luke's parable of the pounds.
+The very resemblances of the two are meant to give force to their
+differences, which are fundamental. They are the converse of each
+other. That of the pounds teaches that men who have the same gifts
+intrusted to them may make a widely different use of these, and will
+be rewarded differently, in strictly graduated proportion to their
+unlike diligence. The lesson of the parable before us, on the other
+hand, is that men with dissimilar gifts may employ them with equal
+diligence; and that, if they do, their reward shall be the same,
+however great the endowments of one, and slender those of another. A
+reader who has missed that distinction must be very shortsighted, or
+sworn to make out a case against the Gospels.
+
+I. We may consider the lent capital and the business done with it.
+
+Masters nowadays do not give servants their money to trade with,
+when they leave home; but the incident is true to the old-world
+relations of master and slave. Our Lord's consciousness of His near
+departure, which throbs in all this context, comes out emphatically
+here. He is preparing His disciples for the time when they will have
+to work without Him, like the managers of some branch house of
+business whose principal has gone abroad. What are the 'talents'
+with which He will start them on their own account? We have taken
+the word into common language, however little we remember the
+teaching of the parable as to the hand that gives 'men of talent'
+their endowments. But the natural powers usually called by the name
+are not what Christ means here, though the principles of the parable
+may be extended to include them. For these powers are the 'ability'
+according to which the talents are given. But the talents themselves
+are the spiritual knowledge and endowments which are properly the
+gifts of the ascended Lord to His Church. Two important lessons as
+to these are conveyed. First, that they are distributed in varying
+measure, and that not arbitrarily, by the mere will of the giver,
+but according to his discernment of what each servant can profitably
+administer. The 'ability' which settles their amount is not more
+closely defined. It may include natural faculty, for Christ's gifts
+usually follow the line of that; and the larger the nature, the more
+of Him it can contain. But it also includes spiritual receptiveness
+and faithfulness, which increase the absorbing power. The capacity
+to receive will also be the capacity to administer, and it will be
+fully filled.
+
+The second lesson taught is that spiritual gifts are given for
+trading with. In other words, they are here considered not so much
+as blessings to the possessor as his stock-in-trade, which he can
+employ for the Master's enrichment. We are all tempted to think of
+them mostly as given us for our own blessing and joy; and the
+reminder is never unseasonable that a Christian receives nothing for
+himself alone. God hath shined into our hearts, that we may give to
+others the light of the knowledge which has flashed glad day into
+our darkness. The Master intrusts us with a portion of His wealth,
+not for expending on ourselves, but for trading with.
+
+A third principle here is that the right use of His gifts increases
+them in our hands. 'Money makes money.' The five talents grow to
+ten, the two to four. The surest way to increase our possession of
+Christ's grace is to try to impart it. There is no better way of
+strengthening our own faith than to seek to make others share in it.
+Christian convictions, spoken, are confirmed, but muffled in silence
+are weakened. 'There is that scattereth and yet increaseth.' Seed
+heaped and locked up in a granary breeds weevils and moths; flung
+broadcast over the furrows, it multiplies into seed that can be sown
+again, and bread that feeds the sower. So we have in this part of
+the parable almost the complete summary of the principles on which,
+the purposes for which, and the results to faithful use with which,
+Christ gives His gifts.
+
+The conduct of the slenderly endowed servant who hides his talent
+will be considered farther on.
+
+II. We note the faithful servants' balance-sheet and reward.
+
+Our Lord again sounds the note of delay--'After a long time'--an
+indefinite phrase which we know carries centuries in its folds, how
+many more we know not nor are intended to know. The two faithful
+servants present their balance-sheet in identical words, and receive
+the same commendation and reward. Their speech is in sharp contrast
+with the idle one's excuse, inasmuch as it puts a glad acknowledgment
+of the lord's giving in the forefront, as if to teach that the
+thankful recognition of his liberality underlies all joyful and
+successful service, and deepens while it makes glad the sense of
+responsibility. The cords of love are silken; and he who begins with
+setting before himself the largeness of Christ's gifts to him, will
+not fail in using these so as to increase them. In the light of that
+day, the servant sees more clearly than when he was at work the
+results of his work. We do not know what the year's profits have
+been till stock-taking and balancing-time comes. Here we often say,
+'I have laboured in vain.' There we shall say, 'I have gained five
+talents.'
+
+The verbatim repetition of the same words to both servants teaches
+the great lesson of this parable as contrasted with that of the
+pounds, that where there has been the same faithful work, with
+different amounts of capital, there will be the same reward. Our
+Master does not care about quantity, but about quality and motive.
+The slave with a few shillings, enough to stock meagrely a little
+stall, may show as much business capacity, diligence, and fidelity,
+as if he had millions to work with. Christ rewards not actions, but
+the graces which are made visible in actions; and these can be as
+well seen in the tiniest as in the largest deeds. The light that
+streams through a pin-prick is the same that pours through the
+widest window. The crystals of a salt present the same facets,
+flashing back the sun at the same angles, whether they be large or
+microscopically small. Therefore the judgment of Christ, which is
+simply the utterance of fact, takes no heed of the extent but only
+of the kind of service, and puts on the same level of recompense all
+who, with however widely varying powers, were one in spirit, in
+diligence, and devotion. The eulogium on the servants is not
+'successful' or 'brilliant,' but 'faithful,' and both alike get it.
+
+The words of the lord fall into three parts. First comes his
+generous and hearty praise,--the brief and emphatic monosyllable
+'Well,' and the characterisation of the servants as 'good and
+faithful.' Praise from Christ's lips is praise indeed; and here He
+pours it out in no grudging or scanty measure, but with warmth and
+evident delight. His heart glows with pleasure, and His commendation
+is musical with the utterance of His own joy in His servants. He
+'rejoices over them with singing'; and more gladly than a fond
+mother speaks honeyed words of approval to her darling, of whose
+goodness she is proud, does He praise these two. When we are tempted
+to disparage our slender powers as compared with those of His more
+conspicuous servants, and to suppose that all which we do is nought,
+let us think of this merciful and loving estimate of our poor
+service. For such words from such lips, life itself were wisely
+flung away; but such words from such lips will be spoken in
+recognition of many a piece of service less high and heroic than a
+martyr's. 'Good and faithful' refers not to the more general notion
+of goodness, but to the special excellence of a servant, and the
+latter word seems to define the former. Fidelity is the grace which
+He praises,--manifested in the recognition that the capital was a
+loan, given to be traded with for Him, and to be brought back
+increased to Him. He is faithful who ever keeps in view, and acts
+on, the conditions on which, and the purposes for which, he has
+received his spiritual wealth; and 'he who is faithful in that which
+is least, is faithful also in much.'
+
+The second part of the lord's words is the appointment to higher
+office, as the reward of faithfulness. Here on earth, the tools
+come, in the long run, to the hands that can use them, and the best
+reward of faithfulness in a narrower sphere is to be lifted to a
+wider. Promotion means more to do; and if the world were rightly
+organised, the road to advancement would be diligence; and the
+higher a man climbed, the wider would be the horizon of his labour.
+It is so in Christ's kingdom, and should be so in His visible
+Church. It will be so in heaven. Clearly this saying implies the
+active theory of the future life, and the continuance in some
+ministry of love, unknown to us, of the energies which were trained
+in the small transactions of earth. 'If five talents are "a few
+things," how great the "many things" will be!' In the parable of the
+pounds, the servant is made a ruler; here being 'set over' seems
+rather still to point to the place of a steward or servant. The
+sphere is enlarged, but the office is unaltered. The manager who
+conducted a small trade rightly will be advanced to the
+superintendence of a larger business.
+
+  'We doubt not that for one so true
+   There must be other, nobler work to do,'
+
+and that in that work the same law will continue to operate, and
+faithfulness be crowned with ever-growing capacities and tasks
+through a dateless eternity.
+
+The last words of the lord pass beyond our poor attempts at
+commenting. No eye can look undazzled at the sun. When Christ was
+near the Cross, He left His disciples a strange bequest at such a
+moment,--His joy; and that is their brightest portion here, even
+though it be shaded with many sorrows. The enthroned Christ welcomes
+all who have known 'the fellowship of His sufferings' into the
+fulness of His heavenly joy, unshaded, unbroken, unspeakable; and
+they pass into it as into an encompassing atmosphere, or some broad
+land of peace and abundance. Sympathy with His purposes leads to
+such oneness with Him that His joy is ours, both in its occasions
+and in its rapture. 'Thou makest them drink of the river of Thy
+pleasures,' and the lord and the servant drink from the same cup.
+
+III. The excuse and punishment of the indolent servant.
+
+His excuse is his reason. He did think hardly of his lord, and, even
+though he had His gift in his hand to confute him, he slandered Him
+in his heart as harsh and exacting. To many men the requirements of
+religion are more prominent than its gifts, and God is thought of as
+demanding rather than as 'the giving God.' Such thoughts paralyse
+action. Fear is barren, love is fruitful. Nothing grows on the
+mountain of curses, which frowns black over against the sunny slopes
+of the mountain of blessing with its blushing grapes. The indolence
+was illogical, for, if the master was such as was thought, the more
+reason for diligence; but fear is a bad reasoner, and the absurd gap
+between the premises and the conclusion is matched by one of the
+very same width in every life that thinks of God as rigidly
+requiring obedience, which, therefore, it does _not_ give!
+Still another error is in the indolent servant's words. He flings
+down the hoarded talent with 'Lo, thou hast thine own.' He was
+mistaken. Talents hid are not, when dug up, as heavy as they were
+when buried. This gold does rust, and a life not devoted to God is
+never carried back to Him unspoiled.
+
+The lord's answer again falls into three parts, corresponding to
+that to the faithful servants. First comes the stern characterisation
+of the man. As with the others' goodness, his badness is defined
+by the second epithet. It is slothfulness. Is that all? Yes; it does
+not need active opposition to pull down destruction on one's head.
+Simple indolence is enough, the negative sin of not doing or being
+what we ought. Ungirt loins, unlit lamps, unused talents, sink a man
+like lead. Doing nothing is enough for ruin.
+
+The remarkable answer to the servant's charge seems to teach us that
+timid souls, conscious of slender endowments, and pressed by the
+heavy sense of responsibility, and shrinking from Christian
+enterprises, for fear of incurring heavier condemnation, may yet
+find means of using their little capital. The bankers, who invest
+the collective contributions of small capitalists to advantage, may,
+or may not, be intended to be translated into the Church; but, at
+any rate, the principle of united service is here recommended to
+those who feel too weak for independent action. Slim houses in a row
+hold each other up; and, if we cannot strike out a path for
+ourselves, let us seek strength and safety in numbers.
+
+The fate of the indolent servant has a double horror. It is loss and
+suffering. The talent is taken from the slack hands and coward heart
+that would not use it, and given to the man who had shown he could
+and would. Gifts unemployed for Christ are stripped off a soul
+yonder. How much will go from many a richly endowed spirit, which
+here flashed with unconsecrated genius and force! We do not need to
+wait for eternity to see that true possession, which is use,
+increases powers, and that disuse, which is equivalent to not
+possessing, robs of them. The blacksmith's arm, the scout's eye, the
+craftsman's delicate finger, the student's intellect, the
+sensualist's passions, all illustrate the law on its one side; and
+the dying out of faculties and tastes, and even of intuitions and
+conscience, by reason of simple disuse, are melancholy instances of
+it on the other. But the solemn words of this condemnation seem to
+point to a far more awful energy in its working in the future, when
+everything that has not been consecrated by employment for Jesus
+shall be taken away, and the soul, stripped of its garb, shall 'be
+found naked.' How far that process of divesting may affect
+faculties, without touching the life, who can tell? Enough to see
+with awe that a spirit may be cut, as it were, to the quick, and
+still exist.
+
+But loss is not all the indolent servant's doom. Once more, like the
+slow toll of a funeral bell, we hear the dread sentence of ejection
+to the 'mirk midnight' without, where are tears undried and passion
+unavailing. There is something very awful in the monotonous
+repetition of that sentence so often in these last discourses of
+Christ's. The most loving lips that ever spoke, in love, shaped this
+form of words, so heart-touching in its wailing, but decisive,
+proclamation of blackness, homelessness, and sorrow, and cannot but
+toll them over and over again into our ears, in sad knowledge of our
+forgetfulness and unbelief,--if perchance we may listen and be
+warned, and, having heard the sound thereof, may never know the
+reality of that death in life which is the sure end of the indolent
+who were blind to His gifts, and therefore would not listen to His
+requirements.
+
+
+
+
+WHY THE TALENT WAS BURIED
+
+    'Then he which had received the one talent came and
+    said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man,
+    reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where
+    thou hast not strawed: 25. And I was afraid, and went
+    and hid thy talent in the earth.'-MATT. xxv. 24, 25.
+
+That was a strangely insolent excuse for indolence. To charge an
+angry master to his face with grasping greed and injustice was
+certainly not the way to conciliate him. Such language is quite
+unnatural and incongruous until we remember the reality which the
+parable was meant to shadow--viz., the answers for their deeds which
+men will give at Christ's judgment bar. Then we can understand how,
+by some irresistible necessity, this man was compelled, even at the
+risk of increasing the indignation of the master, to turn himself
+inside out, and to put into harsh, ugly words the half-conscious
+thoughts which had guided his life and caused his unfaithfulness.
+'Every one of us shall give account of himself to God.' The
+unabashed impudence of such an excuse for idleness as this is but
+putting into vivid and impressive form this truth, that then a man's
+actions in their true character, and the ugly motives that underlie
+them, and which he did not always honestly confess to himself, will
+be clear before him. It will be as much of a surprise to the men
+themselves, in many cases, as it could be to listeners. Thus it
+becomes us to look well to the under side of our lives, the unspoken
+convictions and the unformulated motives which work all the more
+mightily upon us because, for the most part, they work in the dark.
+This is Christ's explanation of one very operative and fruitful
+cause of the refusal to serve Him.
+
+I. I ask you, then, to consider, first, the slander here and the
+truth that contradicts it.
+
+'I knew thee that thou art an hard man,' says he, 'reaping where
+them hast not sown' (and he was standing with the unused talent in
+his hand all the while), 'and gathering where thou hast not
+strawed.' That is to say, deep down in many a heart that has never
+said as much to itself, there lies this black drop of gall--a
+conception of the divine character rather as demanding than as
+giving, a thought of Him as exacting. What He requires is more
+considered than what He bestows. So religion is thought to be mainly
+a matter of doing certain things and rendering up certain
+sacrifices, instead of being regarded, as it really is, as mainly a
+matter of receiving from God. Christ's authority makes me bold to
+say that this error underlies the lives of an immense number of
+nominal Christians, of people who think themselves very good and
+religious, as well as the lives of thousands who stand apart from
+religion altogether. And I want, not to drag down any curtain by my
+own hand, but to ask you to lift away the veil which hides the ugly
+thing in your hearts, and to put your own consciousness to the bar
+of your own conscience, and say whether it is not true that the
+uppermost thought about God, when you think about Him at all, is,
+'Thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown.'
+
+It is not difficult to understand why such a thought of God should
+rise in a heart which has no delight in Him nor in His service.
+There is a side of the truth as to God's relations to man which
+gives a colour of plausibility to the slander. Grave and stringent
+requirements are made by the divine law upon each of us; and our
+consciences tell us that they have not been kept. Therefore we seek
+to persuade ourselves that they are too severe. Then, further, we
+are, by reason of our own selfishness, almost incapable of rising to
+the conception of God's pure, perfect, disinterested love; and we
+are far too blind to the benefits that He pours upon us all every
+day of our lives. And so from all these reasons taken together, and
+some more besides, it comes about that, for some of us, the blessed
+sun in the heavens, the God of all mercy and love, has been darkened
+into a lurid orb shorn of all its beneficent beams, and hangs
+threatening there in our misty sky. 'I knew Thee that Thou art an
+hard man.' Ah! I am sure that if we would go down into the deep
+places of our own hearts, and ask ourselves what our real thought of
+God is, many of us would acknowledge that it is something like that.
+
+Now turn to the other side. What is the truth that smites this
+slander to death? That God is perfect, pure, unmingled, infinite
+love. And what is love? The infinite desire to impart itself. His
+'nature and property' is to be merciful, and you can no more stop
+God from giving than you can shut up the rays of the sun within
+itself. To be and to bestow are for Him one and the same thing. His
+love is an infinite longing to give, which passes over into
+perpetual acts of beneficence. He never reaps where He has not sown.
+Is there any place where He has not sown? Is there any heart on
+which there have been no seeds of goodness scattered from His rich
+hand? The calumniator in the text was speaking his slanders with
+that in his hand which should have stopped his mouth. He who
+complained that the hard master was asking for fruit of what He had
+not given would have had nothing at all, if he had not obtained the
+one talent from His hand. And there is no place in the whole wide
+universe of God where His love has not scattered its beneficent
+gifts. There are no fallow fields out of cultivation and unsown, in
+His great farm. He never asks where He has not given.
+
+He never asks until after He has given. He begins with bestowing,
+and it is only after the vineyard has been planted on the very
+fruitful hill, and the hedge built round about it, and the winepress
+digged, and the tower erected, and miracles of long-suffering mercy
+and skilful patience have been lavished upon it, that then He looks
+that it should bring forth grapes. God's gifts precede His
+requirements. He ever sows before He reaps. More than that, He gives
+_what_ He asks, helping us to render to Him the hearts that He
+desires. He, by His own merciful communications, makes it possible
+that we should lay at His feet the tribute of loving thanks. Just as
+a parent will give a child some money in order that the child may go
+and buy the giver a birthday present, so God gives to us hearts, and
+enriches them with many bestowments. He scatters round about us good
+from His hand, like drops of a fragrant perfume from a blazing
+torch, in order that we may catch them up and have some portion of
+the joy which is especially His own--the joy of giving. It would be
+a poor affair if our sole relation to God were that of receiving. It
+would be a tyrannous affair if our sole relation to God were that of
+rendering up. But both relations are united, and if it be 'more
+blessed to give than to receive,' the Giver of all good does not
+leave us without the opportunity of entering in even to that
+superlative blessing. We have to come to Him and say, when we lay
+the gifts, either of our faculties or of our trust, of our riches or
+of our virtues, at His feet, 'All things come of Thee, and of Thine
+own have we given Thee.'
+
+He asks for our sakes, and not for His own. 'If I were hungry I
+would not tell thee, for the cattle upon a thousand hills are Mine.
+Offer unto God praise, and pay thy vows unto the Most High.' It is
+blessed to us to render. He is none the richer for all our giving,
+as He is none the poorer for all His. Yet His giving to us is real,
+and our giving is real and a joy to Him. That is the truth lifted up
+against the slander of the natural heart. God is love, pure giving,
+unlimited and perpetual disposition to bestow. He gives all things
+before He asks for anything, and when He asks for anything it is
+that we may be blessed.
+
+But you say, 'That is all very well--where do you learn all that about
+God?' My answer is a very simple one. I learn it, and I believe there
+is no other place to learn it, at the Cross of Jesus Christ. If that
+be the very apex of the divine love and self-revelation; if, looking
+upon it, we understand God better than by any other means, then there
+can be no question but that instead of gathering where He has not
+strawed, and reaping where He has not sown, God is only, and always,
+and utterly, and to every man, infinite love that bestows itself. My
+heart says to me many a time, 'God's laws are hard, God's judgment is
+strict. God requires what you cannot give. Crouch before Him, and be
+afraid.' And my faith says, 'Get thee behind me, Satan!' 'He that
+spared not His own Son, ... how shall He not with Him also freely give
+us all things?' The Cross of Christ is the answer to the slander, and
+the revelation of the giving God.
+
+II. Secondly, mark here the fear that dogs such a thought, and the
+love that casts out the fear.
+
+'I was afraid.' Yes, of course. If a man is not a fool, his emotions
+follow his thoughts, and his thoughts ought to shape his emotions.
+And wherever there is the twilight of uncertainty upon the great
+lesson that the Cross of Jesus Christ has taught us, _there_
+there will be, however masked and however modified by other
+thoughts, deep in the human heart, a perhaps unspoken, but not
+therefore ineffectual, dread of God. Just as the misconception of
+the divine character does influence many a life in which it has
+never been spoken articulately, and needs some steady observation of
+ourselves to be detected, so is it with this dread of Him. Carry the
+task of self-examination a little further, and ask yourselves
+whether there does not lie coiled in many of your hearts this dread
+of God, like a sleeping snake which only needs a little warmth to be
+awakened to sting. There are all the signs of it. There are many of
+you who have a distinct indisposition to be brought close up to the
+thought of Him. There are many of you who have a distinct sense of
+discomfort when you are pressed against the realities of the
+Christian religion. There are many of you who, though you cover it
+over with a shallow confidence, or endeavour to persuade yourselves
+into speculative doubts about the divine nature, or hide it from
+yourselves by indifference, yet know that all that is very thin ice,
+and that there is a great black pool down below---a dread at the
+heart, of a righteous Judge somewhere, with whom you have somewhat
+to do, that you cannot shake off. I do not want to appeal to fear,
+but it goes to one's heart to see the hundreds and thousands of
+people round about us who, just because they are afraid of God, will
+not think about Him, put away angrily and impatiently solemn words
+like these that I am trying to speak, and seek to surround
+themselves with some kind of a fool's paradise of indifference, and
+to shut their eyes to facts and realities. You do not confess it to
+yourselves. What kind of a thought must that be about your relation
+to God which you are afraid to speak? Some of you remember the awful
+words in one of Shakespeare's plays: 'Now I, to comfort him, bid him
+he should not think of God. I hoped there was no need to trouble
+himself with any such thoughts yet.' What does that teach us? 'I
+knew Thee that Thou art an hard man; and I was afraid.'
+
+Dear friend, there are two religions in this world: there is the
+religion of fear, and there is the religion of love; and if you have
+not the one, you must have the other, if you have any at all. The
+only way to get perfect love that casts out fear is to be quite sure
+of the Father-love in heaven that begets it. And the only way to be
+sure of the infinite love in the heavens that kindles some little
+spark of love in our hearts here, is to go to Christ and learn the
+lesson that He reveals to us at His Cross. Love will annihilate the
+fear; or rather, if I may take such a figure, will set a light to
+the wreathing smoke that rises, and flash it all up into a ruddy
+flame. For the perfect love that casts out fear sublimes it into
+reverence and changes it into trust. Have you got that love, and did
+you get it at Christ's Cross?
+
+III. Lastly, mark the torpor of fear and the activity of love. 'I
+was afraid, and I went and hid thy talent in the earth.'
+
+Fear paralyses service, cuts the nerve of activity, makes a man
+refuse obedience to God. It was a very illogical thing of that
+indolent servant to say, 'I knew that you were so hard in exacting
+what was due to you that therefore I determined _not_ to give
+it to you.' Is it more illogical and more absurd than what hundreds
+of men and women round about us do to-day, when they say, 'God's
+requirements are so great that I do _not_ attempt to fulfil
+them'? One would have thought that he would have reasoned the other
+way, and said, 'Because I knew that Thy requirements were so great
+and severe, therefore I put myself with all my powers to my work.'
+Not so. Logical or illogical, the result remains, that that thought
+of God, that black drop of gall, in many a heart, stops the action
+of the hand. Fear is barren, or if it produces anything it is
+nothing to the purpose, and it brings gifts that not even God's love
+can accept, for there is no love in them. Fear is barren; Love is
+fruitful--like the two mountains of Samaria, from one of which the
+rolling burden of the curses of the Law was thundered, and from the
+other of which the sweet words of promise and of blessing were
+chanted in musical response. On the one side are black rocks,
+without a blade of grass on them, the Mount of Cursing; on the other
+side are blushing grapes and vineyards, the Mount of Blessing. Love
+moves to action, fear paralyses into indolence. And the reason why
+such hosts of you do nothing for God is because your hearts have
+never been touched with the thorough conviction that He has done
+everything for you, and asks you but to love Him back again, and
+bring Him your hearts. These dark thoughts are like the frost which
+binds the ground in iron fetters, making all the little flowers that
+were beginning to push their heads into the light shrink back again.
+And love, when it comes, will come like the west wind and the
+sunshine of the Spring; and before its emancipating fingers the
+earth's fetters will be cast aside, and the white snowdrops and the
+yellow crocuses will show themselves above the ground. If you want
+your hearts to bear any fruit of noble living, and holy
+consecration, and pure deeds, then here is the process--Begin with
+the knowledge and belief of 'the love which God hath to us'; learn
+that at the Cross, and let it silence your doubts, and send them
+back to their kennels, silenced. Then take the next step, and love
+Him back again. 'We love Him because He first loved us.' That love
+will be the productive principle of all glad obedience, and you will
+keep His commandments, and here upon earth find, as the faithful
+servant found, that talents used increase; and yonder will receive
+the eulogium from His lips whom to please is blessedness, by whom to
+be praised is heaven's glory, 'Well done! good and faithful
+servant.'
+
+
+
+
+THE KING ON HIS JUDGMENT THRONE
+
+
+    'When the Son of Man shall come in His glory, and all
+    the holy angels with Him, then shall He sit upon the
+    throne of His glory: 32. And before Him shall be
+    gathered all nations: and He shall separate them one
+    from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the
+    goats: 33. And He shall set the sheep on His right
+    hand, but the goats on the left. 34. Then shall the
+    King say unto them on His right hand, Come, ye blessed
+    of My Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from
+    the foundation of the world: 35. For I was an hungred,
+    and ye gave Me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave Me
+    drink: I was a stranger, and ye took Me in: 36. Naked,
+    and ye clothed Me: I was sick, and ye visited Me: I was
+    in prison, and ye came unto Me. 37. Then shall the
+    righteous answer Him, saying, Lord, when saw we Thee an
+    hungred, and fed Thee? or thirsty, and gave Thee drink?
+    38. When saw we Thee a stranger, and took Thee in! or
+    naked, and clothed Thee! 39. Or when saw we Thee sick,
+    or in prison, and came unto Thee? 10. And the King
+    shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you,
+    Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of
+    these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me. 41. Then
+    shall He say also unto them on the left hand, Depart
+    from Me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for
+    the devil and his angels: 42. For I was an hungred, and
+    ye gave Me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave Me no
+    drink: 43. I was a stranger, and ye took Me not in:
+    naked, and ye clothed Me not: sick, and in prison, and
+    ye visited Me not. 44. Then shall they also answer Him,
+    saying, Lord, when saw we Thee an hungred, or athirst,
+    or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did
+    not minister unto Thee? 45. Then shall He answer them,
+    saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it
+    not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to Me.
+    46. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment:
+    but the righteous into life eternal.'--MATT. xxv. 31-46.
+
+The teachings of that wonderful last day of Christ's ministry, which
+have occupied so many of our pages, are closed with this tremendous
+picture of universal judgment. It is one to be gazed upon with
+silent awe, rather than to be commented on. There is fear lest, in
+occupying the mind in the study of the details, and trying to pierce
+the mystery it partly unfolds, we should forget our own individual
+share in it. Better to burn in on our hearts the thought, 'I shall
+be there,' than to lose the solemn impression in efforts to unravel
+the difficulties of the passage. Difficulties there are, as is to be
+expected in even Christ's revelation of so unparalleled a scene.
+Many questions are raised by it which will never be solved till we
+stand there. Who can tell how much of the parabolic element enters
+into the description? We, at all events, do not venture to say of
+one part, 'This is merely drapery, the sensuous representation of
+spiritual reality,' and of another, 'That is essential truth.' The
+curtain is the picture, and before we can separate the elements of
+it in that fashion, we must have lived through it. Let us try to
+grasp the main lessons, and not lose the spirit in studying the
+letter.
+
+I. The first broad teaching is that Christ is the Judge of all the
+earth. Sitting there, a wearied man on the Mount of Olives, with the
+valley of Jehoshaphat at His feet, which the Jew regarded as the
+scene of the final judgment, Jesus declared Himself to be the Judge
+of the world, in language so unlimited in its claims that the
+speaker must be either a madman or a god. Calvary was less than
+three days off, when He spoke thus. The contrast between the vision
+of the future and the reality of the present is overwhelming. The
+Son of Man has come in weakness and shame; He will come in His
+glory, that flashing light of the self-revealing God, of which the
+symbol was the 'glory' which shone between the cherubim, and which
+Jesus Christ here asserts to belong to Him as '_His_ glory.'
+Then, heaven will be emptied of its angels, who shall gather round
+the enthroned Judge as His handful of sorrowing followers were
+clustered round Him as He spoke, or as the peasants had surrounded
+the meek state of His entry yesterday. Then, He will take the place
+of Judge, and 'sit,' in token of repose, supremacy, and judgment,
+'on the throne of His glory,' as He now sat on the rocks of Olivet.
+Then, mankind shall be massed at His feet, and His glance shall part
+the infinite multitudes, and discern the character of each item in
+the crowd as easily and swiftly as the shepherd's eye picks out the
+black goats from among the white sheep. Observe the difference in
+the representation from those in the previous parables. There, the
+parting of kinds was either self-acting, as in the case of the
+foolish maidens; or men gave account of _themselves_, as in the
+case of the servants with the talents. Here, the separation is the
+work of the Judge, and is completed before a word is spoken. All
+these representations must be included in the complete truth as to
+the final judgment. It is the effect of men's actions; it is the
+result of their compelled disclosing of the deepest motives of their
+lives; it is the act of the perfect discernment of the Judge. Their
+deeds will judge them; they will judge themselves; Christ will
+judge.
+
+Singularly enough, every possible interpretation of the extent of
+the expression 'all nations' has found advocates. It has been taken
+in its widest and plainest meaning, as equivalent to the whole race;
+it has been confined to mankind exclusive of Christians, and it has
+been confined to Christians exclusive of heathens. There are
+difficulties in all these explanations, but probably the least are
+found in the first. It is most natural to suppose that 'all nations'
+means all nations, unless that meaning be impossible. The absence of
+the limitation to the 'kingdom of heaven,' which distinguishes this
+section from the preceding ones having reference to judgment, and
+the position of the present section as the solemn close of Christ's
+teachings, which would naturally widen out into the declaration of
+the universal judgment, which forms the only appropriate climax and
+end to the foregoing teachings, seem to point to the widest meaning
+of the phrase. His office of universal Judge is unmistakably taught
+throughout the New Testament, and it seems in the highest degree
+unnatural to suppose that He did not speak of it in these final
+words of prophetic warning. We may therefore, with some confidence,
+see in the magnificent and awful picture here drawn the vision of
+universal judgment. Parabolic elements there no doubt are in the
+picture; but we have no governing revelation, free from these, by
+which we can check them, and be sure of how much is form and how
+much substance. This is clear, 'that we must all appear before the
+judgment-seat of Christ'; and this is clear, that Jesus Christ put
+forth, when at the very lowest point of His earthly humiliation,
+these tremendous claims, and asserted His authority as Judge over
+every soul of man. We are apt to lose ourselves in the crowd. Let us
+pause and think that 'all' includes 'me.'
+
+II. Note the principles of Christ's universal judgment. It is
+important to remember that this section closes a series of
+descriptions of the judgment, and must not be taken as if, when
+isolated, it set forth all the truth. It is often harped upon by
+persons who are unfriendly to evangelical teaching, as if it were
+Christ's only word about judgment, and interpreted as if it meant
+that, no matter what else a man was, if only he is charitable and
+benevolent, he will find mercy. But this is to forget all the rest
+of our Lord's teaching in the context, and to fly in the face of the
+whole tenor of New Testament doctrine. We have here to do with the
+principles of judgment which apply equally to those who have, and to
+those who have not, heard the gospel. The subjects of the kingdom
+are shown the principles more immediately applicable to them, in the
+previous parables, and here they are reminded that there is a
+standard of judgment absolutely universal. All men, whether
+Christians or not, are judged by 'the things done in the body,
+whether they be good or bad.' So Christ teaches in His closing words
+of the Sermon on the Mount, and in many another place. 'Every tree
+that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the
+fire.' The productive source of good works is not in question here;
+stress is laid on the fruits, rather than on the root. The gospel is
+as imperative in its requirements of righteousness as the law is,
+and its conception of the righteousness which it requires is far
+deeper and wider. The subjects of the kingdom ever need to be
+reminded of the solemn truth that they have not only, like the wise
+maidens, to have their lights burning and their oil vessels filled,
+nor only, like the wise servants, to be using the gifts of the
+kingdom for their lord, but, as members of the great family of man,
+have to cultivate the common moralities which all men, heathen and
+Christian, recognise as binding on all, without which no man shall
+see the Lord. The special form of righteousness which is selected as
+the test is charity. Obviously it is chosen as representative of all
+the virtues of the second table of the law. Taken in its bare
+literality, this would mean that men's relations to God had no
+effect in the judgment, mid that no other virtues but this of
+charity came into the account. Such a conclusion is so plainly
+repugnant to all Christ's teaching, that we must suppose that love
+to one's neighbour is here singled out, just as it is in His summary
+of 'the law and the prophets,' as the crown and flower of all
+relative duties, and as, in a very real sense, being 'the fulfilling
+of the law.' The omission of any reference to the love of God
+sufficiently shows that the view here is rigidly limited to acts,
+and that all the grounds of judgment are not meant to be set forth.
+
+But the benevolence here spoken of is not the mere natural
+sentiment, which often exists in great energy in men whose moral
+nature is, in other respects, so utterly un-Christlike that their
+entrance into the kingdom prepared for the righteous is
+inconceivable. Many a man has a hundred vices and yet a soft heart.
+It is very much a matter of temperament. Does Christ so contradict
+all the rest of His teaching as to say that such a man is of 'the
+sheep,' and 'blessed of the Father'? Surely not. Is every piece of
+kindliness to the distressed, from whatever motive, and by
+whatsoever kind of person done, regarded by Him as done to Himself?
+To say so, would be to confound moral distinctions, and to dissolve
+all righteousness into a sentimental syrup. The deeds which He
+regards as done to Himself, are done to His 'brethren.' That
+expression carries us into the region of motive, and runs parallel
+with His other words about 'receiving a prophet,' and 'giving a cup
+of cold water to one of these little ones,' because they are His.
+Seeing that all nations are at the bar, the expression, 'My
+brethren,' cannot be confined to the disciples, for many of those
+who are being judged have never come in contact with Christians, nor
+can it be reasonably supposed to include all men, for, however true
+it is that Christ is every man's brother, the recognition of kindred
+here must surely be confined to those at the right hand. Whatever be
+included under the 'righteous,' that is included under the
+'brethren.' We seem, then, led to recognise in the expression a
+reference to the motive of the beneficence, and to be brought to the
+conclusion that what the Judge accepts as done to Himself is such
+kindly help and sympathy as is extended to these His kindred, with
+some recognition of their character, and desire after it. To
+'receive a prophet' implies that there is some spiritual affinity
+with him in the receiver. To give help to His brethren, because they
+are so, implies some affinity with Him or feeling after likeness to
+Him and them. Now, if we hold fast by the universality of the
+judgment here depicted, we shall see that this recognition must
+necessarily have different degrees in those who have heard of Christ
+and in those who have not. In the former, it will be equivalent to
+that faith which is the root of all goodness, and grasps the Christ
+revealed in the gospel. In the latter, it can be no more than a
+feeling after Him who is the 'light that lighteneth every man that
+cometh into the world.' Surely there are souls amid the darkness of
+heathenism yearning toward the light, like plants grown in the dark.
+By ways of His own, Christ can reach such hearts, as the river of
+the water of life may percolate through underground channels to many
+a tree which grows far from its banks.
+
+III. Note the surprises of the judgment. The astonishment of the
+righteous is not modesty disclaiming praise, but real wonder at the
+undreamed-of significance of their deeds. In the parable of the
+talents, the servants unveiled their inmost hearts, and accurately
+described their lives. Here, the other side of the truth is brought
+into prominence, that, at that day, we shall be surprised when we
+hear from His lips what we have really done. True Christian
+beneficence has consciously for its motive the pleasing of Christ;
+but still he who most earnestly strove, while here, to do all as
+unto Jesus, will be full of thankful wonder at the grace which
+accepts his poor service, and will learn, with fresh marvelling, how
+closely He associates Himself with His humblest servant. There is an
+element of mystery hidden from ourselves in all our deeds. Our love
+to Christ's followers never goes out so plainly to Him that, while
+here, we can venture to be sure that He takes it as done for Him. We
+cannot here follow the flight of the arrow, nor know what meaning He
+will attach to, or what large issues He will evolve from, our poor
+doings. So heaven will be full of blessed surprises, as we reap the
+fruit growing 'in power' of what we sowed 'in weakness,' and as
+doleful will be the astonishment which will seize those who see, for
+the first time, in the lurid light of that day, the true character
+of their lives, as one long neglect of plain duties, which was all a
+defrauding the Saviour of His due. Mere doing nothing is enough to
+condemn, and its victims will be shudderingly amazed at the fatal
+wound it has inflicted on them.
+
+IV. The irrevocableness of the judgment. That is an awful contrast
+between the 'Come! ye blessed,' and 'Depart! ye cursed.' That is a
+more awful parallel between 'eternal punishment' and 'eternal life.'
+It is futile to attempt to alleviate the awfulness by emptying the
+word 'eternal' of reference to duration. It no doubt connotes
+quality, but its first meaning is ever-during. There is nothing here
+to suggest that the one condition is more terminable than the other.
+Rather, the emphatic repetition of the word brings the unending
+continuance of each into prominence, as the point in which these two
+states, so wofully unlike, are the same. In whatever other passages
+the doctrine of universal restoration may seem to find a foothold,
+there is not an inch of standing-room for it here. Reverently
+accepting Christ's words as those of perfect and infallible love,
+the present writer feels so strongly the difficulty of bringing all
+the New Testament declarations on this dread question into a
+harmonious whole, that he abjures for himself dogmatic certainty,
+and dreads lest, in the eagerness of discussing the duration (which
+will never be beyond the reach of discussion), the solemn reality of
+the fact of future retribution should be dimmed, and men should
+argue about 'the terror of the Lord' till they cease to feel it.
+
+
+
+
+THE DEFENCE OF UNCALCULATING LOVE
+
+
+    'Now when Jesus was in Bethany, in the house of Simon
+    the leper, 7. There came unto him a woman having an
+    alabaster box of very precious ointment, and poured
+    it on His head, as He sat at meat. 8. But when His
+    disciples saw it, they had indignation, saying, To what
+    purpose is this waste? 9. For this ointment might have
+    been sold for much, and given to the poor. 10. When
+    Jesus understood it, He said unto them, Why trouble ye
+    the woman? for she hath wrought a good work upon Me.
+    11. For ye have the poor always with you; but Me ye
+    have not always. 12. For in that she hath poured this
+    ointment on My body, she did it for My burial.
+    13. Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel
+    shall be preached in the whole world, there shall also
+    this, that this woman hath done, be told for a memorial
+    of her. 14. Then one of the twelve, called Judas
+    Iscariot, went unto the chief priests, 15. And said
+    unto them, What will ye give me, and I will deliver Him
+    unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty
+    pieces of silver. 16. And from that time he sought
+    opportunity to betray Him.'--MATT. xxvi. 6-16.
+
+John tells us that the 'woman' was Mary, and the objector Judas.
+Both the deed and the cavil are better understood by knowing whence
+they came. Lazarus was a guest, and as his sister saw him sitting
+there by Jesus her heart overflowed, and she could not but catch up
+her most precious possession, and lavish it on His head and feet.
+Love's impulses appear absurd to selfishness. How could Judas
+understand Mary? Detracting comments find ready ears. One sneer will
+cool down to contempt and blame the feelings of a company. People
+are always eager to pick holes in conduct which they uneasily feel
+to be above their own reach. Poor Mary! she had but yielded to the
+uncalculating impulse of her great love, and she finds herself
+charged with imprudence, waste, and unfeeling neglect of the poor.
+No wonder that her gentle heart was 'troubled.' But Jesus threw the
+shield of His approval over her, and that was enough. Never mind how
+Judas and better men than he may find fault, if Jesus smiles
+acceptance.
+
+His great words set forth, first, the vindication of the act,
+because of its motive. Anything done with no regard to any end but
+Himself is, in His eyes, 'good.' The perfection of conduct is that
+it shall all be referred to Jesus. That 'altar' sanctifies gift and
+giver. Conversely, whatever has no reference to Him lacks the
+highest beauty of goodness. A pebble in the bed of a sunlit stream
+has its veins of colour brought out; lift it out, and, as it dries,
+it dulls. So our deeds plunged into that great river are heightened
+in loveliness. Everything which has 'For Christ's sake' stamped on
+it is thereby hallowed. That is the unfailing recipe for making a
+life fair. Mary was thinking only of Jesus and of her love to Him,
+therefore what she did was sweet to Him. The greater part of a deed
+is its motive, and the perfect motive is love to Jesus.
+
+But, further, Christ defends the side of Mary's deed which the
+critics fastened on. They posed as being more practical and
+benevolent than she was. They were utilitarians, she was wasteful.
+Their objection sounds sensible, but it belongs to the low levels of
+life. One flash of lofty love would have killed it. Christ's reply
+to it draws a contrast between constant duties and special,
+transient moments. It is coloured, too, by His consciousness of His
+near end, and has an undertone of sadness in that 'Me ye have not
+always.' There are high tides of Christian emotion, when the
+question of what good this thing will do is submerged, and the only
+question is, 'What best thing shall I render to the Lord?' The
+critics were not more beneficent, but less inflamed with love to
+Jesus, and the leader of them only wished that the proceeds of the
+ointment had come into his hands, where some of it would have stuck.
+We hear the same sort of taunt today,--What is the sense of all this
+money being spent on missions and religious objects? How much more
+useful it would be if expended on better dwellings for the poor or
+hospitals or technical schools! But there is a place in Christ's
+treasury for useless deeds, if they are the pure expression of love
+to Him, and Mary's alabaster box, which did no good at all, lies
+beside the cups that held cold water which slaked some thirsty lips.
+Uncalculating impulse, which only knows that it would fain give all
+to the Lover of souls, is not merely excused, but praised, by Jesus.
+Lovers on earth do not concern themselves about the usefulness of
+their gifts, and the divine Lover rejoices over what cold-blooded
+spectators, who do not in the least understand the ways of loving
+hearts, find useless 'waste.' The world would put all the emotions
+of Christian hearts, and all the heroisms of Christian martyrs, and
+all the sacrifices of Christian workers, into the same class. Jesus
+accepts them all.
+
+Again, He breathes a meaning into the gift beyond what the giver
+meant. Mary did not regard her anointing  as preparatory to His
+burial, but He had His thoughts fixed on it, and He sought to
+prepare the disciples for the coming storm. How far away from the
+simple festivities in Simon's house were His thoughts! What a gulf
+between the other guests and Him! But Jesus always puts significance
+into the service which He accepts, and surprises the givers by the
+far-reaching issues of their gifts. We know not what He may make our
+poor deeds mean. Results are beyond our vision. Therefore let us
+make sure of what is within our horizon--namely, motives. If we do
+anything for His sake, He will take care of what it comes to. That
+is true even on earth, and still more true in heaven. 'Lord, when
+saw we Thee an hungred, and fed Thee?' What surprises will wait
+Christ's humble servants in heaven, when they see what was the true
+nature and the widespread consequences of their humble deeds! 'Thou
+sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, ... but God
+giveth it a body as it hath pleased Him.'
+
+Again, Mark gives an additional clause in Christ's words, which
+brings out the principle that the measure of acceptable service is
+ability. 'She hath done what she could' is an apology, or rather a
+vindication, for the shape of the gift. Mary was not practical, and
+could not 'serve' like Martha; she probably had no other precious
+thing that she could give, but she could love, and she could bestow
+her best on Jesus. But the saying implies a stringent demand, as
+well as a gracious defence. Nothing less than the full measure of
+ability is the measure of Christian obligation. Power to its last
+particle is duty. Jesus does not ask how much His servants do or
+give, but He does ask that they should do and give all that they
+can. He wishes us to be ourselves in serving Him, and to shape our
+methods according to character and capabilities, but He also wishes
+us to give Him our whole selves. If anything is kept back, all that
+is given is marred.
+
+Jesus' last word gives perpetuity to the service which He accepts.
+Mary is promised immortality for her deed, and the promise has been
+fulfilled, and here are we, all these centuries after, looking at
+her as she breaks the box and pours it on His head. Jesus is not
+unrighteous to forget any work of love done for Him. The fragrance
+of the ointment soon passed away, and the shreds of the broken cruse
+were swept into the dust-bin, with the other relics of the feast;
+but all the world knows of that act of all-surrendering love, and it
+smells sweet and blossoms for evermore.
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW PASSOVER
+
+
+    'Now the first day of the feast of unleavened bread the
+    disciples came to Jesus, saying unto Him, Where wilt
+    Thou that we prepare for Thee to eat the passover?
+    18. And He said, Go into the city to such a man, and
+    say unto him, The Master saith, My time is at hand; I
+    will keep the passover at thy house with My disciples.
+    19. And the disciples did as Jesus had appointed them;
+    and they made ready the passover. 20. Now when the even
+    was come, He sat down with the twelve. 21. And as they
+    did eat, He said, Verily I say unto you, That one of
+    you shall betray Me. 22. And they were exceeding
+    sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto Him,
+    Lord, is it I? 23. And He answered and said, He that
+    dippeth his hand with Me in the dish, the same shall
+    betray Me. 21. The Son of Man goeth as it is written
+    of Him; but woe unto that man by whom the Son of Man is
+    betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not
+    been born. 25. Then Judas, which betrayed Him, answered
+    and said, Master, is it I? He said unto him, Thou hast
+    said 26. And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and
+    blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples,
+    and said, Take, eat; this is My body. 27. And He took
+    the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying,
+    Drink ye all of it; 28. For this is My blood of the new
+    testament, which is shed for many for the remission
+    of sins. 29. But I say unto you, I will not drink
+    henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day
+    when I drink it new with you in My Father's kingdom.
+    30. And when they had sung an hymn, they went out into
+    the Mount of Olives.'--MATT. xxvi. 17-30.
+
+The Tuesday of Passion Week was occupied by the wonderful discourses
+which have furnished so many of our meditations. At its close Jesus
+sought retirement in Bethany, not only to soothe and prepare His
+spirit but to 'hide Himself' from the Sanhedrin. There He spent the
+Wednesday. Who can imagine His thoughts? While He was calmly
+reposing in Mary's quiet home, the rulers determined on His arrest,
+but were at a loss how to effect it without a riot. Judas comes to
+them opportunely, and they leave it to him to give the signal.
+Possibly we may account for the peculiar secrecy observed as to the
+place for the last supper, by our Lord's knowledge that His steps
+were watched, and by His earnest wish to eat the Passover with the
+disciples before He suffered. The change between the courting of
+publicity and almost inviting of arrest at the beginning of the
+week, and the evident desire to postpone the crisis till the fitting
+moment which marks the close of it, is remarkable, and most
+naturally explained by the supposition that He wished the time of
+His death to be that very hour when, according to law, the paschal
+lamb was slain. On the Thursday, then, he sent Peter and John into
+the city to prepare the Passover; the others being in ignorance of
+the place till they were there, and Judas being thus prevented from
+carrying out his purpose till after the celebration.
+
+The precautions taken to ensure this have left their mark on
+Matthew's narrative, in the peculiar designation of the host,--'Such
+a man!' It is a kind of echo of the mystery which he so well
+remembered as round the errand of the two. He does not seem to have
+heard of the token by which they knew the house, viz., the man with
+the pitcher whom they were to meet. But he does know that Peter and
+John got secret instructions, and that he and the others wondered
+where they were to go. Had there been a previous arrangement with
+this unnamed 'such an one,' or were the token and the message alike
+instances of Christ's supernatural knowledge and authority? It is
+difficult to say. I incline to the former supposition, which would
+be in accordance with the distinct effort after secrecy which marks
+these days; but the narratives do not decide the question. At all
+events, the host was a disciple, as appears from the authoritative
+'the Master saith'; and, whether he had known beforehand that 'this
+day' incarnate 'salvation would come to his house' or no, he eagerly
+accepts the peril and the honour. His message is royal in its tone.
+The Lord does not ask permission, but issues His commands. But He is
+a pauper King, not having where to lay His head, and needing another
+man's house in which to gather His own household together for the
+family feast of the Passover. What profound truths are wrapped up in
+that 'My time is come'! It speaks of the voluntariness of His
+surrender, the consciousness that His Cross was the centre point of
+His work, His superiority to all external influences as determining
+the hour of His death, and His submission to the supreme appointment
+of the Father. Obedience and freedom, choice and necessity, are
+wonderfully blended in it.
+
+So, late on that Thursday evening, the little band left Bethany for
+the last time, in a fashion very unlike the joyous stir of the
+triumphal entry. As the evening is falling, they thread their way
+through the noisy streets, all astir with the festal crowds, and
+reach the upper room, Judas vainly watching for an opportunity to
+slip away on his black errand. The chamber, prepared by unknown
+hands, has vanished, and the hands are dust; but both are immortal.
+How many of the living acts of His servants in like manner seem to
+perish, and the doers of them to be forgotten or unknown! But He
+knows the name of 'such an one,' and does not forget that he opened
+his door for Him to enter in and sup.
+
+The fact that Jesus put aside the Passover and founded the Lord's
+Supper in its place, tells much both about _His_ authority and
+_its_ meaning. What must He have conceived of Himself, who bade
+Jew and Gentile turn away from that God-appointed festival, and
+think not of Moses, but of Him? What did He mean by setting the
+Lord's Supper in the place of the Passover, if He did not mean that
+He was the true Paschal Lamb, that His death was a true sacrifice,
+that in His sprinkled blood was safety, that His death inaugurated
+the better deliverance of the true Israel from a darker prison-house
+and a sorer bondage, that His followers were a family, and that 'the
+children's bread' was the sacrifice which He had made? There are
+many reasons for the doubling of the commemorative emblem, but this
+is obviously one of the chief--that, by the separation of the two in
+the rite, we are carried back to the separation in fact; that is to
+say, to the violent death of Christ. Not His flesh alone, in the
+sense of Incarnation, but His body broken and His blood shed, are
+what He wills should be for ever remembered. His own estimate of the
+centre point of His work is unmistakably pronounced in His
+institution of this rite.
+
+But we may consider the force of each emblem separately. In many
+important points they mean the same things, but they have each their
+own significance as well. Matthew's condensed version of the words
+of institution omits all reference to the breaking of the body and
+to the memorial character of the observance, but both are implied.
+He emphasises the reception, the participation, and the significance
+of the bread. As to the latter, 'This is My body' is to be
+understood in the same way as 'the field is the world,' and many
+other sayings. To speak in the language of grammarians, the copula
+is that of symbolic relationship, not that of existence; or, to
+speak in the language of the street, 'is' here means, as it often
+does, 'represents.' How could it mean anything else, when Christ sat
+there in His body, and His blood was in His veins? What, then, is
+the teaching of this symbol? It is not merely that He in His
+humanity is the bread of life, but that He in His death is the
+nourishment of our true life. In that great discourse in John's
+Gospel, which embodies in words the lessons which the Lord's Supper
+teaches by symbols, He advances from the general statement, 'I am
+the Bread of Life,' to the yet more mysterious and profound teaching
+that His flesh, which at some then future point He will 'give for
+the life of the world,' is the bread; thus distinctly foreshadowing
+His death, and asserting that by that death we live, and by
+partaking of it are nourished. The participation in the benefits of
+Christ's death, which is symbolised by 'Take, eat,' is effected by
+living faith. We feed on Christ when our minds are occupied with His
+truth, and our hearts nourished by His love, when it is the 'meat'
+of our wills to do His will, and when our whole inward man fastens
+on Him as its true object, and draws from Him its best being. But
+the act of reception teaches the great lesson that Christ must be in
+us, if He is to do us any good. He is not 'for us' in any real
+sense, unless He be 'in us.' The word rendered in John's Gospel
+'eateth' is that used for the ruminating of cattle, and wonderfully
+indicates the calm, continual, patient meditation by which alone we
+can receive Christ into our hearts, and nourish our lives on Him.
+Bread eaten is assimilated to the body, but this bread eaten
+assimilates the eater to itself, and he who feeds on Christ becomes
+Christ-like, as the silk-worm takes the hue of the leaves on which
+it browses. Bread eaten to-day will not nourish us to-morrow,
+neither will past experiences of Christ's sweetness sustain the
+soul. He must be 'our daily bread' if we are not to pine with
+hunger.
+
+The wine carries its own special teaching, which clearly appears in
+Matthew's version of the words of institution. It is 'My blood,' and
+by its being presented in a form separate from the bread which is
+His body suggests a violent death. It is 'covenant blood,' the seal
+of that 'better covenant' than the old, which God makes now with all
+mankind, wherein are given renewed hearts which carry the divine law
+within themselves; the reciprocal and mutually blessed possession of
+God by men and of men by God, the universally diffused knowledge of
+God, which is more than head knowledge, being the consciousness of
+possessing Him; and, finally, the oblivion of all sins. These
+promises are fulfilled, and the covenant made sure, by the shed
+blood of Christ. So, finally, it is 'shed for many, for the
+remission of sins.' The end of Christ's death is pardon which can
+only be extended on the ground of His death. We are told that Christ
+did not teach the doctrine of atonement. Did He establish the Lord's
+Supper? If He did (and nobody denies that), what did He mean by it,
+if He did not mean the setting forth by symbol of the very same
+truth which, stated in words, is the doctrine of His atoning death?
+This rite does not, indeed, explain the _rationale_ of the
+doctrine; but it is a piece of unmeaning mummery, unless it preaches
+plainly the fact that Christ's death is the ground of our
+forgiveness.
+
+Bread is the 'staff of life,' but blood is the life. So 'this cup'
+teaches that 'the life' of Jesus Christ must pass into His people's
+veins, and that the secret of the Christian life is 'I live; yet not
+I, but Christ liveth in me.' Wine is joy, and the Christian life is
+not only to be a feeding of the soul on Christ as its nourishment,
+but a glad partaking, as at a feast, of His life and therein of His
+joy. Gladness of heart is a Christian duty, 'the joy of the Lord is
+your strength' and should be _our_ joy; and though here we eat
+with loins girt, and go out, some of us to deny, some of us to flee,
+all of us to toil and suffer, yet we may have His joy fulfilled in
+ourselves, even whilst we sorrow.
+
+The Lord's Supper is predominantly a memorial, but it is also a
+prophecy, and is marked as such by the mysterious last words of
+Jesus, about drinking the new wine in the Father's kingdom. They
+point the thoughts of the saddened eleven, on whom the dark shadow
+of parting lay heavily, to an eternal reunion, in a land where 'all
+things are become new,' and where the festal cup shall be filled
+with a draught that has power to gladden and to inspire beyond any
+experience here. The joys of heaven will be so far analogous to the
+Christian joys of earth that the same name may be applied to both;
+but they will be so unlike that the old name will need a new
+meaning, and communion with Christ at His table in His kingdom, and
+our exuberance of joy in the full drinking in of His immortal life,
+will transcend the selectest hours of communion here. Compared with
+that fulness of joy they will be 'as water unto wine,'--the new wine
+of the kingdom.
+
+
+
+
+'IS IT I?'
+
+
+    'And they were exceeding sorrowful, and began every one
+    of them to say unto Him, Lord, is it I? 25. Then Judas,
+    which betrayed Him, answered and said, Master, is it I?
+    He said unto him, Thou hast said.'-MATT. xxvi. 22, 25.
+
+    'He then lying on Jesus' breast saith unto Him, Lord,
+    who is it?'--JOHN xiii. 25.
+
+The genius of many great painters has portrayed the Lord's Supper,
+but the reality of it was very different from their imaginings. We
+have to picture to ourselves some low table, probably a mere tray
+spread upon the ground, round which our Lord and the twelve
+reclined, in such a fashion as that the head of each guest came
+against the bosom of him that reclined above him; the place of
+honour being at the Lord's left hand, or higher up the table than
+Himself, and the second place being at His right, or below Himself.
+
+So there would be no eager gesticulations of disciples starting to
+their feet when our Lord uttered the sad announcement, 'One of you
+shall betray Me!' but only horror-struck amazement settled down upon
+the group. These verses, which we have put together, show us three
+stages in the conversation which followed the sad announcement. The
+three evangelists give us two of these; John alone omits these two,
+and only gives us the third.
+
+First, we have their question, born of a glimpse into the
+possibilities of evil in their hearts, 'Lord, is it I?'
+
+The form of that question in the original suggests that they
+expected a negative answer, and might be reproduced in English:
+'Surely it is not I?' None of them could think that he was the
+traitor, yet none of them could be sure that he was not. Their
+Master knew better than they did; and so, from a humble knowledge of
+what lay in them, coiled and slumbering, _but there_, they
+would not meet His words with a contradiction, but with a question.
+His answer spares the betrayer, and lets the dread work in their
+consciences for a little longer, for their good. For many hands
+dipped in the dish together, to moisten their morsels; and to say,
+'He that dippeth with Me in the dish, the same shall betray Me,' was
+to say nothing more than 'One of you at the table.'
+
+Then comes the second stage. Judas, reassured that he has escaped
+detection for the moment, and perhaps doubting whether the Master
+had anything more than a vague suspicion of treachery, or knew who
+was the traitor, shapes his lying lips with loathsome audacity into
+the same question, but yet not quite the same, The others had said,
+'Is it I, Lord?' he falters when he comes to that name, and dare not
+say 'Lord!' That sticks in his throat. 'Rabbi!' is as far as he can
+get. 'Is it I, Rabbi?' Christ's answer to him, 'Thou hast said,' is
+another instance of patient longsuffering. It was evidently a
+whisper that did not reach the ears of any of the others, for he
+leaves the room without suspicion. Our Lord still tries to save him
+from himself by showing Judas that his purpose is known, and by
+still concealing his name.
+
+Then comes the third stage, which we owe to John's Gospel. Here
+again he is true to his task of supplementing the narrative of the
+three synoptic Gospels. Remembering what I have said about the
+attitude of the disciples at the table, we can understand that
+Peter, if he occupied the principal place at the Lord's left, was
+less favourably situated for speaking to Christ than John, who
+reclined in the second seat at His right, and so he beckoned over
+the Master's head to John. The Revised Version gives the force of
+the original more vividly than the Authorised does: 'He, leaning
+back, as he was, on Jesus' breast, saith unto Him, Lord! who is it?'
+John, with a natural movement, bends back his head on his Master's
+breast, so as to ask and be answered, in a whisper. His question is
+_not_, 'Is it I?' He that leaned on Christ's bosom, and was
+compassed about by Christ's love, did not need to ask that. The
+question now is, 'Who is it?' Not a question of presumption, nor of
+curiosity, but of affection; and therefore answered: 'He it is to
+whom I shall give the sop, when I have dipped it.'
+
+The morsel dipped in the dish and passed by the host's hand to a
+guest, was a token of favour, of unity and confidence. It was one
+more attempt to save Judas, one more token of all-forgiving
+patience. No wonder that that last sign of friendship embittered his
+hatred and sharpened his purpose to an unalterable decision, or, as
+John says: 'After the sop, Satan entered into him.' For then, as
+ever, the heart which is not melted by Christ's offered love is
+hardened by it.
+
+Now, if we take these three stages of this conversation we may learn
+some valuable lessons from them. I take the first form of the
+question as an example of that wholesome self-distrust which a
+glimpse into the slumbering possibilities of evil in our hearts
+ought to give us all. I take the second on the lips of Judas, as an
+example of the very opposite of that self-distrust, the fixed
+determination to do a wrong thing, however clearly we know it to be
+wrong. And I take the last form of the question, as asked by John,
+as an illustration of the peaceful confidence which comes from the
+consciousness of Christ's love, and of communion with Him. Now a
+word or two about each of these.
+
+I. First, we have an example of that wholesome self-distrust, which
+a glimpse into the possibilities of evil that lie slumbering in all
+our hearts ought to teach every one of us.
+
+Every man is a mystery to himself. In every soul there lie, coiled
+and dormant, like hibernating snakes, evils that a very slight rise
+in the temperature will wake up into poisonous activity. And let no
+man say, in foolish self-confidence, that any form of sin which his
+brother has ever committed is impossible for him. Temperament
+shields us from much, no doubt. There are sins that 'we are inclined
+to,' and there are sins that 'we have no mind to.' But the identity
+of human nature is deeper than the diversity of temperament, and
+there are two or three considerations that should abate a man's
+confidence that _anything_ which one man has done it is impossible
+that he should do. Let me enumerate them very briefly. Remember, to
+begin with, that all sins are at bottom but varying forms of one root.
+The essence of every evil is selfishness, and when you have that, it
+is exactly as with cooks who have the 'stock' by the fireside. They
+can make any kind of soup out of it, with the right flavouring. We
+have got the mother tincture of all wickedness in each of our hearts;
+and therefore do not let us be so sure that it cannot be manipulated
+and flavoured into any form of sin. All sin is one at bottom, and this
+is the definition of it--living to myself instead of living to God.
+So it may easily pass from one form of evil into another, just as
+light and heat, motion and electricity, are all--they tell us--various
+forms and phases of one force. Just as doctors will tell you that
+there are types of disease which slip from one form of sickness
+into another, so if we have got the infection about us it is a matter
+very much of accidental circumstances what shape it takes. And no
+man with a human heart is safe in pointing to any sin, and saying,
+'_That_ form of transgression I reckon alien to myself.'
+
+And then let me remind you, too, that the same consideration is
+reinforced by this other fact, that all sin is, if I may so say,
+gregarious; is apt not only to slip from one form into another, but
+that any evil is apt to draw another after it. The tangled mass of
+sin is like one of those great fields of seaweed that you some times
+come across upon the ocean, all hanging together by a thousand slimy
+growths; which, if lifted from the wave at any point, drags up yards
+of it inextricably grown together. No man commits only one kind of
+transgression. All sins hunt in couples. According to the grim
+picture of the Old Testament, about another matter, 'None of them
+shall want his mate. The wild beasts of the desert shall meet with
+the wild beasts of the islands.' One sin opens the door for another,
+'and seven other spirits worse than himself' come and make holiday
+in the man's heart.
+
+Again, any evil is possible to us, seeing that all sin is but
+yielding to tendencies common to us all. The greatest transgressions
+have resulted from yielding to such tendencies. Cain killed his
+brother from jealousy; David besmirched his name and his reign by
+animal passion; Judas betrayed Christ because he was fond of money.
+Many a man has murdered another one simply because he had a hot
+temper. And you have got a temper, and you have got the love of
+money, and you have got animal passions, and you have got that which
+may stir you up into jealousy. Your neighbour's house has caught
+fire and been blown up. Your house, too, is built of wood, and
+thatched with straw, and you have as much dynamite in your cellars
+as he had in his. Do not be too sure that you are safe from the
+danger of explosion.
+
+And, again, remember that this same wholesome self-distrust is
+needful for us all, because all transgression is yielding to
+temptations that assail all men. Here are one hundred men in a
+plague-stricken city; they have all got to draw their water from the
+same well. If five or six of them died of cholera it would be very
+foolish of the other ninety-five to say, 'There is no chance of our
+being touched.' We all live in the same atmosphere; and the
+temptations that have overcome the men that have headed the count of
+crimes appeal to you. So the lesson is, 'Be not high-minded, but
+fear.'
+
+And remember, still further, that the same solemn consideration is
+enforced upon us by the thought that men will gradually drop down to
+the level which, before they began the descent, seemed to be
+impossible to them. 'Is thy servant a dog that he should do this
+thing?' said Hazael when the crime of murdering his master first
+floated before him. Yes, but he did it. By degrees he came down to
+the level to which he thought that he would never sink. First the
+imagination is inflamed, then the wish begins to draw the soul to
+the sin, then conscience pulls it back, then the fatal decision is
+made, and the deed is done. Sometimes all the stages are hurried
+quickly through, and a man spins downhill as cheerily and fast as a
+diligence down the Alps. Sometimes, as the coast of a country may
+sink an inch in a century until long miles of the flat seabeach are
+under water, and towers and cities are buried beneath the barren
+waves, so our lives may be gradually lowered, with a motion
+imperceptible but most real, bringing us down within high-water
+mark, and at last the tide may wash over what was solid land.
+
+So, dear friends, there is nothing more foolish than for any man to
+stand, self-confident that any form of evil that has conquered his
+brother has no temptation for him. It may not have for you, under
+present circumstances; it may not have for you to-day; but, oh!
+we have all of us one human heart, and 'he that trusteth in his own
+heart is a fool.' 'Blessed is the man that feareth always.' Humble
+self-distrust, consciousness of sleeping sin in my heart that may very
+quickly be stirred into stinging and striking; rigid self-control over
+all these possibilities of evil, are duties dictated by the plainest
+common-sense.
+
+Do not say, 'I know when to stop.' Do not say, 'I can go so far; it
+will not do me any harm.' Many a man has said that, and many a man
+has been ruined by it. Do not say, 'It is natural to me to have
+these inclinations and tastes, and there can be no harm in yielding
+to them.' It is perfectly natural for a man to stoop down over the
+edge of a precipice to gather the flowers that are growing in some
+cranny in the cliff; and it is as natural for him to topple over,
+and be smashed to a mummy at the bottom. God gave you your
+dispositions and your whole nature 'under lock and key,'--keep them
+so. And when you hear of, or see, great criminals and great crimes,
+say to yourself, as the good old Puritan divine said, looking at a
+man going to the scaffold, 'But for the grace of God there go I!'
+And in the contemplation of sins and apostasies, let us each look
+humbly at our own weakness, and pray Him to keep us from our
+brother's evils which may easily become ours.
+
+II. Secondly, we have here an example of precisely the opposite
+sort, namely, of that fixed determination to do evil which is
+unshaken by the clearest knowledge that it is evil.
+
+Judas heard his crime described in its own ugly reality. He heard
+his fate proclaimed by lips of absolute love and truth; and
+notwithstanding both, he comes unmoved and unshaken with his
+question. The dogged determination in his heart, that dares to see
+his evil stripped naked and is 'not ashamed,' is even more dreadful
+than the hypocrisy and sleek simulation of friendship in his face.
+
+Now most men turn away with horror from even the sins that they are
+willing to do, when they are put plainly and bluntly before them. As
+an old mediaeval preacher once said, 'There is nothing that is
+weaker than the devil stripped naked.' By which he meant exactly
+this--that we have to dress wrong in some fantastic costume or
+other, so as to hide its native ugliness, in order to tempt men to
+do it. So we have two sets of names for wrong things, one of which
+we apply to our brethren's sins, and the other to the same sins in
+ourselves. What I do is 'prudence,' what you do of the same sort is
+'covetousness'; what I do is 'sowing my wild oats,' what you do is
+'immorality' and 'dissipation'; what I do is 'generous living,' what
+you do is 'drunkenness' and 'gluttony'; what I do is 'righteous
+indignation,' what you do is 'passionate anger.' And so you may go
+the whole round of evil. Very bad are the men who can look at their
+deed, described in Its own inherent deformity, and yet say, 'Yes;
+that is it, and I am going to do it.' 'One of you shall betray Me.'
+'Yes; I will betray you!' It must have taken something to look into
+the Master's face, and keep the fixed purpose steady.
+
+Now I ask you to think, dear friends, of this, that that obstinate
+condition of dogged determination to do a wrong thing, knowing it to
+be a wrong thing, is a condition to which all evil steadily tends.
+We may not come to it in this world--I do not know that men ever do
+so wholly; but we are all getting towards it in regard to the
+special wrong deeds and desires which we cherish and commit. And
+when a man has once reached the point of saying to evil, 'Be thou my
+good,' then he is a 'devil' in the true meaning of the word; and
+wherever he is, he is in hell! And the one unpardonable sin is the
+sin of clear recognition that a given thing is contrary to God's
+will, and unfaltering determination, notwithstanding, to do it. That
+is the only sin that cannot be pardoned, 'either in this world or in
+the world to come.'
+
+And so, my brother, seeing that such a condition is possible, and
+that all the paths of evil, however tentative and timorous they may
+be at first, and however much the sin may be wrapped up with excuses
+and forms and masks, tend to that condition, let us take that old
+prayer upon our lips, which befits both those who distrust
+themselves because of slumbering sins, and those who dread being
+conquered by manifest iniquity:--'Who can understand his errors?
+Cleanse Thou me from secret faults. Keep back Thy servant also from
+presumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over me.'
+
+III. Now, lastly, we have in the last question an example of the
+peaceful confidence that comes from communion with Jesus Christ.
+
+John leaned on the Master's bosom. 'He was the disciple whom Jesus
+loved.' And so compassed with that great love, and feeling absolute
+security within the enclosure of that strong hand, his question is
+not, 'Is it I?' but 'Who is it?' From which I think we may fairly
+draw the conclusion that to feel that Christ loves me, and that I am
+compassed about by Him, is the true security against my falling into
+any sin.
+
+It was not John's love to Christ, but Christ's to John that made his
+safety. He did not say: 'I love Thee so much that I cannot betray
+Thee.' For all our feelings and emotions are but variable, and to
+build confidence upon them is to build a heavy building upon
+quicksand; the very weight of it drives out the foundations. But he
+thought to himself--or he felt rather than he thought--that all
+about him lay the sweet, warm, rich atmosphere of his Master's love;
+and to a man who was encompassed by that, treachery was impossible.
+
+Sin has no temptation so long as we actually enjoy the greater
+sweetness of Christ's felt love. Would thirty pieces of silver have
+been a bribe to John? Would anything that could have terrified
+others have frightened him from his Master's side whilst he felt His
+love? Will a handful of imitation jewellery, made out of coloured
+glass and paste, be any temptation to a man who bears a rich diamond
+on his finger? And will any of earth's sweetness be a temptation to
+a man who lives in the continual consciousness of the great rich
+love of Christ wrapping him round about? Brethren, not ourselves,
+not our faith, not our emotion, not our religious experience;
+nothing that is in us, is any security that we may not be tempted,
+and yield to the temptation, and deny or betray our Lord. There is
+only one thing that is a security, and that is that we be folded to
+the heart, and held by the hand, of that loving Lord. Then--then we
+may be confident that we shall not fall; for 'the Lord is able to
+make us stand.'
+
+Such confidence is but the other side of our self-distrust; is the
+constant accompaniment of it, must have that self-distrust for its
+condition and prerequisite, and leads to a yet deeper and more
+blessed form of that self-distrust. Faith in Him and 'no confidence
+in the flesh' are but the two sides of the same coin, the obverse
+and the reverse. The seed, planted in the ground, sends a little
+rootlet down, and a little spikelet up, by the same vital act. And
+so in our hearts, as it were, the downward rootlet is self-despair,
+and the upward shoot is faith in Christ. The two emotions go
+together--the more we distrust ourselves the more we shall rest upon
+Him, and the more we rest upon Him, and feel that all our strength
+comes, not from our foot, but from the Rock on which it stands, the
+more we shall distrust our own ability and our own faithfulness.
+
+Therefore, dear brethren, looking upon all the evil that is around
+us, and conscious in some measure of the weakness of our own hearts,
+let us do as a man would do who stands upon the narrow ledge of a
+cliff, and look sheer down into the depth below, and feels his head
+begin to reel and turn giddy; let us lay hold of the Guide's hand,
+and if we cleave by Him, He will hold up our goings that our
+footsteps slip not. Nothing else will. No length of obedient service
+is any guarantee against treachery and rebellion. As John Bunyan
+saw, there was a backdoor to hell from the gate of the Celestial
+City. Men have lived for years consistent professing Christians, and
+have fallen at last. Many a ship has come across half the world, and
+gone to pieces on the harbour bar. Many an army, victorious in a
+hundred fights, has been annihilated at last. No depths of religious
+experience, no heights of religious blessedness, no attainments of
+past virtue and self-sacrifice, are any guarantees for to-morrow.
+Trust in nothing and in nobody, least of all in yourselves and your
+own past. Trust only in Jesus Christ.
+
+'Now unto Him that is able to keep us from falling, and to present
+us faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy; to
+the only wise God our Saviour be glory and majesty, dominion and
+power, both now and for ever.' Amen.
+
+
+
+
+'THIS CUP'
+
+
+    'And Jesus took the cup, and grave thanks, and gave it
+    to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; 28. For this is My
+    blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for
+    the remission of sins'--MATT. xxvi. 27, 28.
+
+The comparative silence of our Lord as to the sacrificial character
+of His death has very often been urged as a reason for doubting that
+doctrine, and for regarding it as no part of the original Christian
+teaching. That silence may be accounted for by sufficient reasons.
+It has been very much exaggerated, and those who argue from it
+against the doctrine of the Atonement have forgotten that Jesus
+Christ founded the Lord's Supper.
+
+That rite shows us what He thought, and what He would have us think,
+of His death; and in the presence of its testimony it seems to me
+impossible to deny that His conception of it was distinctly
+sacrificial. By it He points out the moment of His whole career
+which He desires that men should remember. Not His words of
+tenderness and wisdom; not His miracles, amazing and gracious as
+these were; not the flawless beauty of His character, though it
+touches all hearts and wins the most rugged to love, and the most
+degraded to hope; but the moment in which He gave His life is what
+He would imprint for ever on the memory of the world.
+
+And not only so, but in the rite he distinctly tells us in what
+aspect He would have that death remembered. Not as the tragic end of
+a noble career which might be hallowed by tears such as are shed
+over a martyr's ashes; not as the crowning proof of love; not as the
+supreme act of patient forgiveness; but as a death for us, in which,
+as by the blood of the sacrifice, is secured the remission of sins.
+
+And not only so, but the double symbol in the Lord's Supper--whilst
+in some respects the bread and wine speak the same truths, and
+certainly point to the same Cross--has in each of its parts special
+lessons intrusted to it, and special truths to proclaim. The bread
+and the wine both say:--'Remember Me and My death.' Taken in
+conjunction they point to that death as violent; taken separately
+they each suggest various aspects of it, and of the blessings that
+will flow to us therefrom. And it is my present purpose to bring
+out, as briefly and as clearly as I can, the special lessons which
+our Lord would have us draw from that cup which is the emblem of His
+shed blood.
+
+I. First, then, observe that it speaks to us of a divine treaty or
+covenant.
+
+Ancient Israel had lived for nearly 2000 years under the charter of
+their national existence which, as we read in the Old Testament, was
+given on Sinai amidst thunderings and lightnings--'Now, therefore,
+if ye will obey My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ye shall
+be a peculiar treasure unto Me above all people; for all the earth
+is Mine, and ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests and an holy
+nation.'
+
+And that covenant, or agreement, or treaty, on the part of God, was
+ratified by a solemn act, in which the blood of the sacrifice,
+divided into two portions, was sprinkled, one half upon the altar,
+and the other half, after their acceptance of the conditions and
+obligations of the covenant, on the people, who had pledged
+themselves to obedience.
+
+And now, here is a Galilean peasant, in a borrowed upper room,
+within four-and-twenty hours of His ignominious death which might
+seem to blast all His work, who steps forward and says, 'I put away
+that ancient covenant which knits this nation to God. It is
+antiquated. I am the true offering and sacrifice, by the blood of
+which, sprinkled on altar and on people, a new covenant, built upon
+better promises, shall henceforth be.'
+
+What a tremendous piece of audacity, except on the one hypothesis
+that He that spake was indeed the Word of God; and that He was
+making that which Himself had established of old, to give way to
+that which He establishes now! The new covenant which Christ seals
+in His blood, is the charter, the better charter, under the
+conditions of which, not a nation but the world may find an external
+salvation which dwarfs all the deliverances of the past. That idea
+of a covenant confirmed by Christ's blood may sound to many hearers
+dry and hard. But if you will try to think what great truths are
+wrapped up in the theological phraseology, you will find them very
+real and very strong. Is it not a grand thought that between us and
+the infinite divine Nature there is established a firm and unmovable
+agreement? Then He has revealed His purposes; we are not left to
+grope in darkness, at the mercy of 'peradventures' and 'probablies';
+nor reduced to consult the ambiguous oracles of nature or of
+Providence, or the varying voices of our own hearts, or painfully
+and dubiously to construct more or less strong bases for confidence
+in a loving God out of such hints and fragments of revelation as
+these supply. He has come out of His darkness, and spoken articulate
+words, plain words, faithful words, which bind Him to a distinctly
+defined course of action. Across the great ocean of possible modes
+of action for a divine nature He has, if I may so say, buoyed out
+for Himself a channel, so as that we know His path, which is in the
+deep waters. He has limited Himself by the utterance of a faithful
+word, and we can now come to Him with His own promise, and cast it
+down before Him, and say: 'Thou hast spoken, and Thou art bound to
+fulfil it.' We have a covenant wherein God has shown us His hand,
+has told us what He is going to do and has thereby pledged Himself
+to its performance.
+
+And, still further, in order to get the full sweetness of this
+thought, to break the husk and reach to the kernel, you must
+remember what, according to the New Testament, are the conditions of
+this covenant. The old agreement was, 'If ye will obey My voice and
+do My commandments, then,'--so and so will happen. The old condition
+was, 'Do and live; be righteous and blessed!' The new condition is:
+'Take and have; believe and live!' The one was law, the other is
+gift; the one was retribution, the other is forgiveness. One was
+outward, hard, rigid law, fitly 'graven with a pen of iron on the
+rocks for ever'; the other is impulse, love, a power bestowed that
+will make us obedient; and the sole condition that we have to render
+is the condition of humble and believing acceptance of the divine
+gift. The new covenant, in the exuberant fulness of its mercy, and
+in the tenderness of its gracious purposes, is at once the
+completion and the antithesis of the ancient covenant with its
+precepts and its retribution.
+
+And, still further, this 'new covenant,' of which the essence is
+God's bestowment of Himself on every heart that wills to possess
+Him; this new covenant, according to the teaching of these words of
+my text and of the symbol to which they refer, is ratified and
+sealed by that great sacrifice. The blood was sprinkled on the
+altar; the blood was sprinkled on the people, which being translated
+into plain, unmetaphorical language is simply this, that Christ's
+death remains for ever present to the divine mind as the great
+reason and motive which modifies His government, and which ensures
+that His love shall ever find its way to every seeking soul. His
+death is the token; His death is the reason; His death is the pledge
+of the unending and the inexhaustible mercy of God bestowed upon
+each of us. 'He that spared not His own Son, shall He not with Him
+also freely give us all things?' The outward rite with its symbol is
+the exhibition in visible form of that truth, that the blood of
+Jesus Christ seals to the world the infinite mercy of God.
+
+And, on the other hand, that same blood of the covenant, sprinkled
+upon the other parties to the treaty, even our poor sinful hearts,
+binds them to the fulfilment of the condition which belongs to them.
+That is to say, by the power of that sacrifice there are evoked in
+our poor souls, faith, love, surrender. It, and it alone, knits us
+to God; it, and it alone, binds us to the fulfilment of the
+covenant. My brother, have you entered into that sweet, solemn,
+sacred alliance and union with God? Have you accepted and fulfilled
+the conditions? Is your heart 'sprinkled with the blood so freely
+shed for you'; and have you thereby been brought into living
+alliance with the God who has pledged His being and His name to be
+the all-sufficient God to you?
+
+II. Still further, this cup speaks to us of the forgiveness of sins.
+
+One theory, and one theory only, as it seems to me, of the meaning
+of Christ's death, is possible if these words of my text ever
+dropped from Christ's lips, or if He ever instituted the rite to
+which they refer; He must have believed that His death was a
+sacrifice, without which the sins of the world were not forgiven;
+and by which forgiveness came to us all.
+
+And I do not think that we rightly conceive the relation between the
+sacrifices of barbarous heathen tribes, or the sacrifices appointed
+in Israel, and the great sacrifice on the Cross, if we say that our
+Lord's death is only figuratively accommodated to these in order to
+meet lower or grosser conceptions, but rather, I take it, that the
+accommodation is the other way. In all nations beyond the limits of
+Israel the sacrifices of living victims spoke not only of surrender
+and dependence, but likewise of the consciousness of demerit and
+evil on the part of the offerers, and were at once a confession of
+sin, a prayer for pardon, and a propitiation of an offended God. And
+I believe that the sacrifices in Israel were intended and adapted
+not only to meet the deep-felt want of human nature, common to them
+as to all other tribes, but also were intended and adapted to point
+onwards to Him in whose death a real want of mankind was met, in
+whose death a real sacrifice was offered, in whose death an angry
+God was not indeed propitiated, but in whose death the loving Father
+of our souls Himself provided the Lamb for the offering, without
+which, for reasons deeper than we can wholly fathom, it was
+impossible that sin should be remitted.
+
+I insist upon no theory of an Atonement. I believe there is no
+Gospel, worth calling so, worth the preaching, worth your believing,
+or that will ever move the world or purify society, except the
+Gospel which begins with the fact of an Atonement, and points to the
+Cross as the altar on which the Sacrifice for the sins of the world,
+without whose death pardon is impossible, has died for us all.
+
+Oh! dear friends, do not let yourselves be confused by the
+difficulties that beset all human and incomplete statements of the
+philosophy of the death of Christ; but getting away from these,
+cleave you to the fact that your sins were laid upon Christ, and
+that He has died for us all; that His death is a sacrifice; His body
+broken for us; and for the remission of our sins, His blood freely
+shed. Thus, and only thus, will you come to the understanding either
+of the sweetness of His love or of the power of His example; then,
+and only then, shall we know why it was that He elected to be
+remembered, out of all the moments of His life, by that one when He
+hung in weakness upon the Cross, and out of the darkness came the
+cry, 'My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?'
+
+III. And now, again, let me remind you that this cup speaks likewise
+of a life infused.
+
+'The blood is the life,' says the physiology of the Hebrews. The
+blood is the life, and when men drink of that cup they symbolise the
+fact that Christ's own life and spirit are imparted to them that
+love Him. 'Except ye eat the flesh, and drink the blood of the Son
+of Man, ye have no life in you.' The very heart of Christ's gift to
+us is the gift of His own very life to be the life of our lives. In
+deep, mystical reality He Himself passes into our being, and the
+'law of the spirit of life makes us free from the law of sin and
+death,' so that we may say: 'He that is joined to the Lord is one
+spirit,' and the humble believing soul may rejoice in this: 'I live,
+yet not I, but Christ liveth in Me.' This is, in one aspect, the
+very deepest meaning of this Communion rite. As physicians sometimes
+tried to restore life to an almost dead man by the transfusion into
+his shrunken veins of the fresh warm blood from a young and healthy
+subject, so into our fevered life, into our corrupted blood, there
+is poured the full tide of the pure and perfect life of Jesus Christ
+Himself, and we live, not by our own power, nor for our own will,
+nor in obedience to our own caprices, but by Him and in Him, and
+with Him and for Him. This is the heart of Christianity, the
+possession within us of the life, the immortal life of Him that died
+for us.
+
+My brother have you that great gift in your heart? Be sure of this,
+that unless the life of Christ is in you by faith, ye are dead,
+'dead in trespasses and in sins'; dead, and sure to rot away and
+disintegrate into corruption. The cup of blessing which we drink
+speaks to us of the transfusion into our spirits of the Spirit of
+Jesus Christ.
+
+IV. And lastly, it speaks of a festal gladness.
+
+The bread says nothing to us of the remission of sins. The broken
+bread proclaims, indeed, our nourishment from Jesus, but falls short
+of the deep and solemn truth that it is the very life-blood of
+Christ Himself which nourishes us and vitalises us. And the bread,
+in like manner, proclaims indeed the fact that we are fed on Him,
+but says nothing of the joy of that feeding. The wine is the symbol
+of that, and it proclaims to us that the Christian life here on
+earth, just because it is the feeding on and the drinking in of
+Jesus Christ, ought ever to be a life of blessedness, of abounding
+joy, by whatsoever darkness, burdens, cares, toils, sorrows, and
+solitude it may be shaded and saddened. They who live on Christ,
+they who drink in of His spirit, they should be glad in all
+circumstances, they, and they alone. We sit at a table, though it be
+in the wilderness, though it be in the presence of our enemies,
+where there ought to be joy and the voice of rejoicing.
+
+But beyond that, as our Master Himself taught these apostles in that
+upper room, this cup points onwards to a future feast. At that
+solemn hour Jesus stayed His own heart with the vision of the
+perfected kingdom and the glad festival then. So this Communion has
+a prophetic element in it, and links on with predictions and
+parables which speak of the 'marriage supper' of the great King, and
+of the time when we shall sit at His table in His kingdom.
+
+For the past the Lord's Supper speaks of the one sufficient oblation
+and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. For the present it
+speaks of life produced and sustained by communion with Jesus
+Christ. And for the future it speaks of the unending, joyful
+satisfaction of all desires in the 'upper room' of the heavens.
+
+How unlike, and yet how like to that scene in the upper room at
+Jerusalem! From it the sad disciples went out, some of them to deny
+their Master; all of them to struggle, to sin, to lose Him from
+their sight, to toil, to sorrow, and at last to die. From that other
+table we shall go no more out, but sit there with Him in full
+fruition of unfailing blessedness and participation of His immortal
+life for evermore.
+
+Dear brethren, these are the lessons, these the hopes, which this
+'blood of the new covenant' teaches and inspires. Have you entered
+into that covenant with God? Have you made sure work of the
+forgiveness of your sins through His blood? Have you received into
+your spirits His immortal life? Then you may humbly be confident
+that, after life's weariness and lonesomeness are past, you will be
+welcomed to the banqueting hall by the Lord of the feast, and sit
+with Him and His servants who loved Him at that table and be glad.
+
+
+
+
+'UNTIL THAT DAY'
+
+
+    'I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine,
+    until that day when I drink it new with you in my
+    Father's kingdom.'--MATT. xxvi. 29.
+
+This remarkable saying of our Lord's is recorded in all of the
+accounts of the institution of the Lord's Supper. The thought
+embodied in it ought to be present in the minds of all who partake
+of that rite. It converts what is primarily a memorial into a
+prophecy. It bids us hope as well as, and because we, remember. The
+light behind us is cast forward on to the dimness before. So the
+Apostle Paul, in his solitary reference to the Communion--which,
+indeed, is an entirely incidental one, and evoked simply by the
+corruptions in the Corinthian Church, emphasises this prophetic and
+onward-looking aspect of the backward-looking rite when he says, 'Ye
+do show the Lord's death _till He come_.'
+
+Now, it seems to me that those of us who so strongly hold that the
+Communion is primarily a simple memorial service, with no mysterious
+or magical efficacy of any sort about it, do rather ignore in our
+ordinary thoughts the other aspect which is brought out in my text;
+and that comparative ignoring seems to me to be but a part of a very
+lamentable and general tendency of this day, whereby the prospect of
+a future life has become somewhat dimmed and does not fill the place
+either in ordinary Christian thinking, or as a motive for Christian
+service which the proportion of faith, and the relative importance
+of the present and the future suggest that it ought to fill. The
+Christianity of this day has so much to do with the present life,
+and the thought of the Gospel as a power in the present has been so
+emphasised, in legitimate reaction from the opposite exaggeration,
+that there is great need, as I believe, to preach to Christian people
+the wisdom of making more prominent in their faith their immortal
+hope. I wish, then, to turn now to this aspect of the rite which we
+regard as a memorial, and try to emphasise its forward-looking
+attitude, and the large blessed truths that emerge if we consider that.
+
+I. First, let me say just a word about the twin aspect of the
+Communion as a memorial prophecy, or prophetic remembrance.
+
+Now, I need not remind you, I suppose, that according to the view
+which, as I believe, the New Testament takes, and which certainly we
+Nonconformists take, of all the rites of external worship, every one
+of them is a prophecy, because every act in which our sense is
+brought in to reinforce the spirit--and by outward forms, be they
+vocal, or be they manual, or be they of any other sort, we try to
+express and to quicken spiritual emotions and intellectual
+convictions--declares its own imperfection, digs its own grave, and
+prophecies its own resurrection in a nobler and better fashion. Just
+because these outward symbols of bread and wine do, through the
+senses, quicken the faith and the love of the spirit, they declare
+themselves to be transitory, and they point onwards to the time when
+that which is perfect shall absorb, and so destroy, that which is in
+part, and when sense shall be no longer necessary as the ally and
+humble servant of spirit. 'I saw no temple therein.' Temples, and
+rites, and services, and holy days, and all the external apparatus
+of worship, are but scaffolding, and just as the scaffolding round a
+building is a prophecy of its own being pulled down when the
+building is reared and completed, so we cannot partake of these
+external symbols rightly, unless we recognise their transiency, and
+feel that they say to us, 'A mightier than I cometh after me, the
+latchet of whose shoe I am not worthy to unloose.' The light that
+shines in the dark heralds the day and its own extinction.
+
+So, looking back we must look forward, and partaking of the symbol,
+we must reach out to the time when the symbol shall be antiquated,
+the reality having come. The Passover of Israel did not more truly
+point onwards to the true Lamb of Sacrifice, and to the true
+Passover that was slain for us, and to its own elevation into the
+Lord's Supper of the Christian Church, than the Lord's Supper of the
+Christian Church points onwards to the 'marriage supper of the
+Lamb,' and its own cessation.
+
+But then, again, let me remind you that this prophetic aspect is
+inherent in the memorial aspect of the Communion, because what we
+remember necessarily demands the coming of what we hope. That is to
+say, if Jesus Christ be what the Lord's Supper says that He is, and
+if He has done what that broken bread and poured out wine proclaim,
+according to His own utterance, that He has done, then clearly that
+death which was for the life of the world, that death which was the
+seal of a covenant, that body broken for the remission of sins, that
+wine partaken of as a reception into ourselves of the very life-blood
+of Jesus Christ, do all demand something far nobler and more perfect
+than the broken, incomplete obedience and loyalties and communions
+which Christian men here exercise and possess.
+
+If He died, as the rite says that He did, and if dying He left such
+a commentary upon His act as that ordinance affords, then He cannot
+have done with the world; then the powers that were set in motion by
+His death cannot pause nor cease their action until they have
+reached their appropriate culmination in effecting all that it was
+in them to effect. If, leaving His people, He said to them, 'Never
+forget My death for you, My broken body, and My shed blood,' He
+therein said that the time will come, must come, when all the powers
+of the Cross shall be incorporated in humanity, and when the parted
+shall be reunited. The Communion would stand as the expression of
+Christ's mistaken estimate of His own importance, if there were not
+beyond the grave the perfecting of it, and the full appropriation
+and joyful possession of all which the death that it signifies
+brought to mankind.
+
+Therefore, dear brethren, it seems to me that the best way by which
+Christians can deepen their confidence and brighten their hope in
+the perfect reunion and blessedness of the heavens, is to increase
+the firmness of their faith in, and the depth of their apprehension
+of, the sacrifice of the Cross. If the Cross demands the Crown, then
+our surest way to realise as certain our own possession of that
+Crown is to cling very close to that Cross. The more we look
+backwards to it the more will it fling its light into all the dark
+places that are in front of us, and flush the heavens up to the
+seventh and beyond, with the glories that stream from it. Hold fast
+by the Cross, and the more fully, believingly, joyously,
+unfalteringly, we recognise in it the foundation of our salvation,
+the more gladly, clearly, operatively, shall we cherish the hope
+that 'the headstone shall be brought forth with shoutings,' and that
+the imperfect symbolical communion of earth will grow and greaten
+into complete and real union in eternal bliss.
+
+Let me urge, then, this, that, as a matter of fact, a faith in
+eternal glory goes with and fluctuates in the same degree and manner
+as does the faith in the past sacrifice that Christ has made. He,
+and He alone, as I believe, turns nebulae into solidity, and makes
+of the more or less tremulous anticipation of a more or less dim and
+distant future, a calm, still certainty. We know that He will come
+because, and in proportion as, we believe that He has come. Keep
+these two things, then, always together, the memory and the hope.
+They stand like two great piers, one on either side of a narrow,
+dark glen, and suspended from them is stretched the bridge, along
+which the happy pilgrims may travel and enter into rest.
+
+II. And now, let us turn for a moment to the lovely vision of that
+future which is suggested by our text.
+
+The truest way, I was going to say the only way, by which we can
+have any conceptions of a condition of being of which we have no
+experience, is to fall back upon the experiences which we have, and
+use them as symbols and metaphors. The curtain is the picture. So
+our Lord here, in accordance with the necessary limitations of our
+human knowledge, contents Himself with using what lay at His hand,
+and taking it as giving faint shadows and metaphorical suggestions
+as to spiritual blessedness yonder.
+
+There is one other way, as it seems to me, by which we can in any
+measure body forth to ourselves that unknown condition of things,
+and that is to fall back upon our present experiences in another
+fashion, and negative all of them which involve pain and limitation
+and incompleteness. There shall be no night--no sorrow--no tears--no
+sighing, and the like. These negatives of the strong and stinging
+griefs and limitations of the present are perhaps our second-best
+way of coming to some prophetic vision of that great future.
+
+Remembering, then, that we are dealing with pure metaphor, and that
+the exact translation of the metaphor into reality is not yet
+possible for us, let us take one or two very plain thoughts out of
+this great saying--'Until I drink it new with you in My Father's
+kingdom.'
+
+Then, we have to think of the completion of the Christian life
+beyond, which is also the completion of the results of Christ's
+death on the Cross, as being, according to the very frequent
+metaphor both of the Old and the New Testament, a prolonged
+festival. I do not need to speak of the details of the thoughts that
+thence emerge. Let me sum them up as briefly as may be. They include
+the satisfaction of every desire and the nourishment of all
+strength, and food for every faculty. When we think of the hungry
+hearts that all men carry, and how true it is that even the wisest
+and the holiest of us are 'spending our money for that which is not
+bread, and our labour for that which satisfieth not'; when we think
+of how the choicest foods that life can provide, even for the
+noblest hunger of noble hearts, are too often to us but as a feeding
+on ashes that will leave grit between the teeth and a foul taste
+upon the palate, surely it is blessed to think that we may, after
+all life's disappointments, cherish the hope of a perfect fruition,
+and that yonder, if not here, it will be fully true that 'God never
+sends mouths but He sends meat to feed them.' That is not so in this
+world, for we all carry hungers which impel us forward to nobler
+living, and which it would not be good for us to have satisfied
+here. But, unless the whole universe is a godless chaos, there must
+be somewhere a state in which a man shall have all that he wants,
+and shall want only what he ought.
+
+The emblem of a feast suggests also society. The solitary travellers
+who have been toiling and moiling through the desert all the day
+long, snatching up a hasty mouthful as they march, and lonely many a
+time, come together at last, and sit together there joyous and
+united. Deep down in our hearts some of us have gashes that always
+bleed. We know losses and loneliness, and we can feel, I hope, how
+blessed is the thought that all the wanderers shall sit there
+together, and rejoice in each other's communion, 'and so shall
+_we_ ever be with the Lord.'
+
+But besides satisfaction and society the figure suggests repose.
+That rest is not indolence, for we have to carry other metaphors
+with us in order to come to the full significance of this one, and
+the festal imagery is not all that we have to take into account; for
+we read, 'I grant unto you a kingdom, and ye shall sit on twelve
+thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel,' as well as 'ye shall
+eat and drink with Me at My table in My kingdom.' So repose, which
+is consistent and coexistent with the intensest activity, is the
+great hope that comes out of these metaphors. But for many of us--I
+suppose for all of us elderly people--who are about weary of work
+and worry, there is no deeper hope than the hope of rest. 'I have
+had labour enough for one,' says one of our poets. And I think there
+is something in most of our hearts that echoes that and rejoices to
+hear that, after the long march, 'ye shall sit with Me at My table.'
+
+But besides satisfaction, society, and rest, the figure suggests
+gladness. Wine is the emblem of the joyous side of a feast, just as
+bread is the emblem of the necessary nourishment. And it is
+_new_ wine; joy raised to a higher power, transformed and
+glorified; and yet the old emotion in a new form. As for that
+gladness, 'eye hath not seen, neither hath it entered into the heart
+of man to conceive, the things that God hath prepared for them that
+love Him.' Only all we weary, heavy-laden, saddened, anxious,
+disappointed, tormented people may hope for these festal joys, if we
+are Christ's. The feast will last when all the troubles and the
+cares which helped us to it are dead and buried and forgotten.
+
+These four things, brethren--satisfaction, society, rest, new
+gladness--are proclaimed and prophesied to each of us, if we will,
+by this memorial rite.
+
+Again, there comes from this aspect of the Communion the thought
+that the blessed condition of the Christian soul hereafter is a
+feast on a sacrifice. We must distinguish between the sense in which
+our Lord drinks with us, and the sense in which we alone partake of
+that feast of which He provides the viands. But just as in the
+symbolic ordinance of the Communion the very essence of it is that
+what was offered as sacrifice is now incorporated into the
+participant's spiritual being, and becomes part of himself, and the
+life of his life, so, in the future, all the blessedness of the
+clustered and constellated joys of that life, which is one eternal
+festival, shall arise from the reception into perfected spirits with
+ever-growing greatness and blessedness of the Christ that died and
+ever lives for them. That heavenly glory, to its highest pinnacle of
+aspiration, to its most rapt completeness of gladness, is all the
+consequence of Christ's death on the Cross. That death, which we
+commemorate, is the procuring cause of man's entrance into bliss,
+and that death is the subject of the continual, grateful remembrance
+of the saints in the seventh heaven of their glory. Life yonder, as
+all true life here, consists in taking into ourselves the life of
+Jesus Christ, and the law for heaven is the same as the law for
+earth, 'He that eateth Me, even he shall live by Me.'
+
+Lastly, the conception of the future for Christian souls arising
+from this aspect of the Lord's Supper is that it is not only a
+feast, and a feast on a sacrifice, but that it is a feast with the
+King.
+
+'_With you_ I will drink it.' Brethren, we pass beyond metaphor when
+we gather up and condense all the vague brightness and glories of that
+perfect future into this one rapturous, overwhelming, all-embracing
+thought: 'So shall we ever be with the Lord.' I could almost wish
+that Christian people had no other thought of that future than this,
+for surely in its grand simplicity, in its ineffable depth, there lie
+the germs of every blessedness. How poor all the material emblems are
+of which sensuous imaginations make so much, when compared with that
+hope! As the good old hymn has it, which to me says more, in its bold
+simplicity, than all the sentimental enlargements of Scriptural
+metaphors which some people admire so much--
+
+  'It is enough that Christ knows all,
+   And I shall be with Him.'
+
+Strange that He says, 'I will drink it _with you._' Does He
+need sustenance? Does He need any external things in order to make
+His feast? No! and Yes! 'I will sup with Him' as well as 'He with
+me.' And, surely, His meat and drink are the love, the loyalty, the
+obedience, the receptiveness, the society of His redeemed children.
+'The joy of the Lord' comes from 'seeing of the travail of His
+soul,' and His servants do enter into that joy in deep and wondrous
+fashion. We not only shall live on Christ, but He Himself puts to
+His own lips the chalice that He commends to ours, and in marvellous
+condescension to, and identity with, our glorified humanity drinks
+with us the 'new wine' in the Father's kingdom.
+
+
+
+
+GETHSEMANE, THE OIL-PRESS
+
+
+    'Then cometh Jesus with them unto a place called
+    Gethsemane, and saith unto the disciples, Sit ye here,
+    while I go and pray yonder. 37. And He took with Him
+    Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be
+    sorrowful and very heavy. 38. Then saith He unto them,
+    My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry
+    ye here, and watch with Me. 39. And He went a little
+    farther, and fell on His face, and prayed, saying, O My
+    Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me:
+    nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt. 40. And
+    He cometh unto the disciples, and findeth them asleep,
+    and saith unto Peter, What, could ye not watch with Me
+    one hour! 41. Watch and pray, that ye enter not into
+    temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh
+    is weak. 42. He went away again the second time, and
+    prayed, saying, O My Father, if this cup may not pass
+    away from Me, except I drink it, Thy will be done.
+    43. And He came and found them asleep again: for their
+    eyes were heavy. 44. And He left them, and went away
+    again, and prayed the third time, saying the same words.
+    45. Then cometh He to His disciples, and saith unto
+    them, Sleep on now, and take your rest: behold, the
+    hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is betrayed into
+    the hands of sinners. 46. Rise, let us be going: behold,
+    he is at hand that doth betray Me.'--MATT. xxvi. 36-46.
+
+One shrinks from touching this incomparable picture of unexampled
+sorrow, for fear lest one's finger-marks should stain it. There is
+no place here for picturesque description, which tries to mend the
+gospel stories by dressing them in to-day's fashions, nor for
+theological systematisers and analysers of the sort that would
+'botanise upon their mother's grave.' We must put off our shoes, and
+feel that we stand on holy ground. Though loving eyes saw something
+of Christ's agony, He did not let them come beside Him, but withdrew
+into the shadow of the gnarled olives, as if even the moonbeams must
+not look too closely on the mystery of such grief. We may go as near
+as love was allowed to go, but stop where it was stayed, while we
+reverently and adoringly listen to what the Evangelist tells us of
+that unspeakable hour.
+
+I. Mark the 'exceeding sorrow' of the Man of Sorrows. Somewhere on
+the western foot of Olivet lay the garden, named from an oil-press
+formerly or then in it, which was to be the scene of the holiest and
+sorest sorrow on which the moon, that has seen so much misery, has
+ever looked. Truly it was 'an oil-press,' in which 'the good olive'
+was crushed by the grip of unparalleled agony, and yielded precious
+oil, which has been poured into many a wound since then. Eight of
+the eleven are left at or near the entrance, while He passes deeper
+into the shadows with the three. They had been witnesses of His
+prayers once before, on the slopes of Hermon, when He was
+transfigured before them. They are now to see a no less wonderful
+revelation of His glory in His filial submission. There is something
+remarkable in Matthew's expression, 'He began to be sorrowful,'--as
+if a sudden wave of emotion, breaking over His soul, had swept His
+human sensibilities before it. The strange word translated by the
+Revisers 'sore troubled' is of uncertain derivation, and may
+possibly be simply intended to intensify the idea of sorrow; but
+more probably it adds another element, which Bishop Lightfoot
+describes as 'the confused, restless, half-distracted state which is
+produced by physical derangement or mental distress.' A storm of
+agitation and bewilderment broke His calm, and forced from His
+patient lips, little wont to speak of His own emotions, or to seek
+for sympathy, the unutterably pathetic cry, 'My soul is exceeding
+sorrowful'--compassed about with sorrow, as the word means--'even
+unto death.' No feeble explanation of these words does justice to
+the abyss of woe into which they let us dimly look. They tell the
+fact, that, a little more and the body would have sunk under the
+burden. He knew the limits of human endurance, for 'all things were
+made by Him,' and, knowing it, He saw that He had grazed the very
+edge. Out of the darkness He reaches a hand to feel for the grasp of
+a friend, and piteously asks these humble lovers to stay beside Him,
+not that they could help Him to bear the weight, but that their
+presence had some solace in it. His agony must be endured alone,
+therefore He bade them tarry there; but He desired to have them at
+hand, therefore He went but 'a little forward.' They could not bear
+it with Him, but they could 'watch with' Him, and that poor comfort
+is all He asks. No word came from them. They were, no doubt, awed
+into silence, as the truest sympathy is used to be, in the presence
+of a great grief. Is it permitted us to ask what were the fountains
+of these bitter floods that swept over Christ's sinless soul? Was
+the mere physical shrinking from death all? If so, we may reverently
+say that many a maiden and old man, who drew all their fortitude
+from Jesus, have gone to stake or gibbet for His sake, with a calm
+which contrasts strangely with His agitation. Gethsemane is robbed
+of its pathos and nobleness if that be all. But it was not all.
+Rather it was the least bitter of the components of the cup. What
+lay before Him was not merely death, but the death which was to
+atone for a world's sin, and in which, therefore, the whole weight
+of sin's consequences was concentrated. 'The Lord hath made to meet
+on Him the iniquities of us all'; that is the one sufficient
+explanation of this infinitely solemn and tender scene. Unless we
+believe that, we shall find it hard to reconcile His agitation in
+Gethsemane with the perfection of His character as the captain of
+'the noble army of martyrs.'
+
+II. Note the prayer of filial submission. Matthew does not tell us
+of the sweat falling audibly and heavily, and sounding to the three
+like slow blood-drops from a wound, nor of the strengthening angel,
+but he gives us the prostrate form, and the threefold prayer,
+renewed as each moment of calm, won by it, was again broken in upon
+by a fresh wave of emotion. Thrice He had to leave the disciples,
+and came back, a calm conqueror; and twice the enemy rallied and
+returned to the assault, and was at last driven finally from the
+field by the power of prayer and submission. The three Synoptics
+differ in their report of our Lord's words, but all mean the same
+thing in substance; and it is obvious that much more must have been
+spoken than they report. Possibly what we have is only the fragments
+that reached the three before they fell asleep. In any case, Jesus
+was absent from them on each occasion long enough to allow of their
+doing so.
+
+Three elements are distinguishable in our Lord's prayer. There is,
+first, the sense of Sonship, which underlies all, and was never more
+clear than at that awful moment. Then there is the recoil from 'the
+cup,' which natural instinct could not but feel, though sinlessly.
+The flesh shrank from the Cross, which else had been no suffering;
+and if no suffering, then had been no atonement. His manhood would
+not have been like ours, nor His sorrows our pattern, if He had not
+thus drawn back, in His sensitive humanity, from the awful prospect
+now so near. But natural instinct is one thing, and the controlling
+will another. However currents may have tossed the vessel, the firm
+hand at the helm never suffered them to change her course. The will,
+which in this prayer He seems so strangely to separate from the
+Father's, even in the act of submission, was the will which wishes,
+not that which resolves. His fixed purpose to die for the world's
+sin never wavered. The shrinking does not reach the point of
+absolutely and unconditionally asking that the cup might pass. Even
+in the act of uttering the wish, it is limited by that 'if it be
+possible,' which can only mean--possible, in view of the great
+purpose for which He came. That is to be accomplished, at any cost;
+and unless it can be accomplished though the cup be withdrawn, He
+does not even wish, much less will, that it should be withdrawn. So,
+the third element in the prayer is the utter resignation to the
+Father's will, in which submission He found peace, as we do.
+
+He prayed His way to perfect calm, which is ever the companion of
+perfect self-surrender to God. They who cease from their own works
+do 'enter into rest.' All the agitations which had come storming in
+massed battalions against Him are defeated by it. They have failed
+to shake His purpose, they now fail even to disturb His peace. So,
+victorious from the dreadful conflict, and at leisure of heart to
+care for others, He can go back to the disciples. But even whilst
+seeking to help them, a fresh wave of suffering breaks in on His
+calm, and once again He leaves them to renew the struggle. The
+instinctive shrinking reasserts itself, and, though overcome, is not
+eradicated. But the second prayer is yet more rooted in acquiescence
+than the first. It shows that He had not lost what He had won by the
+former; for it, as it were, builds on that first supplication, and
+accepts as answer to its contingent petition the consciousness,
+accompanying the calm, that it was not possible for the cup to pass
+from Him. The sense of Sonship underlies the complete resignation of
+the second prayer as of the first. It has no wish but God's will,
+and is the voluntary offering of Himself. Here He is both Priest and
+Sacrifice, and offers the victim with this prayer of consecration.
+So once more He triumphs, because once more, and yet more
+completely, He submits, and accepts the Cross. For Him, as for us,
+the Cross accepted ceases to be a pain, and the cup is no more
+bitter when we are content to drink it. Once more in fainter fashion
+the enemy came on, casting again his spent arrows, and beaten back
+by the same weapon. The words were the same, because no others could
+have expressed more perfectly the submission which was the heart of
+His prayers and the condition of His victory.
+
+Christ's prayer, then, was not for the passing of the cup, but that
+the will of God might be done in and by Him, and 'He was heard in
+that He feared,' not by being exempted from the Cross, but by being
+strengthened through submission for submission. So His agony is the
+pattern of all true prayer, which must ever deal with our wishes, as
+He did with His instinctive shrinking,--present them wrapped in an
+'if it be possible,' and followed by a 'nevertheless.' The meaning
+of prayer is not to force our wills on God's, but to bend our wills
+to His; and that prayer is really answered of which the issue is our
+calm readiness for all that He lays upon us.
+
+III. Note the sad and gentle remonstrance with the drowsy three.
+'The sleep of the disciples, and of these disciples, and of all
+three, and such an overpowering sleep, remains even after Luke's
+explanation, "for sorrow," a psychological riddle' (_Meyer_).
+It is singularly parallel with the sleep of the same three at the
+Transfiguration--an event which presents the opposite pole of our
+Lord's experiences, and yields so many antithetical parallels to
+Gethsemane. No doubt the tension of emotion, which had lasted for
+many hours, had worn them out; but, if weariness had weighed down
+their eyelids, love should have kept them open. Such sleep of such
+disciples may have been a riddle, but it was also a crime, and
+augured imperfect sympathy. Gentle surprise and the pain of
+disappointed love are audible in the question, addressed to Peter
+especially, as he had promised so much, but meant for all. This was
+all that Jesus got in answer to His yearning for sympathy. 'I looked
+for some to take pity, but there was none.' Those who loved Him most
+lay curled in dead slumber within earshot of His prayers. If ever a
+soul tasted the desolation of utter loneliness, that suppliant
+beneath the olives tasted it. But how little of the pain escapes His
+lips! The words but hint at the slightness of their task compared
+with His, at the brevity of the strain on their love, and at the
+companionship which ought to have made sleep impossible. May we not
+see in Christ's remonstrance a word for all? For us, too, the task
+of keeping awake in the enchanted ground is light, measured against
+His, and the time is short, and we have Him to keep us company in
+the watch, and every motive of grateful love should make it easy;
+but, alas, how many of us sleep a drugged and heavy slumber!
+
+The gentle remonstrance soon passes over into counsel as gentle.
+Watchfulness and prayer are inseparable. The one discerns dangers,
+the other arms against them. Watchfulness keeps us prayerful, and
+prayerfulness keeps us watchful. To watch without praying is
+presumption, to pray without watching is hypocrisy. The eye that
+sees clearly the facts of life will turn upwards from its scanning
+of the snares and traps, and will not look in vain. These two are
+the indispensable conditions of victorious encountering of
+temptation. Fortified by them, we shall not 'enter into' it, though
+we encounter it. The outward trial will remain, but its power to
+lead us astray will vanish. It will still be danger or sorrow, but
+it will not be temptation; and we shall pass through it, as a
+sunbeam through foul air, untainted, and keeping heaven's radiance.
+That is a lesson for a wider circle than the sleepy three.
+
+It is followed by words which would need a volume to expound in all
+their depth and width of application, but which are primarily a
+reason for the preceding counsel, as well as a loving apology for
+the disciples' sleep. Christ is always glad to give us credit for
+even imperfect good; His eye, which sees deeper than ours, sees more
+lovingly, and is not hindered from marking the willing spirit by
+recognising weak flesh. But these words are not to be made a pillow
+for indolent acquiescence in the limitations which the flesh imposes
+on the spirit. He may take merciful count of these, and so may we,
+in judging others, but it is fatal to plead them at the bar of our
+own consciences. Rather they should be a spur to our watchfulness
+and to our prayer. We need these because the flesh is weak, still
+more because, in its weakness toward good, it is strong to evil.
+Such exercise will give governing power to the spirit, and enable it
+to impose its will on the reluctant flesh. If we watch and pray, the
+conflict between these two elements in the renewed nature will tend
+to unity and peace by the supremacy of the spirit; if we do not, it
+will tend to cease by the unquestioned tyranny of the flesh. In one
+or other direction our lives are tending.
+
+Strange that such words had no effect. But so it was, and so deep
+was the apostles' sleep that Christ left them undisturbed the second
+time. The relapse is worse than the original disease. Sleep broken
+and resumed is more torpid and fatal than if it had not been
+interrupted. We do not know how long it lasted, though the whole
+period in the garden must have been measured by hours; but at last
+it was broken by the enigmatical last words of our Lord. The
+explanation of the direct opposition between the consecutive
+sentences, by taking the 'Sleep on now' as ironical, jars on one's
+reverence. Surely irony is out of keeping with the spirit of Christ
+then. Rather He bids them sleep on, since the hour is come, in sad
+recognition that the need for their watchful sympathy is past, and
+with it the opportunity for their proved affection. It is said with
+a tone of contemplative melancholy, and is almost equivalent to 'too
+late, too late.' The memorable sermon of F. W. Robertson, on this
+text, rightly grasps the spirit of the first clause, when it dwells
+with such power on the thought of 'the irrevocable past' of wasted
+opportunities and neglected duty. But the sudden transition to the
+sharp, short command and broken sentences of the last verse is to be
+accounted for by the sudden appearance of the flashing lights of the
+band led by Judas, somewhere near at hand, in the valley. The mood
+of pensive reflection gives place to rapid decision. He summons them
+to arise, not for flight, but that He may go out to meet the
+traitor. Escape would have been easy. There was time to reach some
+sheltering fold of the hill in the darkness; but the prayer beneath
+the silver-grey olives had not been in vain, and these last words in
+Gethsemane throb with the Son's willingness to yield Himself up, and
+to empty to its dregs the cup which the Father had given Him.
+
+
+
+
+THE LAST PLEADING OF LOVE
+
+
+    'And Jesus said unto him, Friend, wherefore art thou
+    come?'--MATT. xxvi. 50.
+
+We are accustomed to think of the betrayer of our Lord as a kind of
+monster, whose crime is so mysterious in its atrocity as to put him
+beyond the pale of human sympathy. The awful picture which the great
+Italian poet draws of him as alone in hell, shunned even there, as
+guilty beyond all others, expresses the general feeling about him.
+And even the attempts which have been made to diminish the greatness
+of his guilt, by supposing that his motive was only to precipitate
+Christ's assumption of His conquering Messianic power, are prompted
+by the same thought that such treason as his is all but
+inconceivable. I cannot but think that these attempts fail, and that
+the narratives of the Gospels oblige us to think of his crime as
+deliberate treachery. But even when so regarded, other emotions than
+wondering loathing should be excited by the awful story.
+
+There had been nothing in his previous history to suggest such sin,
+as is proved by the disciples' question, when our Lord announced
+that one of them should betray Him. No suspicion lighted on him--no
+finger pointed to where he sat. But self-distrust asked, 'Lord, is
+it I?' and only love, pillowed on the Master's breast, and strong in
+the happy sense of His love, was sufficiently assured of its own
+constancy, to change the question into 'Lord! who is it?' The
+process of corruption was unseen by all eyes but Christ's. He came
+to his terrible pre-eminence in crime by slow degrees, and by paths
+which we may all tread. As for his guilt, that is in other hands
+than ours. As for his fate, let us copy the solemn and pitying
+reticence of Peter, and say, 'that he might go to _his own_
+place'--the place that belongs to him, and that he is fit for,
+wherever that may be. As for the growth and development of his sin,
+let us remember that 'we have all of us one human heart,' and that
+the possibilities of crime as dark are in us all. And instead of
+shuddering abhorrence at a sin that can scarcely be understood, and
+can never be repeated, let us be sure that whatever man has done,
+man may do, and ask with humble consciousness of our own deceitful
+hearts, 'Lord, is it I?'
+
+These remarkable and solemn words of Christ, with which He meets the
+treacherous kiss, appear to be a last appeal to Judas. They may
+possibly not be a question, as in our version--but an incomplete
+sentence, 'What thou hast come to do'--leaving the implied command,
+'That do,' unexpressed. They would then be very like other words
+which the betrayer had heard but an hour or two before, 'That thou
+doest, do quickly.' But such a rendering does not seem so
+appropriate to the circumstances as that which makes them a
+question, smiting on his heart and conscience, and seeking to tear
+away the veil of sophistications with which he had draped from his
+own eyes the hideous shape of his crime. And, if so, what a
+wonderful instance we have here of that long-suffering love. They
+are the last effort of the divine patience to win back even the
+traitor. They show us the wrestle between infinite mercy and a
+treacherous, sinful heart, and they bring into awful prominence the
+power which that heart has of rejecting the counsel of God against
+itself. I venture to use them now as suggesting these three things:
+the patience of Christ's love; the pleading of Christ's love; and
+the refusal of Christ's love.
+
+I. The patience of Christ's love.
+
+If we take no higher view of this most pathetic incident than that the
+words come from a man's lips, even then all its beauty will not be
+lost. There are some sins against friendship in which the manner is
+harder to bear than the substance of the evil. It must have been a
+strangely mean and dastardly nature, as well as a coarse and cold one,
+that could think of fixing on the kiss of affection as the concerted
+sign to point out their victim to the legionaries. Many a man who
+could have planned and executed the treason would have shrunk from
+that. And many a man who could have borne to be betrayed by his own
+familiar friend would have found that heartless insult worse to endure
+than the treason itself. But what a picture of perfect patience and
+unruffled calm we have here, in that the answer to the poisonous,
+hypocritical embrace was these moving words! The touch of the traitor's
+lips has barely left His cheek, but not one faint passing flush of
+anger tinges it. He is perfectly self-oblivious--absorbed in other
+thoughts, and among them in pity for the guilty wretch before Him.
+His words have no agitation in them, no instinctive recoil from the
+pollution of such a salutation. They have grave rebuke, but it is
+rebuke which derives its very force from the appeal to former
+companionship. Christ still recognises the ancient bond, and is true
+to it. He will still plead with this man who has been beside Him long;
+and though His heart be wounded yet He is not wroth, and He will not
+cast him off. If this were nothing more than a picture of human
+friendship it would stand alone, above all other records that the
+world cherishes in its inmost heart, of the love that never fails, and
+is not soon angry.
+
+But we, I hope, dear brethren, think more loftily and more truly of
+our dear Lord than as simply a perfect manhood, the exemplar of all
+goodness. How He comes to be that, if He be not more than that, I do
+not understand, and I, for one, feel that my confidence in the
+flawless completeness of His human character lives or dies with my
+belief that He is the Eternal Word, God manifest in the flesh.
+Certainly we shall never truly grasp the blessed meaning of His life
+on earth until we look upon it all as the revelation of God. The
+tears of Christ are the pity of God. The gentleness of Jesus is the
+long-suffering of God. The tenderness of Jesus is the love of God.
+'He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father'; and all that life so
+beautiful but so anomalous as to be all but incredible, when we
+think of it as only the life of a man, glows with a yet fairer
+beauty, and corresponds with the nature which it expresses, when we
+think of it as being the declaration to us by the divine Son of the
+divine Father--our loftiest, clearest, and authentic revelation of
+God.
+
+How that thought lifts these words before us into a still higher
+region! We are now in the presence of the solemn greatness of a
+divine love. If the meaning of this saying is what we have
+suggested, it is pathetic even in the lower aspect, but how
+infinitely that pathos is deepened when we view it in the higher!
+
+Surely if ever there was a man who might have been supposed to be
+excluded from the love of God, it was Judas. Surely if ever there
+was a moment in a human life, when one might have supposed that even
+Christ's ever open heart would shut itself together against any one,
+it was this moment. But no, the betrayer in the very instant of his
+treason has that changeless tenderness lingering around him, and
+that merciful hand beckoning to him still.
+
+And have we not a right to generalise this wonderful fact, and to
+declare its teaching to be--that the love of God is extended to us
+all, and cannot be made to turn away from us by any sins of ours?
+Sin is mighty; it can work endless evils on us; it can disturb and
+embitter all our relations with God; it can, as we shall presently
+have to point out, make it necessary for the tenderest 'grace of God
+to come disciplining'--to 'come with a rod,' just because it comes
+in 'the spirit of meekness.' But one thing it cannot do, and that
+is--make God cease to love us. I suppose all human affection can be
+worn out by constant failure to evoke a response from cold hearts. I
+suppose that it can be so nipped by frosts, so constantly checked in
+blossoming, that it shrivels and dies. I suppose that constant
+ingratitude, constant indifference can turn the warmest springs of
+our love to a river of ice. 'Can a mother forget her child?--Yea,
+she may forget.' But we have to do with a God, whose love is His
+very being; who loves us not for reasons in us but in Himself; whose
+love is eternal and boundless as all His nature; whose love,
+therefore, cannot be turned away by our sin--but abides with us for
+ever, and is granted to every soul of man. Dear brethren, we cannot
+believe too firmly, we cannot trust too absolutely, we cannot
+proclaim too broadly that blessed thought, without which we have no
+hope to feed on for ourselves, or to share with our fellows--the
+universal love of God in Christ.
+
+Is there a _worst_ man on earth at this moment? If there be,
+he, too, has a share in that love. Harlots and thieves, publicans
+and sinners, leprous outcasts, and souls tormented by unclean
+spirits, the wrecks of humanity whom decent society and respectable
+Christianity passes by with averted head and uplifted hands,
+criminals on the gibbet with the rope round their necks--and those
+who are as hopeless as any of these, self-complacent formalists and
+'Gospel-hardened professors'--all have a place in that heart. And
+that, not as undistinguished members of a class, but as separate
+souls, singly the objects of God's knowledge and love. He loves all,
+because He loves each. We are not massed together in His view, nor
+in His regard. He does not lose the details in the whole; as we,
+looking on some great crowd of upturned faces, are conscious of all
+but recognise no single one. He does not love a class--a world--but
+He loves the single souls that make it up--you and me, and every one
+of the millions that we throw together in the vague phrase, 'the
+race.' Let us individualise that love in our thoughts as it
+individualises us in its outflow--and make our own the 'exceeding
+broad' promises, which include us, too. 'God loves _me_; Christ
+gave Himself for _me_. _I_ have a place in that royal, tender
+heart.'
+
+Nor should any sin make us doubt this. He loved us with exceeding
+love, even when we were 'dead in trespasses.' He did not begin to
+love because of anything in us; He will not cease because of
+anything in us. We change; 'He abideth faithful, He cannot deny
+Himself.' As the sunshine pours down as willingly and abundantly on
+filth and dunghills, as on gold that glitters in its beam, and
+jewels that flash back its lustre, so the light and warmth of that
+unsetting and unexhausted source of life pours down 'on the
+unthankful and on the good.' The great ocean clasps some black and
+barren crag that frowns against it, as closely as with its waves it
+kisses some fair strand enamelled with flowers and fragrant with
+perfumes. So that sea of love in which we 'live, and move, and have
+our being,' encircles the worst with abundant flow. He Himself sets
+us the pattern, which to imitate is to be the children of 'our
+Father which is in heaven,' in that He loves His enemies, blessing
+them that curse, and doing good to them that hate. He Himself is
+what He has enjoined us to be, in that He feeds His enemies when
+they hunger, and when they thirst gives them drink, heaping coals of
+fire on their heads, and seeking to kindle in them thereby the glow
+of answering love, not being overcome of their evil, so that He
+repays hate with hate and scorn with scorn, but in patient
+continuance of loving kindness seeking to overcome evil with good.
+He is Himself that 'charity' which 'is not easily provoked, is not
+soon angry, beareth all things, hopeth all things, and never
+faileth.' His love is mightier than all our sins, and waits not on
+our merits, nor is turned away by our iniquities. 'God so loved the
+world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth
+in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.'
+
+II. Then, secondly, we have here--the pleading of Christ's patient
+love.
+
+I have been trying to say as broadly and strongly as I can, that our
+sins do not turn away the love of God in Christ from us. The more
+earnestly we believe and proclaim that, the more needful is it to
+set forth distinctly--and that not as limiting, but as explaining
+the truth--the other thought, that the sin which does not avert,
+does modify the expression of, the love of God. Man's sin compels
+Him to do what the prophet calls his 'strange work'--the work which
+is not dear to His heart, nor natural, if one may so say, to His
+hands--His work of judgment.
+
+The love of Christ has to come to sinful men with patient pleading
+and remonstrance, that it may enter their hearts and give its
+blessings. We are familiar with a modern work of art in which that
+long-suffering appeal is wonderfully portrayed. He who is the Light
+of the world stands, girded with the royal mantle clasped with the
+priestly breastplate, bearing in His hand the lamp of truth, and
+there, amidst the dew of night and the rank hemlock, He pleads for
+entrance at the closed door which has no handle on its outer side,
+and is hinged to open only from within. 'I stand at the door and
+knock. If any man open the door, I will come in.'
+
+And in this incident before us, we see represented not only the
+endless patience of God's pitying love, but the method which it
+needs to take in order to reach the heart.
+
+There is an appeal to the traitor's heart, and an appeal to his
+conscience. Christ would have him think of the relations that have
+so long subsisted between them; and He would have him think, too, of
+the real nature of the deed he is doing, or, perhaps, of the motives
+that impel him. The grave, sad word, by which He addresses him, is
+meant to smite upon his heart. The sharp question which He puts to
+him is meant to wake up his conscience; and both taken together
+represent the two chief classes of remonstrance which He brings to
+bear upon us all--the two great batteries from which He assails the
+fortress of our sins.
+
+There is first, then--Christ's appeal to the heart. He tries to make
+Judas feel the considerations that should restrain him. The
+appellation by which our Lord addresses him does not in the original
+convey quite so strongly the idea of amity, as our word 'Friend'
+does. It is not the same as that which He had used a few hours
+before in the upper chamber, when He said, 'Henceforth I call you
+not servants, but I have called you friends.--Ye are My friends if
+ye do whatsoever I command you.' It is the same as is put into the
+lips of the Lord of the vineyard, remonstrating with his jealous
+labourer, 'Friend, I do thee no wrong.' There is a tone, then, of
+less intimate association and graver rebuke in it than in that name
+with which He honours those who make His will theirs, and His word
+the law of their lives. It does not speak of close confidence, but
+it does suggest companionship and kindness on the part of the
+speaker. There is rebuke in it, but it is rebuke which derives its
+whole force from the remembrance of ancient concord and connection.
+Our Lord would recall to the memory of the betrayer the days in
+which they had taken sweet counsel together. It is as if He had
+said--'Hast thou forgotten all our former intercourse? Thou hast
+eaten My bread, thou hast been Mine own familiar friend, in whom I
+trusted--canst thou lift up thy heel against Me?' What happy hours
+of quiet fellowship on many a journey, of rest together after many a
+day of toil, what forgotten thoughts of the loving devotion and the
+glow of glad consecration that he had once felt, what a long series
+of proofs of Christ's gentle goodness and meek wisdom should have
+sprung again to remembrance at such an appeal! And how black and
+dastardly would his guilt have seemed if once he had ventured to
+remember what unexampled friendship he was sinning against!
+
+Is it not so with us all, dear brethren? All our evils are betrayals
+of Christ, and all our betrayals of Christ are sins against a
+perfect friendship and an unvaried goodness. We, too, have sat at
+His table, heard His wisdom, seen His miracles, listened to His
+pleadings, have had a place in His heart; and if we turn away from
+Him to do our own pleasure, and sell His love for a handful of
+silver, we need not cherish shuddering abhorrence against that poor
+wretch who gave Him up to the cross. Oh! if we could see aright, we
+should see our Saviour's meek, sad face standing between us and each
+of our sins, with warning in the pitying eyes, and His pleading
+voice would sound in our ears, appealing to us by loving
+remembrances of His ancient friendship, to turn from the evil which
+is treason against Him, and wounds His heart as much as it harms
+ours. Take heed lest in condemning the traitor we doom ourselves. If
+we flush into anger at the meanness of his crime, and declare, 'He
+shall surely die,' do we not hear a prophet's voice saying to each,
+'Thou art the man'?
+
+The loving hand laid on the heart-strings is followed by a strong
+stroke on conscience. The heart vibrates most readily in answer to
+gentle touches: the conscience, in answer to heavier, as the breath
+that wakes the chords of an Aeolian harp would pass silent through
+the brass of a trumpet. 'Wherefore art thou come?'--if to be taken
+as a question at all, which, as I have said, seems most natural, is
+either, 'What hast thou come to do?'--or, 'Why hast thou come to do
+it?' Perhaps it maybe fairly taken as including both. But, at all
+events, it is clearly an appeal to Judas to make him see what his
+conduct really is in itself, and possibly in its motive too. And
+this is the constant effort of the love of Christ--to get us to say
+to ourselves the real name of what we are about.
+
+We cloak our sins from ourselves with many wrappings, as they swathe
+a mummy in voluminous folds. And of these veils, one of the thickest
+is woven by our misuse of words to describe the very same thing by
+different names, according as we do it, or another man does it.
+Almost all moral actions--the thing to which we can apply the words
+right or wrong--have two or more names, of which the one suggests
+the better and the other the worse side of the action. For instance
+what in ourselves we call prudent regard for our own interest, we
+call, in our neighbour, narrow selfishness; what in ourselves is
+laudable economy, in him is miserable avarice. We are impetuous, he
+is passionate; we generous, he lavish; we are clever men of
+business, he is a rogue; we sow our wild oats and are gay, he is
+dissipated. So we cheat ourselves by more than half-transparent
+veils of our own manufacture, which we fling round the ugly features
+and misshapen limbs of these sins of ours, and we are made more than
+ever their bond-slaves thereby.
+
+Therefore, it is the office of the truest love to force us to look at
+the thing as it is. It would go some way to keep a man from some of
+his sins if he would give the thing its real name. A distinct conscious
+statement to oneself, 'Now I am going to tell a lie'--'This that I am
+doing is fraud'--'This emotion that I feel creeping with devilish
+warmth about the roots of my heart is revenge'--and so on, would
+surely startle us sometimes, and make us fling the gliding poison
+from our breast, as a man would a snake that he found just lifting
+its head from the bosom of his robe. Suppose Judas had answered the
+question, and, gathering himself up, had looked his Master in the face,
+and said--'What have I come for?' 'I have come to betray Thee for
+thirty pieces of silver!' Do you not think that putting his guilt into
+words might have moved even him to more salutary feelings than the
+remorse which afterwards accompanied his tardy discernment of what he
+_had_ done? So the patient love of Christ comes rebuking, and
+smiting hard on conscience. 'The grace of God that bringeth salvation
+to all men hath appeared disciplining'--and His hand is never more
+gentle than when it plucks away the films with which we hide our sins
+from ourselves, and shows us the 'rottenness and dead men's bones'
+beneath the whited walls of the sepulchres and the velvet of the coffins.
+
+He must begin with rebukes that He may advance to blessing. He must
+teach us what is separating us from Him that, learning it, we may
+flee to His grace to help us. There is no entrance for the truest
+gifts of His patient love into any heart that has not yielded to His
+pleading remonstrance, and in lowly penitence has answered His
+question as He would have us answer it, 'Friend and Lover of my
+soul, I have sinned against Thy tender heart, against the unexampled
+patience of Thy love. I have departed from Thee and betrayed Thee.
+Blessed be Thy merciful voice which hath taught me what I have done!
+Blessed be Thine unwearied goodness which still bends over me! Raise
+me fallen! forgive me treacherous! Keep me safe and happy, ever true
+and near to Thee!'
+
+III. Notice the possible rejection of the pleading of Christ's
+patient love.
+
+Even that appeal was vain. Here we are confronted with a plain
+instance of man's mysterious and awful power of 'frustrating the
+counsel of God'--of which one knows not whether is greater, the
+difficulty of understanding how a finite will _can_ rear itself
+against the Infinite Will, or the mournful mystery that a creature
+should desire to set itself against its loving Maker and Benefactor.
+But strange as it is, yet so it is; and we can turn round upon
+Sovereign Fatherhood bidding us to its service, and say, '_I will
+not_.' He pleads with us, and we can resist His pleadings. He
+holds out the mercies of His hands and the gifts of His grace, and
+we can reject them. We cannot cease to be the objects of His love,
+but we can refuse to be the recipients of its most precious gifts.
+We can bar our hearts against it. Then, of what avail is it to us?
+To go back to an earlier illustration, the sunshine pours down and
+floods a world, what does that matter to us if we have fastened up
+shutters on all our windows, and barred every crevice through which
+the streaming gladness can find its way? We shall grope at noontide
+as in the dark within our gloomy house, while our neighbours have
+light in theirs. What matters it though we float in the great ocean
+of the divine love, if with pitch and canvas we have carefully
+closed every aperture at which the flood can enter? A hermetically
+closed jar, plunged in the Atlantic, will be as dry inside as if it
+were lying on the sand of the desert. It is possible to perish of
+thirst within sight of the fountain. It is possible to separate
+ourselves from the love of God, not to separate the love of God from
+ourselves.
+
+The incident before us carries another solemn lesson--how simple and
+easy a thing it is to repel that pleading love. What did Judas do?
+Nothing; it was enough. He merely held his peace--no more. There was
+no need for him to break out with oaths and curses, to reject his
+Lord with wild words. Silence was sufficient. And for us--no more is
+required. We have but to be passive; we have but to stand still. Not
+to accept is to refuse; non-submission is rebellion. We do not need
+to emphasise our refusal by any action--no need to lift our clenched
+hands in defiance. We have simply to put them behind our backs or to
+keep them folded. The closed hand must remain an empty hand. 'He
+that believeth not is condemned.' My friend, remember that, when
+Christ pleads and draws, to do nothing is to oppose, and to delay is
+to refuse. It is a very easy matter to ruin your soul. You have
+simply to keep still when He says 'Come unto Me'--to keep your eyes
+fixed where they were, when He says, 'Look unto Me, and be ye
+saved,' and all the rest will follow of itself.
+
+Notice, too, how the appeal of Christ's love hardens where it does
+not soften. That gentle voice drove the traitor nearer the verge
+over which he fell into a gulf of despair. It should have drawn him
+closer to the Lord, but he recoiled from it, and was thereby brought
+nearer destruction. Every pleading of Christ's grace, whether by
+providences, or by books, or by His own word, does something with
+us. It is never vain. Either it melts or it hardens. The sun either
+scatters the summer morning mists, or it rolls them into heavier
+folds, from whose livid depths the lightning will be flashing by
+mid-day. You cannot come near the most inadequate exhibition of the
+pardoning love of Christ without being either drawn closer to Him or
+driven further from Him. Each act of rejection prepares the way for
+another, which will be easier, and adds another film to the darkness
+which covers your eyes, another layer to the hardness which incrusts
+your hearts.
+
+Again, that silence, so eloquent and potent in its influence, was
+probably the silence of a man whose conscience was convicted while
+his will was unchanged. Such a condition is possible. It points to
+solemn thoughts, and to deep mysteries in man's awful nature. He
+knew that he was wrong, he had no excuse, his deed was before him in
+some measure in its true character, and yet he would not give it up.
+Such a state, if constant and complete, presents the most frightful
+picture we can frame of a soul. That a man shall not be able to say,
+'I did it ignorantly'; that Christ shall not be able to ground His
+intercession on, 'They know not what they do'; that with full
+knowledge of the true nature of the deed, there shall be no wavering
+of the determination to do it--we may well turn with terror from
+such an awful abyss. But let us remember that, whether such a
+condition in its completeness is conceivable or not, at all events
+we may approach it indefinitely; and we do approach it by every sin,
+and by every refusal to yield to the love that would touch our
+consciences and fill our hearts.
+
+Have you ever noticed what a remarkable verbal correspondence there
+is between these words of our text, and some other very solemn ones
+of Christ's? The question that He puts into the lips of the king who
+came in to see his guests is, '_Friend, how camest thou_ in
+hither, not having on a wedding garment?' The question asked on
+earth shall be repeated again at last. The silence which once
+indicated a convinced conscience and an unchanged will may at that
+day indicate both of these and hopelessness beside. The clear vision
+of the divine love, if it do not flood the heart with joy and evoke
+the bliss of answering love, may fill it with bitterness. It is
+possible that the same revelation of the same grace may be the
+heaven of heaven to those who welcome it, and the pain of hell to
+those who turn from it. It is possible that love believed and
+received may be life, and love recognised and rejected may be death.
+It is possible that the vision of the same face may make some break
+forth with the rapturous hymn, 'Lo, this is our God, we have waited
+for Him!' and make others call on the hills to fall on them and
+cover them from its brightness.
+
+But let us not end with such words. Rather, dear brethren, let us
+yield to His patient beseechings; let Him teach us our evil and our
+sin. Listen to His great love who invites us to plead, and promises
+to pardon--'Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord:
+though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow;
+though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.'
+
+
+
+
+THE REAL HIGH PRIEST AND HIS COUNTERFEIT
+
+
+    'And they that had laid hold on Jesus led Him away to
+    Caiaphas the high priest, where the scribes and the
+    elders were assembled. 58. But Peter followed Him afar
+    off unto the high priest's palace, and went in, and sat
+    with the servants, to see the end. 59. Now the chief
+    priests, and elders, and all the council, sought false
+    witness against Jesus, to put Him to death; 60. But
+    found none: yea, though many false witnesses came, yet
+    found they none. At the last came two false witnesses,
+    61. And said, This fellow said, I am able to destroy
+    the temple of God, and to build it in three days.
+    62 And the high priest arose, and said unto Him,
+    Answerest Thou nothing? what is it which these witness
+    against Thee? 63. But Jesus held His peace. And the
+    high priest answered and said unto Him, I adjure Thee
+    by the living God, that Thou tell us whether Thou be
+    the Christ, the Son of God. 64. Jesus saith unto him,
+    Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter
+    shall ye see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand
+    of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. 65. Then
+    the high priest rent his clothes, saying, He hath spoken
+    blasphemy; what further need have we of witnesses?
+    behold, now ye have heard His blasphemy. 66. What think
+    ye? They answered and said, He is guilty of death.
+    67. Then did they spit in His face, and buffeted Him;
+    and others smote Him with the palms of their hands,
+    68. Saying, Prophesy unto us, Thou Christ, Who is he
+    that smote Thee?'--MATT. xxvi. 57-68.
+
+John's Gospel tells us that Jesus was brought before 'Annas first,'
+probably in the same official priestly residence as Caiaphas, his
+son-in-law, occupied. That preliminary examination brought out
+nothing to incriminate the prisoner, and was flagrantly illegal,
+being an attempt to entrap Him into self-accusing statements. It was
+baffled by Jesus being silent first, and subsequently taking His
+stand on the undeniable principle that a charge must be sustained by
+evidence, not based on self-accusation. Annas, having made nothing
+of this strange criminal, 'sent Him bound unto Caiaphas.'
+
+A meeting of the Sanhedrin had been hastily summoned in the dead of
+night, which was itself an illegality. Now Jesus stands before the
+poor shadow of a judicial tribunal, which, though it was all that
+Rome had left a conquered people, was still entitled to sit in
+judgment on Him. Strange inversion, and awful position for these
+formalists! And with sad persistence of bitter prejudice they
+proceeded to try the prisoner, all unaware that it was themselves,
+not Him, that they were trying.
+
+They began wrongly, and betrayed their animus at once. They were
+sitting there to inquire whether Jesus was guilty or no; they had
+made up their minds beforehand that He was, and their effort now was
+but to manufacture some thin veil of legality for a judicial murder.
+So they 'sought false witness, ... that they might put Him to
+death.' Matthew simply says that no evidence sufficient for the
+purpose was forthcoming; Mark adds that the weak point, was that the
+lies contradicted each other. Christ's presence has a strange,
+solemn power of unmasking our falsehoods, both of thought and deed,
+and it is hard to speak evil of Him before His face. If His
+calumniators were confused when He stood as Prisoner, what will they
+be when He sits as a Judge?
+
+Only Matthew and Mark tell us of the two witnesses whose twisted
+version of the word about 'destroying the Temple and rebuilding it
+in three days' seemed to Caiaphas serious enough to require an
+answer. Their mistake was one which might have been made in good
+faith, but none the less was their travesty 'false witness.' Their
+version of His great word shows how easily the teaching of a lofty
+soul, passed through the popular brain, is degraded, and made to
+mean the opposite of what he had meant by it. For the destruction of
+the Temple had appeared in the saying as the Jews' work, and Jesus
+had presented Himself in it as the Restorer, not the Destroyer, of
+the Temple and of all that it symbolised. We destroy, He rebuilds.
+The murder of Jesus was the suicide of the nation. Caiaphas and his
+council were even now pulling down the Temple. And that murder was
+the destruction, so far as men could effect it, of the true 'Temple
+of His body,' in which the fulness of the Godhead dwelt, and which
+was more gloriously reconstituted in the Resurrection. The risen
+Christ rears the true temple on earth, for through Him the Holy
+Ghost dwells in His Church, which is collectively 'the Temple,' and
+in all believing spirits, which are individually 'the temples' of
+God. So the false witnesses distorted into a lie a great truth.
+
+The Incarnate Word was dumb all the while. He 'was still and
+refrained' Himself. It was the silence of the King before a lawless
+tribunal of rebels, of patient meekness, 'as a sheep before her
+shearers'; of innocence that will not stoop to defend itself from
+groundless accusations; of infinite pity and forbearing love, which
+sees that it cannot win, but will not smite. Jesus is still silent,
+but one day, 'with the breath of His lips shall He slay the wicked.'
+Caiaphas seems to have been annoyed as well as surprised at Jesus'
+silence, for there is a trace of irritation, as at 'contempt of
+court,' in his words. But our Lord's continued silence appears to
+have somewhat awed him, and the dawning consciousness of his dignity
+is, perhaps, the reason for the high priest's casting aside all the
+foolery of false witnessing, and coming at last to the real point,--
+the Messianic claims of Jesus.
+
+Caiaphas was doing his duty as high priest in inquiring into such
+claims, but he was somewhat late in the day, and he had made up his
+mind before he inquired. What he wished to get was a plain assertion
+on which the death sentence could be pronounced. Jesus knew this,
+and yet He answered. But Luke tells us that He first scathingly
+pointed to the unreality and animus of the question by saying, 'If I
+tell you, ye will not believe.' But yet it was fitting that He
+should solemnly, before the supreme court, representative of the
+nation, declare that He was the Messiah, and that, if He was to be
+rejected and condemned, it should be on the ground of that
+declaration. Before Caiaphas He claimed to be Messiah, before Pilate
+He claimed to be King. Each rejected Him in the character that
+appealed to them most. The many-sidedness of the perfect Revealer of
+God brings Him to each soul in the aspect that most loudly addresses
+each. Therefore the love in the appeal and the guilt in its
+rejection are the greater.
+
+But Christ's self-attestation to the council was not limited to the
+mere claim to the name of Messiah. It disclosed the implications of
+that name in a way altogether unlike the conceptions held by
+Caiaphas. When Caiaphas put in apposition 'the Christ' and 'the Son
+of God,' he was not speaking from the ordinary Jewish point of view,
+but from some knowledge, of Christ's teaching, and there are two
+charges combined into one.
+
+But Jesus' answer, while plainly claiming to be the Messiah, expands
+itself in regard to the claim to be 'Son of God,' and shows its
+tremendous significance. It involves participation in divine
+authority and omnipotence. It involves a future coming to be the
+Judge of His judges. It declares that these blind scribes and elders
+will see Him thus exalted, and it asserts that all this is to begin
+then and there ('henceforth'), as if that hour of humiliation was to
+His consciousness the beginning of His manifestation as Lord, or, as
+John has it, 'the hour that the Son of Man should be glorified.' Nor
+must we leave out of sight the fact that it is 'the Son of Man' of
+whom all this is said, for thereby are indicated the raising of His
+perfect humanity to participation in Deity, and the possibility that
+His brethren, too, may sit where He sits. Much was veiled in the
+answer to the council, much is veiled to us. But this remains,--that
+Jesus, at that supreme moment, when He was bound to leave no
+misunderstandings, made the plainest claim to divinity, and could
+have saved His life if He had not done so. Either Caiaphas, in his
+ostentatious horror of such impiety, was right in calling Christ's
+words blasphemy, and not far wrong in inferring that Jesus was not
+fit to live, or He is the everlasting 'Son of the Father,' and will
+'come to be our Judge.'
+
+
+
+
+JESUS CHARGED WITH BLASPHEMY
+
+
+    'Then the high priest rent his clothes, saying, He
+    hath spoken blasphemy; what further need have we of
+    witnesses?'--MATT. xxvi. 65.
+
+Jesus was tried and condemned by two tribunals, the Jewish
+ecclesiastical and the Roman civil. In each case the charge
+corresponded to the Court. The Sanhedrin took no cognisance of, and
+had no concern with, rebellion against Caesar; though for the time
+they pretended loyalty. Pilate had still less concern about Jewish
+superstitions. And so the investigation in each case turned on a
+different question. In the one it was, 'Art Thou the Son of God?' in
+the other, 'Art Thou the King of Israel?' The answer to both was a
+simple 'Yes!' but with very significant differences. Pilate received
+an explanation; the Sanhedrin none. The Roman governor was taught
+that Christ's title of King belonged to another region altogether
+from that of Caesar, and did not in the slightest degree infringe
+upon the dominion that he represented. But 'Son of God' was capable
+of no explanation that could make it any less offensive; and the
+only thing to be done was to accept it or to condemn Him.
+
+So this saying of the high priest differs from other words of our
+Lord's antagonists, which we have been considering in recent pages,
+in that it is no distortion of our Lord's characteristics or
+meaning. It correctly understands, but it fatally rejects, His
+claims; and does not hesitate to take the further step, on the
+ground of these, of branding Him as a blasphemer.
+
+We may turn the high priest's question in another direction: 'What
+further need have we of witnesses?' These horror-stricken judges,
+rending their garments in simulated grief and zeal, and that silent
+Prisoner, knowing that His life was the forfeit of His claims, yet
+saying no word of softening or explanation of them, may teach us
+much. They are witnesses to some of the central facts of the
+revelation of God in Christ. Let us turn to these for a few moments.
+
+I. First, then, they witness to Christ's claims.
+
+The question that was proposed to Jesus, 'Art Thou the Christ, the
+Son of the living God?' was suggested by the facts of His ministry,
+and not by anything that had come out in the course of this
+investigation. It was the summing up of the impression made on the
+ecclesiastical authorities of Judaism by His whole attitude and
+demeanour. And if we look back to His life we shall see that there
+were instances, long before this, on which, on the same ground, the
+same charge was flung at Him. For example, when He would heal the
+paralytic, and, before He dealt with bodily disease, attended to
+spiritual weakness, and said, 'Thy sins be forgiven thee,' ere He
+said, 'Take up thy bed and walk,' there was a group of keen-eyed
+hunters after heresy sitting eagerly on the watch, who snatched at
+the words in a moment, and said, 'Who is this that forgiveth sins?
+No _man_ forgiveth sins, but God only! This man speaketh
+blasphemies!' And they were right. He did claim a divine
+prerogative; and either the claim must be admitted or the charge of
+blasphemy urged.
+
+Again, when He infringed Rabbinical Sabbath law by a cure, and they
+said, 'This Man has broken the Sabbath day,' His vindication was
+worse than His offence, for He answered, 'My Father worketh
+hitherto, and I work.' And then they sought the more to kill Him,
+because He not only brake the Sabbath, but also called God His own
+Father, making Himself equal with God.' And again, when He declared
+that the safety of His sheep in His hands was identical with their
+safety in His Father's hands, and vindicated the audacious
+parallelism by the tremendous assertion, 'I and My Father are One,'
+the charge of blasphemy rang out; and was inevitable, unless the
+claim was true.
+
+These outstanding instances are but, as it were, summits that rise
+above the general level. But the general level is that of One who
+takes an altogether unique position. No one else, professing to lead
+men in paths of righteousness, has so constantly put the stress of
+His teaching, not upon morality, nor religion, nor obedience to God,
+but upon this, 'Believe in Me'; or ever pushed forward His own
+personality into the foreground, and made the whole nobleness and
+blessedness and security and devoutness of a life to hinge upon that
+one thing, its personal relation to Him.
+
+People talk about the sweet and gentle wisdom that flowed from
+Christ's lips, and so on; about the lofty morality, about the beauty
+of pity and tenderness, and all the other commonplaces so familiar
+to us, and we gladly admit them all. But I venture to go a step
+further than all these, and to say that the outstanding
+_differentia_, the characteristic which marks off Christ's
+teaching as something new, peculiar, and altogether _per se_,
+is not its morality, not its philanthropy, not its meek wisdom, not
+its sweet reasonableness, but its tremendous assertions of the
+importance of Himself.
+
+And if I am asked to state the ground upon which such an assertion
+may be vindicated, I would point you to such facts as these, that
+this Man took up a position of equality with, and of superiority to,
+the legislation which He and the people to whom He was speaking
+regarded as being divinely sent, and said, 'Ye have heard that it
+hath been said to them of old time' so and so; 'but I say unto you':
+that this Man declared that to build upon His words was to build
+upon a rock; that this Man declared that He--He--was the legitimate
+object of absolute trust, of utter submission and obedience; that He
+claimed from His followers affiance, love, reverence which cannot be
+distinguished from worship, and that He did not therein conceive
+that He was intercepting anything that belonged to the Father. This
+Man professed to be able to satisfy the desires of every human heart
+when He said, 'If any man thirst let him come to Me and drink.' This
+Man claimed to be able to breathe the sanctity of repose in the
+blessedness of obedience over all the weary and the heavy laden; and
+assured them that He Himself, through all the ages, and in all
+lands, and for all troubles, would give them rest. This Man declared
+that He who stood there, in the quiet homes of Galilee, and went
+about its acres with those blessed feet for our advantage, was to be
+Judge of the whole world. This Man said that His name was 'Son of
+God'; and this Man declared, 'He that hath seen Me hath seen the
+Father.'
+
+And then people say to us, 'Oh! your Gospel narratives, even if they
+be the work of men in good faith, telling what they suppose He said,
+mistook the Teacher; and if we could strip away the accretion of
+mistaken reverence, and come to the historical person, we should
+find no claims like these.'
+
+Well, this is not the time to enter into the large questions which
+that contention involves, but I point you to the incident which
+makes my text, and I say, 'What need we any further witnesses?'
+Nobody denies that Jesus Christ was crucified as the result of a
+combination of Sanhedrin and Pilate. What set the Jewish rulers
+against Him with such virulent and murderous determination? Is there
+anything in the life of Jesus Christ, if it is watered down as the
+people, who want to knock out all the supernatural, desire to water
+it down--is there anything in the life that will account for the
+inveterate acrimony and hostility which pursued Him to the death?
+The fact remains that, whether or not Evangelists and Apostles
+misconceived His teaching when they gave such prominence to His
+personality and His lofty claims, His enemies were under the same
+delusion, if it were a delusion; and the reason why the whole
+orthodox religionism of Judaism rejoiced when He was nailed to the
+Cross was summed up in the taunt which they flung at Him as He hung
+there, 'If He be the Son of God, let Him come down, and we will
+believe Him.'
+
+So, brethren, I put into the witness-box Annas and Caiaphas and all
+their satellites, and I say, 'What need we any further witnesses?'
+He died because He declared that He was the Son of God.
+
+And I beseech you ask yourselves whether we are not being put off
+with a maimed version of His teaching, if there is struck out of it
+this its central characteristic, that He, 'the sage and humble,'
+declared that He was 'likewise One with the Creator.'
+
+II. Secondly, note how we have here the witness that Jesus Christ
+assented always to the loftiest meaning that men attached to His
+claims.
+
+I have already pointed out the remarkable difference between the
+explanations which He condescended to give to the Roman governor as
+to the perfectly innocent meaning of His claim to be the King of
+Israel, and His silence before the Sanhedrin. That silence is only
+explicable because they rightly understood the meaning of the claim
+which they contemptuously and perversely rejected. Jesus Christ knew
+that His death was the forfeit, as I have said, and yet He locked
+His lips and said not a word.
+
+In like manner when, on the other occasion to which I have already
+referred, the Pharisees stumbled at His claims to forgive sins, He
+said nothing to soften down that claim. If He had meant then only
+what some people would desire to make Him mean when He said, 'Thy
+sins be forgiven thee'--viz., that He was simply acting as a
+minister of the divine forgiveness, and assuring a poor sinner that
+God had pardoned him--why in common honesty, in discharge of His
+plain obligations of a teacher, did He not say so--not for His own
+sake, but for the sake of preventing such a tremendous
+misunderstanding of His meaning? But He let them go away with the
+conviction that He intended to claim a divine prerogative, and
+vindicated the assertion by doing what only a divine power could do:
+'That ye may know that the Son of Man hath power enough on earth to
+forgive sins, He saith unto the sick of the palsy, Take up thy bed
+and walk.' There was no need for Him to have wrought a miracle to
+establish His right to tell a poor soul that God forgave sin. And
+the fact that the miracle was supposed to be the demonstration and
+the vindication of His right to declare forgiveness shows that He
+was exercising that prerogative which belongs, as they rightly said,
+to God only.
+
+And in precisely the same manner, the commonest obligations of
+honesty, the plain duty of a misunderstood Teacher, to say nothing
+of the duty of self-preservation, ought to have opened His lips in
+the presence of the Jewish authorities, if they understood wrongly
+and set too high their estimate of the meaning of His claims. His
+silence establishes the fact that they understood these aright.
+
+And so, all through His life, we note this peculiarity, that He
+never puts aside as too lofty for truth men's highest interpretations
+of His claims, nor as too lowly for their mutual relation the lowest
+reverence which bowed before Him. Peter, in the house of Cornelius,
+said, 'Stand up! for I myself also am a man.' Paul and Barnabas, when
+the priests brought out the oxen and garlands to the gates of Lystra,
+could say, 'We also are men of like passions with yourselves.' But
+this meek Jesus lets men fall at His feet; and women wash them with
+their tears and wipe them with the hairs of their head; and souls
+stretch out maimed hands of faith, and grasp Him as their only hope.
+When His apostle said, 'Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,'
+His answer was, 'Blessed art thou, for flesh and blood hath not revealed
+it unto thee,' and when another exclaimed, 'My Lord and my God!' this
+Pattern of all meekness accepted and endorsed the title, and pronounced
+a benediction on all who, not having seen Him, should hereafter attain
+a like faith.
+
+Now I want to know whether that characteristic, which runs through all
+His life, and is inseparable from it, can be vindicated on any ground
+except the ground that He was 'God manifest in the flesh.' Either
+Jesus Christ had a greedy appetite for excessive adoration, was a
+victim to diseased vanity and ever-present self-regard--the most
+damning charge that you can bring against a religious teacher--or He
+accepted love and reverence and trust, because the love and the
+reverence and the trust knit souls to the Incarnate God their Saviour.
+
+III. And so, lastly we have here witness to the only alternative to
+the acceptance of His claims.
+
+He hath spoken 'blasphemy,' not because He had derogated from the
+dignity of divinity, but because He had presumed to participate in
+it. And it seems to me, with all deference, that this rough
+alternative is the only legitimate one. If Jesus Christ did make
+such claims, and His relation to the Jewish hierarchy and His death
+are, as I have shown you, apart even from the testimony of the
+Evangelists, strong confirmation of the fact that He did--if Jesus
+Christ did make such claims, and they were not valid, one of two
+things follows. Either He believed them, and then, what about His
+sanity? or He did not believe them, and then, what about His
+honesty? In either case, what about His claims to be a Teacher of
+religion? What about His claims to be the Pattern of humanity? That
+part of His teaching and character is either the manifestation of
+His glory or it is like one of those fatal black seams that run
+through and penetrate into the substance of a fair white marble
+statue, marring all the rest of its pale and celestial beauty.
+Brethren, it seems to me that, when all is said and done, we come to
+one of three things about Jesus Christ. Either 'He blasphemeth' if
+He said these things, and they were not true, or 'He is beside
+Himself' if He said these things and believed them, or
+
+  'Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ;
+   Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father.'
+
+Now I know that there are many men who, I venture to say, are far
+better than their creed, and who, believing it impossible to accept,
+in their plain meaning, the plain claims of Jesus Christ to
+divinity, do yet cleave to Him with a love and a reverence and an
+obedience which more orthodox men might well copy. And far be it
+from me to say one word which might seem even to quench the faintest
+beam of light that, shining from His perfect character, draws any
+heart, however imperfectly, to Himself. Only, if I speak to any such
+at this time, I beseech them to follow the light which draws them,
+and to see whether their reverence for that fair character should
+not lead them to accept implicitly the claims that came from His own
+lips. I humbly venture to say that if we know anything at all about
+Jesus Christ, we know that He lived declaring Himself to be the
+Everlasting Son of the Father, and that He died because He did so
+declare Himself. And I beseech you to ponder the question whether
+reverence for Him and admiration of His character can be logically
+and reasonably retained, side by side with the repudiation of that
+which is the most distinctive part of His message to men.
+
+Oh, brethren, if it is true that God has come in the flesh, and that
+that sweet, gracious, infinitely beautiful life is really the
+revelation of the heart of God, then what a beam of sunshine falls
+upon all the darkness of this world! Then God is love; then that
+love holds us all; did not shrink from dying for us, and lives for
+ever to bless us. If these claims are true, what should our attitude
+be but that of infinite trust, love, submission, obedience, and the
+shaping of our lives after the pattern of His life?
+
+These rejectors, when they said, 'He speaketh blasphemies,' were
+sealing their own doom, and the ruined Temple and nineteen centuries
+of wandering misery show what comes to men who hear Christ declaring
+that He is the Son of the living God and the Judge of the world, and
+who find nothing in the words but blasphemy. On the other hand, if
+we will answer His question, 'Whom say ye that I am?' as the apostle
+answered it, we shall, like the apostle, receive a benediction from
+His lips, and be set on that faith as on a rock against which the
+'gates of hell' shall not prevail.
+
+
+
+
+'SEE THOU TO THAT!'
+
+
+    'I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent
+    blood. And they said, What is that to us? See thou to
+    that. 24. I am innocent of the blood of this just
+    Person: see ye to it.'--MATT. xxvii. 4, 24.
+
+So, what the priests said to Judas, Pilate said to the priests. They
+contemptuously bade their wretched instrument bear the burden of his
+own treachery. They had condescended to use his services, but he
+presumed too far if he thought that that gave him a claim upon their
+sympathies. The tools of more respectable and bolder sinners are
+flung aside as soon as they are done with. What were the agonies or
+the tears of a hundred such as he to these high-placed and heartless
+transgressors? Priests though they were, and therefore bound by
+their office to help any poor creature that was struggling with a
+wounded conscience, they had nothing better to say to him than this
+scornful gibe, 'What is that to us? See thou to that.'
+
+Pilate, on the other hand, metes to them the measure which they had
+meted to Judas. With curious verbal correspondence, he repeats the
+very words of Judas and of the priests. 'Innocent blood,' said
+Judas. 'I am innocent of the blood of this just Person,' said
+Pilate. 'See thou to that,' answered they. 'See ye to it,' says he.
+He tries to shove off his responsibility upon them, and they are
+quite willing to take it. Their consciences are not easily touched.
+Fanatical hatred which thinks itself influenced by religious motives
+is the blindest and cruellest of all passions, knowing no
+compunction, and utterly unperceptive of the innocence of its
+victim.
+
+And so these three, Judas, the priests, and Pilate, suggest to us, I
+think, a threefold way in which conscience is perverted. Judas
+represents the agony of conscience, Pilate represents the shuffling
+sophistications of a half-awakened conscience, and those priests and
+people represent the torpor of an altogether misdirected conscience.
+
+I. Judas, or the agony of conscience.
+
+'I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood.' We do
+not need to enter at any length upon the difficult question as to
+what were the motives of Judas in his treachery. For my part I do
+not see that there is anything in the Scripture narrative, simply
+interpreted, to bear out the hypothesis that his motives were
+mistaken zeal and affection for Christ; and a desire to force Him to
+the avowal of His Messiahship. One can scarcely suppose zeal so
+strangely perverted as to begin by betrayal, and if the object was
+to make our Lord speak out His claims, the means adopted were
+singularly ill-chosen. The story, as it stands, naturally suggests a
+much less far-fetched explanation.
+
+Judas was simply a man of a low earthly nature, who became a
+follower of Christ, thinking that He was to prove a Messiah of the
+vulgar type, or another Judas Maccabaus. He was not attracted by
+Christ's character and teaching. As the true nature of Christ's work
+and kingdom became more obvious, he became more weary of Him and it.
+The closest proximity to Jesus Christ made eleven enthusiastic
+disciples, but it made one traitor. No man could live near Him for
+three years without coming to hate Him if he did not love Him. Then,
+as ever, He was set for the fall and for the rise of many. He was
+the 'savour of life unto life, or of death unto death.'
+
+But be this as it may, we have here to do with the sudden revulsion
+of feeling which followed upon the accomplished act. This burst of
+confession does not sound like the words of a man who had been
+actuated by motives of mistaken affection. He knows himself a
+traitor, and that fair, perfect character rises before him in its
+purity, as he had never seen it before--to rebuke and confound him.
+
+So this exclamation of his puts into a vivid shape, which may help it to
+stick in our memories and hearts, this thought--what an awful difference
+there is in the look of a sin before we do it and afterwards! Before we
+do it the thing to be gained seems so attractive, and the transgression
+that gains it seems so comparatively insignificant. Yes! and when we
+have done it the two change places; the thing that we win by it seems
+so contemptible--thirty pieces of silver! pitch them over the Temple
+enclosure and get rid of them!--and the thing that we did to win them
+dilates into such awful magnitude!
+
+For instance, suppose we do anything that we know to be wrong, being
+tempted to it by a momentary indulgence of some mere animal impulse.
+By the very nature of the case, that dies in its satisfaction and
+the desire dies along with it. We do not wish the prize any more
+when once we have got it. It lasts but a moment and is past. Then we
+are left alone with the thought of the sin that we have done. When
+we get the prize of our wrong-doing, we find out that it is not as
+all-satisfying as we expected it would be. Most of our earthly aims
+are like that. The chase is a great deal more than the hare. Or, as
+George Herbert has it, 'Nothing between two dishes--a splendid
+service of silver plate, and when you take the cover off there is no
+food to eat--such are the pleasures here.'
+
+Universally, this is true, that sooner or later, when the delirium
+of passion and the rush of temptation are over and we wake to
+consciousness, we find that we are none the richer for the thing
+gained, and oh! so infinitely the poorer for the means by which we
+gained it. It is that old story of the Veiled Prophet that wooed and
+won the hearts of foolish maidens, and, when he had them in his
+power in the inner chamber, removed the silver veil which they had
+thought hid dazzling glory and showed hideous features that struck
+despair into their hearts. Every man's sin does that for him. And to
+you I come now with this message: every wrong thing that you do,
+great or small, will be like some of those hollow images of the gods
+that one hears of in barbarian temples--looked at in front, fair,
+but when you get behind them you find a hollow, full of dust and
+spiders' webs and unclean things. Be sure of this, every sin is a
+blunder.
+
+That is the first lesson that lies in these words of this wretched
+traitor; but again, here is an awful picture for us of the hell upon
+earth, of a conscience which has no hope of pardon. I do not suppose
+that Judas was lost, if he were lost, because he betrayed Jesus
+Christ, but because, having betrayed Jesus Christ, he never asked to
+be forgiven. And I suppose that the difference between the traitor
+who betrayed Him and the other traitor who denied Him, was this,
+that the one, when 'he went out and wept bitterly,' had the thought
+of a loving Master with him, and the other, when 'he went out and
+hanged himself,' had the thought of nothing but that foul deed
+glaring before him. I pray you to learn this lesson--you cannot
+think too much, too blackly, of your own sins, but you may think too
+exclusively of them, and if you do they will drive you to madness of
+despair.
+
+My dear friend, there is no penitence or remorse which is deep
+enough for the smallest transgression; but there is no transgression
+which is so great but that forgiveness for it may come. And we may
+have it for the asking, if we will go to that dear Christ that died
+for us. The consciousness of sinfulness is a wholesome consciousness.
+I would that every man and woman listening to me now had it deep in
+their consciences, and then I would that it might lead us all to that
+one Lord in whom there is forgiveness and peace. Be sure of this,
+that if Judas Iscariot, when his 'soul flared forth in the dark,'
+died without hope and without pardon, it was not because his crime
+was too great for forgiveness, but because the forgiveness had never
+been asked. There is no unpardonable sin except that of refusing the
+pardon that avails for all sin.
+
+II. So much, then, for this first picture and the lessons that come
+out of it. In the next place we take Pilate, as the representative
+of what I have ventured to call the shufflings of a half-awakened
+conscience.
+
+'I am innocent of the blood of this just Person,' says he: 'see ye
+to it.' He is very willing to shuffle off his responsibility upon
+priests and people, and they, for their part, are quite as willing
+to accept it; but the responsibility can neither be shuffled off by
+him nor accepted by them. His motive in surrendering Jesus to them
+was probably nothing more than the low and cowardly wish to humour
+his turbulent subjects, and so to secure an easy tenure of office.
+For such an end what did one poor man's life matter? He had a great
+contempt for the accusers, which he is scarcely at the pains to
+conceal. It breaks out in half-veiled sarcasms, by which he
+cynically indemnifies himself for his ignoble yielding to the
+constraint which they put upon him. He knows perfectly well that the
+Roman power has nothing to fear from this King, whose kingdom rested
+on His witness to the Truth. He knows perfectly well that unavowed
+motives of personal enmity lie at the bottom of the whole business.
+In the words of our text he acquits Christ, and thereby condemns
+himself. If Pilate knew that Jesus was innocent, he knew that he, as
+governor, was guilty of prostituting Roman justice, which was Rome's
+best gift to her subject nations, and of giving up an innocent man
+to death, in order to save himself trouble and to conciliate a
+howling mob. No washing of his hands will cleanse them. 'All the
+perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten that hand. But his words let us
+see how a man may sophisticate his conscience and quibble about his
+guilt.
+
+Here, then, we get once more a vivid picture that may remind us of
+what, alas! we all know in our own experience, how a man's
+conscience may be clearsighted enough to discern, and vocal enough
+to declare, that a certain thing is wrong, but not strong enough to
+restrain from doing it. Conscience has a voice and an eye; alas! it
+has no hands. It shares the weakness of all law, it cannot get
+itself executed. Men will get over a fence, although the board that
+says, 'Trespassers will be prosecuted' is staring them in the face
+in capital letters at the very place where they leap it. Your
+conscience is a king without an army, a judge without officers. 'If
+it had authority, as it has the power, it would govern the world,'
+but as things are, it is reduced to issuing vain edicts and to
+saying, 'Thou shalt not,' and if you turn round and say, 'I will,
+though,' then conscience has no more that it can do.
+
+And then here, too, is an illustration of one of the commonest of
+the ways by which we try to slip our necks out of the collar, and to
+get rid of the responsibilities that really belong to us. 'See ye to
+it' does not avail to put Pilate's crime on the priests' shoulders.
+Men take part in evil, and each thinks himself innocent, because he
+has companions. Half-a-dozen men carry a burden together; none of
+them fancies that he is carrying it. It is like the case of turning
+out a platoon of soldiers to shoot a mutineer--nobody knows whose
+bullet killed him, and nobody feels himself guilty; but there the
+man lies dead, and it was somebody  that did it. So corporations,
+churches, societies, and nations do things that individuals would
+not do, and each man of them wipes his mouth and says, 'I have done
+no harm.' And even when we sin alone we are clever at finding
+scapegoats. 'The woman tempted me, and I did eat,' is the formula
+universally used yet. The schoolboy's excuse, 'Please, sir, it was
+not me, it was the other boy,' is what we are all ready to say.
+
+Now I pray you, brethren, to remember that, whether our consciences
+try to shuffle off responsibility for united action upon the other
+members of the firm, or whether we try to excuse our individual
+actions by laying blame on our tempers, or whether we adopt the
+modern slang, and talk about circumstances and heredity and the
+like, as being reasons for the diminution or the extinction of the
+notion of guilt, it is sophistical trifling; and down at the bottom
+most of us know that we alone are responsible for the volition which
+leads to our act. We could have helped it if we had liked. Nobody
+compelled us to keep in the partnership of evil, or to yield to the
+tempter. Pilate was not forced by his subjects to give the
+commandment that 'it should be as they required.' They had their own
+burden to carry. Each man has to bear the consequences of his
+actions. There are many 'burdens' which we can 'bear for one
+another, and so fulfil the law of Christ'; but every man has to bear
+as his own the burden of the fruits of his deeds. In that harvest,
+he that soweth and he that reapeth are one, and each of us has to
+drink as we ourselves have brewed. You have to pay for your share,
+however many companions you may have had in the act.
+
+So do not you sophisticate your consciences with the delusion that
+your responsibility may be shifted to any other person or thing.
+These may diminish, or may modify your responsibility, and God takes
+all these into account. But after all these have been taken into
+account there is this left--that you yourselves have done the act,
+which you need not have done unless you had so willed, and that
+having done it, you have to carry it on your back for evermore. 'See
+thou to that,' was a heartless word, but it was a true one. 'Every
+one of us shall give an account of himself to God,' and as the old
+Book of Proverbs has it, 'If thou be wise, thou shalt be wise for
+thyself: and if thou scornest, thou alone shalt bear it.'
+
+III. And so, lastly, we have here another group still--the priests
+and people. They represent for us the torpor and misdirection of
+conscience.
+
+'Then answered all the people and said, His blood be on us and on
+our children.' They were perfectly ready to take the burden upon
+themselves. They thought that they were 'doing God service' when
+they slew God's Messenger. They had no perception of the beauty and
+gentleness of Christ's character. They believed Him to be a
+blasphemer, and they believed it to be a solemn religious duty to
+slay Him then and there. Were they to blame because they slew a
+blasphemer? According to Jewish law--no. They were to blame because
+they had brought themselves into such a moral condition that that
+was all which they thought of and saw in Jesus Christ. With their
+awful words they stand before us, as perhaps the crowning instances
+in Scripture history of the possible torpor which may paralyse
+consciences.
+
+I need not dwell, I suppose, even for a moment, upon the thought of
+how the highest and noblest sentiments may be perverted into
+becoming the allies of the lowest crime. 'O Liberty! what crimes
+have been done in thy name!' you remember one of the victims of the
+guillotine said, as her last words. 'O Religion! what crimes have
+been done in _thy_ name!' is one of the lessons to be gathered
+from Calvary.
+
+But, passing that, to come to the thing that is of more consequence
+to each of us, let us take this thought, dear brethren, as to the
+awful possibility of a conscience going fast asleep in the midst of
+the wildest storm of passion, like that unfaithful prophet Jonah,
+down in the hold of the heathen ship. You can lull your consciences
+into dead slumber. You can stifle them so that they shall not speak
+a word against the worst of your sins. You can do so by simply
+neglecting them, by habitually refusing to listen to them. If you
+keep picking all the leaves and buds off the tree before they open,
+it will stop flowering. You can do it by gathering round yourself
+always, and only, evil associations and evil deeds. The habit of
+sinning will lull a conscience faster than almost anything else. We
+do not know how hot a room is, or how much the air is exhausted,
+when we have been sitting in it for an hour and a half. But if we
+came into it from outside we should feel the difference. Styrian
+peasants thrive and fatten upon arsenic, and men may flourish upon
+all iniquity and evil, and conscience will say never a word. Take
+care of that delicate balance within you; and see that you do not
+tamper with it nor twist it.
+
+Conscience may be misguided as well as lulled. It may call evil
+good, and good evil; it may take honey for gall, and gall for honey.
+And so we need something outside of ourselves to be our guide, our
+standard. We are not to be contented that our consciences acquit us.
+'I know nothing against myself, yet I am not hereby justified,' says
+the apostle; 'he that judgeth me is the Lord.' And it is quite
+possible that a man may have no prick of conscience and yet have
+done a very wrong thing. So we want, as it seems to me, something
+outside of ourselves that shall not be affected by our variations.
+Conscience is like the light on the binnacle of a ship. It tosses up
+and down along with the vessel. We want a steady light yonder on
+that headland, on the fixed solid earth, which shall not heave with
+the heaving wave, nor vary at all. Conscience speaks lowest when it
+ought to speak loudest. The worst man is least troubled by his
+conscience. It is like a lamp that goes out in the thickest
+darkness. Therefore we need, as I believe, a revelation of truth and
+goodness and beauty outside of ourselves to which we may bring our
+consciences that they may be enlightened and set right. We want a
+standard like the authorised weights and measures that are kept in
+the Tower of London, to which all the people in the little country
+villages may send up their yard measures and their pound weights,
+and find out if they are just and true. We want a _Bible_, and
+we want a _Christ_ to tell us what is duty, as well as to make
+it possible for us to do it.
+
+These groups which we have been looking at now, show us how very
+little help and sympathy a wounded conscience can get from its
+fellows. The conspirators turn upon each other as soon as the
+detectives are amongst them, and there is always one of them ready
+to go into the witness-box and swear away the lives of the others to
+save his own neck. Wolves tear sick wolves to pieces.
+
+Round us there stand Society, pitiless and stern, and Nature, rigid
+and implacable; not to be besought, not to be turned. And when I, in
+the midst of this universe of fixed law and cause and consequence,
+wail out, 'I have sinned,' a thousand voices say to me, 'What is
+that to us? See thou to that.' And so I am left with my guilt--it
+and I together. There comes One with outstretched, wounded hands,
+and says, 'Cast all thy burden upon Me, and I will free thee from it
+all.' 'Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows!'
+Trust in Him, in His great sacrifice, and you will find that His
+'innocent blood' has a power that will liberate your conscience from
+its torpor, its vain excuses, its agony and despair.
+
+
+
+
+THE SENTENCE WHICH CONDEMNED THE JUDGES
+
+
+    And Jesus stood before the governor: and the governor
+    asked Him, saying, Art Thou the King of the Jews? And
+    Jesus said unto him, Thou sayest. 12. And when He was
+    accused of the chief priests and elders, He answered
+    nothing. 13. Then said Pilate unto Him, Hearest Thou
+    not how many things they witness against Thee? 14. And
+    He answered him to never a word; insomuch that the
+    governor marvelled greatly. 15. Now at that feast the
+    governor was wont to release unto the people a prisoner,
+    whom they would. 16. And they had then a notable
+    prisoner, called Barabbas. 17. Therefore when they were
+    gathered together, Pilate said unto them, Whom will ye
+    that I release unto you? Barabbas, or Jesus which is
+    called Christ? 18. For he knew that for envy they had
+    delivered Him. 19. When he was set down on the judgment
+    seat, his wife sent unto him, saying, Have thou nothing
+    to do with that just man: for I have suffered many
+    things this day in a dream because of Him. 20. But the
+    chief priests and elders persuaded the multitude that
+    they should ask Barabbas, and destroy Jesus. 21. The
+    governor answered and said unto them, Whether of the
+    twain will ye that I release unto you? They said,
+    Barabbas. 22. Pilate saith unto them, What shall I do
+    then with Jesus which is called Christ? They all say
+    unto him, Let Him be crucified. 23. And the governor
+    said, Why, what evil hath He done? But they cried out
+    the more, saying, Let him be crucified. 24. When Pilate
+    saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a
+    tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands
+    before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the
+    blood of this just Person: see ye to it. 25. Then
+    answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us,
+    and on our children. 26. Then released he Barabbas unto
+    them: and when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered Him
+    to be crucified.'--ST. MATT. xxvii. 11-26.
+
+The principal figures in this passage are Pilate and the Jewish
+rulers and people. Jesus is all but passive. They are busy in
+condemning Him, and little know that they are condemning themselves.
+They are unconsciously exemplifying the tragic truth of Christ's
+saying, 'Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken.' They
+do not dislodge it, but their attempt to dislodge it wounds them.
+
+I. Matthew gives a very summary account of our Lord's appearing
+before Pilate, but, brief as it is, and much as it omits, it throws
+up into strong light the two essential points,--Christ's declaration
+that He was the King of the Jews, and His silence while a storm of
+accusations raged around Him. As to the former, it was the only
+charge with which Pilate was properly concerned. He had a right to
+know whether this strange criminal was dangerous to Rome, because He
+claimed kingship, and, if he were satisfied that He was not, his
+bounden duty was to liberate Him. One can understand the scornful
+emphasis which Pilate laid on 'Thou' as he looked on his Prisoner,
+who certainly would not seem to his practical eyes a very formidable
+leader of revolt. There is a world of contempt, amused rather than
+alarmed, in the question, and behind it lies the consciousness of
+commanding legions enough to crush any rising headed by such a
+person. John's account shows the pains which Jesus took to make sure
+of the sense in which the question was asked before He answered it,
+and then to make clear that His kingship bore no menace to Rome.
+That being made plain, He answered with an affirmative. Just as He
+had in unmistakable language claimed before the Sanhedrin to be the
+Messiah, the Son of God, so He claimed before Pilate to be the King
+of Israel, answering each tribunal as to what each had the right to
+inquire into, and thus 'before Pontius Pilate witnessing the good
+confession,' and leaving both tribunals without excuse. Jesus died
+because He would not bate His claims to Messianic dignity. Did He
+fling away His life for a false conception of Himself? He was either
+a dreamer intoxicated with an illusion, and His death was suicide,
+or He was--what?
+
+The one avowal was all that Pilate was entitled to. For the rest Jesus
+locked His lips, and He whose very name was The Word was silent. What
+was the meaning of that silence? It was not disdain, nor unwillingness
+to make Himself known; but it was partly merciful--inasmuch as He knew
+that all speech would have been futile, and would but have added to
+the condemnation of such hearers as Caiaphas, Herod, and Pilate--and
+partly judicial. Still more was it the silence of perfect, unresisting
+submission,--'as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He openeth
+not His mouth.' And it is a pattern for us, as Peter tells us in his
+Epistle; for it is with regard to this very matter of taking unjust
+suffering patiently and without resistance that the apostle says that
+Jesus has 'left us an example.' There are limits to such silent
+endurance of wrong, for Paul defended himself tooth and nail before
+priests and kings; but Christ's followers are strongest by meek
+patience, and descend when they take a leaf out of their enemies' book.
+
+II. The next point is Pilate's weak attempt to save Jesus. Christ's
+silence had impressed Pilate, and, if he had been a true man, he
+would not have stopped at 'marvelling greatly.' He was clearly
+convinced of Christ's innocence of any crime that threatened Roman
+supremacy, and therefore was bound to have given effect to his
+convictions, and let Jesus go. He had read the motives of the
+priests, which were too plain for a shrewd man of the world to be
+blind to them. That Jews should be taken with such a sudden fit of
+loyalty as to yell for the death of a fellow-countryman because he
+was a rebel against Caesar was too absurd to swallow, and Pilate was
+not taken in. He knew that something else was working below ground,
+and hit on 'envy' as the solution. He was not far wrong; for the
+zeal which to the priests themselves seemed to be excited by devout
+regard for God's honour was really kindled by determination to keep
+their own prerogatives, and keen insight into the curtailment of
+these which would follow if this Jesus were recognised as Messiah.
+Pilate's diagnosis coincided with Christ's in the parable: 'This is
+the Heir; come, let us kill Him, and the inheritance shall be ours.'
+
+So, willing to deliver Jesus, and yet afraid to cross the wishes of
+his ticklish subjects, Pilate, like other weak men, tries a trick by
+which he may get his way and seem to give them theirs. He hoped that
+they would choose Jesus rather than Barabbas as the object of the
+customary release. It was ingenious of him to narrow the choice to
+one or other of the two, ignoring all other prisoners who might have
+had the benefit of the custom. But there is also, perhaps, a dash of
+sarcasm, and a hint of his having penetrated the priests' motives,
+in his confining their choice to Jesus or Barabbas; for Barabbas was
+what they had charged Jesus with being,--a rebel; and, if they
+preferred him to Jesus, the hypocrisy of their suspicious loyalty
+would be patent. The same sub-acid tone is obvious in Pilate's twice
+designating our Lord as 'Jesus which is called Christ.' He delights
+to mortify them by pushing the title into their faces, as it were.
+He dare not be just, and he relieves and revenges himself by being
+cynical and mocking.
+
+III. Having referred the choice to the 'multitude,' Pilate takes his
+place on his official seat to wait for, and then to ratify, their
+vote. In that pause, he perhaps felt some compunction at paltering
+with justice, which it was Rome's one virtue to administer. How his
+wife's message would increase his doubt! Was her dream a divine
+warning, or a mere reflection in sleep of waking thoughts? It is
+noticeable that Matthew records several dreams which conveyed God's
+will,--for example, to Joseph and to the Magi, and here may be
+another instance; or some tidings as to Jesus may have reached the
+lady, though not her husband, and her womanly sense of right may
+have shaped the dream, and given her vivid impressions of the danger
+of abetting a judicial murder. But Matthew seems to tell of her
+intervention mainly in order to preserve her testimony to Jesus'
+innocence, and to point out one more of the fences which Pilate
+trampled down in his dread of offending the rulers. A wife's
+message, conveying what both he and she probably regarded as a
+supernatural warning, was powerless to keep him back from his
+disgraceful failure of duty.
+
+IV. While he was fighting against the impression of that message,
+the rulers were busy in the crowd, suggesting the choice of
+Barabbas. It was perhaps his wife's words that stung him to act at
+once, and have done with his inner conflict. So he calls for the
+decision of the alternative which he had already submitted. His
+dignity would suffer, if he had to wait longer for an answer. He got
+it at once, and the unanimous vote was for Barabbas. Probably the
+rulers had skilfully manipulated the people. The multitude is easily
+led by demagogues, but, left to itself, its instincts are usually
+right, though its perception of character is often mistaken. Why was
+Barabbas preferred? Probably just because he had been cast into
+prison for sedition, and so was thought to be a good patriot.
+Popular heroes often win their reputation by very questionable acts,
+and Barabbas was forgiven his being a murderer for the sake of his
+being a rebel. But it was not so much that Barabbas was loved as
+that Jesus was hated, and it was not the multitude so much as the
+rulers that hated him. Many of those now shrieking 'Crucify Him!'
+had shouted 'Hosanna!' a day or two before till they were hoarse.
+The populace was guilty of fickleness, blindness, rashness, too easy
+credence of the crafty calumnies of the rulers. But a far deeper
+stain rests on these rulers who had resisted the light, and were now
+animated by the basest self-interest in the garb of keen regard for
+the honour of God. There were very different degrees of guilt in the
+many voices that roared 'Barabbas!'
+
+Pilate made one more feeble attempt to save Jesus by asking what was
+to be done with Him. The question was an ignoble abdication of his
+judicial office, and perhaps was meant as a salve for his own
+conscience, and an excuse to his wife, enabling him to say, 'I did
+not crucify Him; they did,'--a miserable pretext, the last resort of
+a weak man, who knew that he was doing a wrong and cowardly thing.
+
+V. The same nervous fear and vain attempt to shuffle responsibility
+off himself give tragic interest to his theatrical washing of his
+hands. The one thing that he feared was a riot, which would be like
+a spark in a barrel of gunpowder, if it broke out at the Passover,
+when Jerusalem swarmed with excited crowds. To avoid that, the
+sacrifice of one Jew's life was a small matter, even though he was
+an interesting and remarkable person, and Pilate knew Him to be
+perfectly harmless.
+
+But no washing of hands could shift the guilt from Pilate.
+
+  'Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
+   Clean from my hand? No.'
+
+His vain declaration of innocence is an acknowledgment of guilt, for
+he is forced by conscience to declare that Jesus is a 'righteous
+Man,' and, as such, He should have been under the broad shield of
+Roman justice. We too often deceive ourselves by throwing the blame
+of our sins on companions or circumstances, and try to cheat our
+consciences into silence. But our guilt is ours, however many allies
+we have had, and however strong have been our temptations; and
+though we may say, 'I am innocent,' God will sooner or later say to
+each of us, 'Thou art the man!'
+
+The wild cry of passion with which the multitude accepted the
+responsibility has been only too completely fulfilled in the
+millennium-long Iliad of woes which has attended the Jews. Surely,
+the existence, in such circumstances, for all these centuries, of
+that strange, weird, fated race, is a standing miracle, and the most
+conspicuous proof that 'verily, there is a God that judgeth in the
+earth.' But it is also a prophecy that Israel shall 'turn to the
+Lord,' and that the blood which has so long been on them as a crime,
+carrying its own punishment, will at last be sprinkled on their
+hearts, and take away their sin.
+
+
+
+
+THE CRUCIFIXION
+
+
+    'And when they were come unto a place called Golgotha,
+    that is to say, a place of a skull, 34. They gave Him
+    vinegar to drink mingled with gall: and when He had
+    tasted thereof, He would not drink. 35. And they
+    crucified Him, and parted His garments, casting lots:
+    that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the
+    prophet, They parted My garments among them, and upon
+    My vesture did they cast lots. 36. And sitting down
+    they watched Him there; 37. And set up over His head
+    His accusation written, THIS IS JESUS THE KING OF THE
+    JEWS. 38. Then were there two thieves crucified with
+    Him, one on the right hand, and another on the left
+    39. And they that passed by reviled Him, wagging their
+    heads, 40. And saying, Thou that destroyest the temple,
+    and buildest it in three days, save Thyself. If Thou be
+    the Son of God, come down from the cross. 41. Likewise
+    also the chief priests mocking Him, with the scribes
+    and elders, said, 42. He saved others; Himself He
+    cannot save. If He be the King of Israel, let Him now
+    come down from the cross, and we will believe Him.
+    43. He trusted in God; let Him deliver Him now, if He
+    will have Him: for He said, I am the Son of God.
+    44. The thieves also, which were crucified with Him,
+    cast the same in His teeth. 45. Now from the sixth hour
+    there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth
+    hour. 46. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a
+    loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that
+    is to say, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?
+    47. Some of them that stood there, when they heard
+    that, said. This Man calleth for Elias. 48. And
+    straightway one of them ran, and took a spunge, and
+    filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave
+    Him to drink. 49. The rest said, Let be, let us see
+    whether Elias will come to save Him. 50. Jesus, when He
+    had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost.'
+    --MATT. xxvii. 33-50.
+
+The characteristic of Matthew's account of the crucifixion is its
+representation of Jesus as perfectly passive and silent. His refusal
+of the drugged wine, His cry of desolation, and His other cry at
+death, are all His recorded acts. The impression of the whole is 'as
+a sheep before his shearers is dumb, so He openeth not His mouth.'
+We are bid to look on the grim details of the infliction of the
+terrible death, and to listen to the mockeries of people and
+priests; but reverent awe forbids description of Him who hung there
+in His long, silent agony. Would that like reticence had checked the
+ill-timed eloquence of preachers and teachers of later days!
+
+I. We have the ghastly details of the crucifixion.--Conder's
+suggestion of the site of Calvary as a little knoll outside the
+city, seems possible. It is now a low, bare hillock, with a scanty
+skin of vegetation over the rock, and in its rounded shape and bony
+rockiness explains why it was called 'skull.' It stands close to the
+main Damascus road, so that there would be many 'passers by' on that
+feast day. Its top commands a view over the walls into the temple
+enclosure, where, at the very hour of the death of Jesus, the
+Passover lamb was perhaps being slain. Arrived at the place, the
+executioners go about their task with stolid precision. What was the
+crucifying of another Jew or two to them? Before they lift the cross
+or fasten their prisoner to it, a little touch of pity, or perhaps
+only the observance of the usual custom, leads them to offer a
+draught of wine, in which some anodyne had been mixed, to deaden
+agony. But the cup which He had to drink needed that He should be in
+full possession of all His sensibilities to pain, and of all His
+unclouded firmness of resolve; and so His patient lips closed
+against the offered mercy. He would not drink because He would
+suffer, and He would suffer because He would redeem. His last act
+before He was nailed to the cross was an act of voluntary refusal of
+an opened door of escape from some portion of His pains.
+
+What a gap there is between verses 34 and 35! The unconcerned
+soldiers went on to the next step in their ordinary routine on such
+an occasion,--the fixing of the cross and fastening of the victim to
+it. To them it was only what they had often done before; to Matthew,
+it was too sacred to be narrated, He cannot bring his pen to write
+it. As it were, he bids us turn away our eyes for a moment; and when
+next we look, the deed is done, and there stands the cross, and the
+Lord hanging, dumb and unresisting, on it. We see not Him, but the
+soldiers, busy at their next task. So little were they touched by
+compassion or awe, that they paid no heed to Him, and suspended
+their work to make sure of their perquisites,--the poor robes which
+they stripped from His body. Thus gently Matthew hints at the
+ignominy of exposure attendant on crucifixion, and gives the measure
+of the hard stolidity of the guards. Gain had been their first
+thought, comfort was their second. They were a little tired with
+their march and their work, and they had to stop there on guard for
+an indefinite time, with nothing to do but two more prisoners to
+crucify: so they take a rest, and idly keep watch over Him till He
+shall die. How possible it is to look at Christ's sufferings and see
+nothing! These rude legionaries gazed for hours on what has touched
+the world ever since, and what angels desired to look into, and saw
+nothing but a dying Jew. They thought about the worth of the
+clothes, or about how long they would have to stay there, and in the
+presence of the most stupendous fact in the world's history were all
+unmoved. We too may gaze on the cross and see nothing. We too may
+look at it without emotion, because without faith, or any
+consciousness of what it may mean for us. Only they who see there
+the sacrifice for their sins and the world's, see what is there.
+Others are as blind as, and less excusable than, these soldiers who
+watched all day by the Cross, seeing nothing, and tramped back at
+night to their barrack utterly ignorant of what they had been doing.
+But their work was not quite done. There was still a piece of grim
+mockery to be performed, which they would much enjoy. The 'cause,'
+as Matthew calls it, had to be nailed to the upper part of the
+cross. It was tri-lingual, as John tells us,--in Hebrew, the
+language of revelation; in Greek, the tongue of philosophy and art;
+in Latin, the speech of law and power. The three chief forces of the
+human spirit gave unconscious witness to the King; the three chief
+languages of the western world proclaimed His universal monarchy,
+even while they seemed to limit it to one nation. It was meant as a
+gibe at Him and at the nation, and as Pilate's statement of the
+reason for his sentence; but it meant more than Pilate meant by it,
+and it was fitting that His royal title should hang above His head;
+for the cross is His throne, and He is the King of men because He
+has died for them all. One more piece of work the soldiers had still
+to do. The crucifixion of the two robbers (perhaps of Barabbas'
+gang, though less fortunate than he) by Christ's side was intended
+to associate Him in the public mind with them and their crimes, and
+was the last stroke of malice, as if saying, 'Here is your King, and
+here are two of His subjects and ministers.' Matthew says nothing of
+the triumph of Christ's love, which won the poor robber for a
+disciple even at that hour of ignominy. His one purpose seems to be
+to accumulate the tokens of suffering and shame, and so to emphasise
+the silent endurance of the meek Lamb of God. Therefore, without a
+word about any of our Lord's acts or utterances, he passes on to the
+next group of incidents.
+
+II. The mockeries of people and priests. There would be many coming
+and going on the adjoining road, most of them too busy about their
+own affairs to delay long; for crucifixion was a slow process, and,
+when once the cross has been lifted, there would be little to see.
+But they were not too busy to spit venom at Him as they passed. How
+many of these scoffers, to whom death cast no shield round the
+object of their poor taunts, had shouted themselves hoarse on the
+Monday, and waved palm branches that were not withered yet! What had
+made the change? There was no change. They were running with the
+stream in both their hosannas and their jeers, and the one were
+worth as much as the other. They had been tutored to cry, 'Blessed
+is He that cometh!' and now they were tutored to repeat what had
+been said at the trial about destroying the temple. The worshippers
+of success are true to themselves when they mock at failure. They
+who shout round Jesus, when other people are doing it, are only
+consistent when they join in the roar of execration. Let us take
+care that our worship of Him is rooted in our own personal
+experience, and independent of what rulers or influential minds today
+say of Him.
+
+A common passion levels all distinctions of culture and rank. The
+reverend dignitaries echoed the ferocious ridicule of the mob, whom
+they despised so much. The poorest criminal would have been left to
+die in peace; but brutal laughter surged round the silent sufferer,
+and showers of barbed sarcasms were flung at Him. The throwers
+fancied them exquisite jests, and demonstrations of the absurdity of
+Christ's claims; but they were really witnesses to His claims, and
+explanations of His sufferings. Look at them in turn, with this
+thought in our minds. 'He saved others; Himself He cannot save,' was
+launched as a sarcasm which confuted His alleged miracles by His
+present helplessness. How much it admits, even while it denies!
+Then, He did work miracles; and they were all for others, never for
+His own ends; and they were all for saving, never for destroying.
+Then, too, by this very taunt His claim to be the 'Saviour' is
+presupposed. And so, 'Physician, heal Thyself,' seemed to them an
+unanswerable missile to fling. If they had only known what made the
+'cannot,' and seen that it was a 'will not,' they would have stood
+full in front of the great miracle of love which was before them
+unsuspected, and would have learned that the not saving Himself,
+which they thought blew to atoms His pretensions to save others, was
+really the condition of His saving a world. If He is to save others
+He cannot save Himself. That is the law for all mutual help. The
+lamp burns out in giving light, but the necessity for the death of
+Him who is the life of the world is founded on a deeper 'must.' His
+only way of delivering us from the burden of sin is His taking it on
+Himself. He has to 'bear our griefs and carry our sorrows,' if He is
+to bear away the sin of the world. But the 'cannot' derives all its
+power from His own loving will. The rulers' taunt was a venomous
+lie, as they meant it. If for 'cannot' we read 'will not,' it is the
+central truth of the Gospel.
+
+Nor did they succeed better with their second gibe, which made mirth
+of such a throne, and promised allegiance if He would come down. O
+blind leaders of the blind! That death which seemed to them to
+shatter His royalty really established it. His Cross is His throne
+of saving power, by which He sways hearts and wills, and because of
+it He receives from the Father universal dominion, and every knee
+shall bow to Him. It is just because He did not come down from it
+that we believe on Him. On His head are many crowns; but, however
+many they be, they all grow out of the crown of thorns. The true
+kingship is absolute command over willingly submitted spirits; and
+it is His death which bows us before Him in raptures of glad love
+which counts submission, liberty, and sacrifice blessed. He has the
+right to command because He has given Himself for us, and His death
+wakes all-surrendering and all-expecting faith.
+
+Nor was the third taunt more fortunate. These very religious men had
+read their Bibles so badly that they might never have heard of Job,
+nor of the latter half of Isaiah. They had been poring over the
+letter all their lives, and had never seen, with their microscopes,
+the great figure of the Innocent Sufferer, so plain there. So they
+thought that the Cross demonstrated the hollowness of Jesus' trust
+in God, and the rejection of Him by God. Surely religious teachers
+should have been slow to scoff at religious trust, and surely they
+might have known that failure and disaster even to death were no
+signs of God's displeasure. But, in one aspect, they were right. It
+is a mystery that such a life should end thus; and the mystery is
+none the less because many another less holy life has also ended in
+suffering. But the mystery is solved when we know that God did not
+deliver Him, just because He 'would have Him,' and that the Father's
+delight in the Son reached its very highest point when He became
+obedient until death, and offered Himself 'a sacrifice acceptable,
+well pleasing unto God.'
+
+III. We pass on to the darkness, desolation, and death. Matthew
+represents these three long hours from noon till what answers to our
+3 P.M. as passed in utter silence by Christ. What went on beneath
+that dread veil, we are not meant to know. Nor do we need to ask its
+physical cause or extent. It wrapped the agony from cruel eyes; it
+symbolised the blackness of desolation in His spirit, and by it God
+draped the heavens in mourning for man's sin. What were the
+onlookers doing then? Did they cease their mocking, and feel some
+touch of awe creeping over them?
+
+  'His brow was chill with dying,
+   And His soul was faint with loss.'
+
+The cry that broke the awful silence, and came out of the darkness,
+was more awful still. The fewer our words the better; only we may
+mark how, even in His agony, Jesus has recourse to prophetic words,
+and finds in a lesser sufferer's cry voice for His desolation.
+Further, we may reverently note the marvellous blending of trust and
+sense of desertion. He feels that God has left Him, and yet he holds
+on to God. His faith, as a man, reached its climax in that supreme
+hour when, loaded with the mysterious burden of God's abandonment,
+He yet cried in His agony, 'My God!' and that with reduplicated
+appeal. Separation from God is the true death, the 'wages of sin';
+and in that dread hour He bore in His own consciousness the
+uttermost of its penalty. The physical fact of Christ's death, if it
+could have taken place without this desolation from the
+consciousness of separation from God, would not have been the
+bearing of all the consequences of man's sins. The two must never be
+parted in our grateful contemplations; and, while we reverently
+abjure the attempt to pierce into that which God hid from us by the
+darkness, we must reverently ponder what Christ revealed to us by
+the cry that cleft it, witnessing that He then was indeed bearing
+the whole weight of a world's sin. By the side of such thoughts, and
+in the presence of such sorrow, the clumsy jest of the bystanders,
+which caught at the half-heard words, and pretended to think that
+Jesus was a crazy fanatic calling for Elijah with his fiery chariot
+to come and rescue Him, may well be passed by. One little touch of
+sympathy moistened His dying lips, not without opposition from the
+heartless crew who wanted to have their jest out. Then came the end.
+The loud cry of the dying Christ is worthy of record; for
+crucifixion ordinarily killed by exhaustion, and this cry was
+evidence of abundant remaining vitality. In accordance therewith,
+the fact of death is expressed by a phrase, which, though used for
+ordinary deaths, does yet naturally express the voluntariness of
+Christ. 'He sent away His spirit,' as if He had bid it depart, and
+it obeyed. Whether the expression may be fairly pressed so far or
+no, the fact is the same, that Jesus died, not because He was
+crucified, but because He chose. He was the Lord and Master of
+Death; and when He bid His armour-bearer strike, the slave struck,
+and the King died, not like Saul on the field of his defeat, but a
+victor in and by and over death.
+
+
+
+
+THE BLIND WATCHERS AT THE CROSS
+
+    'And sitting down they watched Him there.'
+    --MATT. xxvii. 36.
+
+Our thoughts are, rightly, so absorbed by the central Figure in this
+great chapter that we pass by almost unnoticed the groups round the
+cross. And yet there are large lessons to be learned from each of
+them. These rude soldiers, four in number, as we infer from John's
+Gospel, had no doubt joined with their comrades in the coarse
+mockery which preceded the sad procession to Calvary; and then they
+had to do the rough work of the executioners, fastening the
+sufferers to the rude wooden crosses, lifting these, with their
+burden, filing them into the ground, then parting the raiment. And
+when all that is done they sit stolidly down to take their ease at
+the foot of the cross, and idly to wait, with eyes that look and see
+nothing, until the sufferers die. A strange picture; and a strange
+thing to think of, how they were so close to the great event in the
+world's history, and had to stare at it for three or four hours, and
+never saw anything!
+
+The lessons that the incident teaches us may be very simply gathered
+together.
+
+I. First we infer from this the old truth of how ignorant men are of
+the real meaning and outcome of what they do.
+
+These four Roman soldiers were foreigners; I suppose that they could
+not speak a word to a man in that crowd. They had no means of
+communication with them. They had had plenty of practice in
+crucifying Jews. It was part of their ordinary work in these
+troublesome times, and this was just one more. Think of what a
+corporal's guard of rough English soldiers, out in Northern India,
+would think if they were bidden to hang a native who was charged
+with rebellion against the British Government. So much, and not one
+whit more, did these men know of what they were doing; and they went
+back to their barracks, stolid and unconcerned, and utterly ignorant
+of what they had been about.
+
+But in part it is so with us all, though in less extreme fashion.
+None of us know the real meaning, and none of us know the possible
+issues and outcome of a great deal of our lives. We are like people
+sowing seed in the dark; it is put into our hands and we sow. We do
+the deed; this end of it is in our power, but where it runs out to,
+and what will come of it, lie far beyond our ken. We are compassed
+about, wherever we go, by this atmosphere of mystery, and enclosed
+within a great ring of blackness.
+
+And so the simple lesson to be drawn from that clear fact, about all
+our conduct, is this--let results alone. Never mind about what you
+cannot get hold of; you cannot see to the other end, and you have
+nothing to do with it. You can see this end; make that right. Be
+sure that the motive is right, and then into whatever unlooked-for
+consequences your act may run out at the further end, you will be
+right. Never mind what kind of harvest is coming out of your deeds,
+you cannot forecast it. 'Thou soweth not that body that shall be,
+but bare grain.... God giveth it a body as it pleaseth Him.' Let
+alone that profitless investigation, the attempt to fashion and
+understand either the significance or the issues of your conduct,
+and stick fast by this--look after your motive for doing it, and
+your temper in doing it; and then be quite sure, 'Thou shalt find it
+after many days,' and the fruit will be 'unto praise and honour and
+glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ.'
+
+II. Take another very simple and equally plain lesson from this
+incident, viz., the limitation of responsibility by knowledge.
+
+These men, as I said, were ignorant of what they were doing, and,
+therefore, they were guiltless. Christ Himself said so: 'They know
+not what they do.' But it is marvellous to observe that whilst the
+people who stood round the cross, and were associated in the act
+that led Jesus there, had all degrees of responsibility, the least
+guilty of the whole were the men who did the actual work of nailing
+Him to the cross, and lifting it with Him upon it. These soldiers
+were not half as much to blame as were many of the men that stood
+by; and just in the measure in which the knowledge or the
+possibility of knowledge increased, just in that measure did the
+responsibility increase. The high priest was a great deal more to
+blame than the Roman soldiers. The rude tool that nailed Christ to
+the cross, the hammer that was held in the hand of the legionary,
+was almost as much to blame as the hand that wielded it. For the
+hand that wielded it had very little more knowledge than it had.
+
+In so far as it was possible that these men might have known
+something of what they were doing, in so far were they to blame; but
+remember what a very, very little light could possibly have shone
+upon these souls. If there is no light there cannot be any shadow;
+and if these men were, as certainly they were, all but absolutely
+ignorant, and never could have been anything else, of what they were
+doing, then they were all but absolutely guiltless. And so you come
+to this, which is only a paradox to superficial thinkers, that the
+men that did the greatest crime in the whole history of the world,
+did it with all but clean hands; and the people that were to be
+condemned were those who delivered 'the Just One' into the hands of
+more lawless, and therefore less responsible, men.
+
+So here is the general principle, that as knowledge and light rise
+and fall, so responsibility rises and falls along with them. And
+therefore let us be thankful that we have not to judge one another,
+but that we have all to stand before that merciful and loving
+tribunal of the God who is a God of knowledge, and by whom actions
+are _weighed_, as the Old Book has it--not _counted_, but weighed. And
+let us be thankful, too, that we may extend our charity to all round
+us, and refrain from thinking of any man or woman that we can pronounce
+upon their criminality, because we do not know the light in which they
+walk.
+
+III. And now the last lesson, and the one that I most desire to lay
+upon your hearts, is this, how possible it is to look at Christ on
+the cross, and see nothing.
+
+For half a day there they sat, and it was but a dying Jew that they
+saw, one of three. A touch of pity came into their hearts once or
+twice, alternating to mockery, which was not savage because it was
+simply brutal; but when it was all over, and they had pierced His
+side, and gone away back to their barracks, they had not the least
+notion that they, with their dim, purblind eyes, had been looking at
+the most stupendous miracle in the whole world's history, had been
+gazing at the thing into which angels desired to look; and had seen
+that to which the hearts and the gratitude of unconverted millions
+would turn for all eternity. They laid their heads down on their
+pillows that night and did not know what had passed before their
+eyes, and they shut the eyes that had served them so ill, and went
+to sleep, unconscious that they had seen the pivot on which the
+whole history of humanity had turned; and been the unmoved witnesses
+of 'God manifest in the flesh,' dying on the cross for the whole
+world, and for them. What should they have seen if they had seen the
+reality? They should have seen not a dying rebel but a dying Christ;
+they should have looked with emotion, they should have looked with
+faith, they should have looked with thankfulness.
+
+Any one who looks at that cross, and sees nothing but a pure and
+perfect man dying upon it, is very nearly as blind as the Roman
+legionaries. Any one to whom it is only an example of perfect
+innocence and patient suffering has only seem an inch into the
+Infinite; and the depths of it are as much concealed from him as
+they were from them. Any one who looks with an unmoved heart,
+without one thrill of gratitude, is nearly as blind as the rough
+soldiers. He that looks and does not say--
+
+  'My faith would lay her hand
+   On that dear head of Thine;
+   While like a penitent I stand
+   And there confess my sin,'
+
+has not learned more of the meaning of the Cross than they did. And
+any one who looks to it, and then turns away and forgets, or who
+looks at it and fails to recognise in it the law of his own life and
+pattern for his own conduct, has yet to see more deeply into it
+before he sees even such portion of its meaning as here we can
+apprehend.
+
+Oh! dear friends, we all of us, as the apostle says in one of his
+letters, have had this Christ 'manifestly set forth before us as if
+painted upon a placard upon a wall' (for that is the meaning of the
+picturesque words that he employs). And if we look with calm,
+unmoved hearts; if we look without personal appropriation of that
+Cross and dying love to ourselves, and if we look without our hearts
+going out in thankfulness and laying themselves at His feet in a
+calm rapture of life-long devotion, then we need not wonder that
+four ignorant heathen men sat and looked at Him for four long hours
+and saw nothing, for we are as blind as ever they were.
+
+You say, 'We see.' Do you see? Do you look? Does the look touch your
+hearts? Have you fathomed the meaning of the fact? Is it to you the
+sacrifice of the living Christ for your salvation? Is it to you the
+death on which all your hopes rest? You say that you see. Do you see
+that in it? Do you see your only ground of confidence and peace? And
+do you so see that, like a man who has looked at the sun for a
+moment or two, when you turn away your head you carry the image of
+what you beheld still stamped on your eyeball, and have it both as a
+memory and a present impression? So is the cross photographed on
+your heart; and is it true about us that every day, and all days, we
+behold our Saviour, and beholding Him are being changed into His
+likeness? Is it true about us that we thus bear about with us in the
+body 'the dying of the Lord Jesus'? If we look to Him with faith and
+love, and make His Cross our own, and keep it ever in our memory,
+ever before us as an inspiration and a hope and a joy and a pattern,
+then we see. If not, 'for judgment am I come into the world, that
+they which see not may see, and that they which see might be made
+blind.' For what men are so blind to the infinite pathos and
+tenderness, power, mystery, and miracle of the Cross, as the men and
+women who all their lives long have heard a Gospel which has been
+held up before their lack-lustre eyes, and have looked at it so long
+that they cannot see it any more?
+
+Let us pray that our eyes may be purged, that we may see, and seeing
+may copy, that dying love of the ever-loving Lord.
+
+
+
+
+TAUNTS TURNING TO TESTIMONIES
+
+
+    '... The chief priests mocking Him ... said, 42. He
+    saved others; Himself He cannot save. If He be the
+    King of Israel, let Him now come down from the cross,
+    and we will believe Him. 43. He trusted in God; let
+    Him deliver Him now, if He will have Him.'
+    --MATT. xxvii. 41-43.
+
+It is an old saying that the corruption of the best is the worst.
+What is more merciful and pitiful than true religion? What is more
+merciless and malicious than hatred which calls itself 'religious'?
+These priests, like many a persecutor for religion since, came to
+feast their eyes on the long-drawn-out agonies of their Victim, and
+their rank tongues blossomed into foul speech. Characteristically
+enough, though they shared in the mockeries of the mob, they kept
+themselves separate. The crowd pressed near enough to the cross to
+speak their gibes _to_ Jesus; the dignified movers of the
+ignorant crowd stood superciliously apart, and talked scoffingly
+_about_ Him. Whilst the populace yelled, 'Thou that destroyest
+the Temple and buildest it in three days, come down,' the chief
+priests, with the scribes, looked at each other with a smile, and
+said, '_He_ saved others; Himself _He_ cannot save.'   Now,
+these brutal taunts have lessons for us. They witness to the popular
+impression of Christ, and what His claims were. He asserted Himself
+to be a worker of miracles, the Messiah-King of Israel, the Son of God,
+therefore He died. And they witness to the misconception which ruled
+in the minds of these priests as to the relation of His claims to the
+Cross. They thought that it had finally burst the bubble, and disposed
+once for all of these absurd and blasphemous pretensions. Was it
+credible that a man who possessed miraculous power should not, in
+this supreme moment, use it to deliver Himself? Did not 'Physician,
+heal Thyself,' come in properly there? Would any of the most besotted
+followers of this pretender retain a rag of belief in His Messiahship
+if He was crucified? Could it be possible that, if there was a God at
+all, He should leave a man that really trusted in Him, not to say
+who was really His Son, to die thus? A cracked mirror gives a distorted
+image. The facts were seen, but their relation was twisted. If we will
+take the guidance of these gibes, and see what is the real explanation
+to the anomaly that they suggest, then we shall find that the taunts
+turn to Him for a testimony, and that 'out of the mouths of mockers
+there is 'perfected praise.' The stones flung at the Master turn to
+roses strewed in His path.
+
+I. So, then, first the Cross shows us the Saviour who could not save
+Himself.
+
+The priests did not believe in Christ's miracles, and they thought
+that this final token of his impotence, as they took it to be, was
+clear proof that the miracles were either tricks or mistakes. They
+saw the two things, they fatally misunderstood the relation between
+them. Let us put the two things together.
+
+Here, on the one hand, is a Man who has exercised absolute authority
+in all the realms of the universe, who has spoken to dead matter,
+and it has obeyed; who by His word has calmed the storm, and hushed
+the winds by His word, has multiplied bread, has transmuted pale water
+into ruddy wine; who has moved omnipotent amongst the disturbed minds
+and diseased bodies of men, who has cast His sovereign word into the
+depth and darkness of the grave, and brought out the dead, stumbling
+and entangled in the grave-clothes. All these are facts on the one
+side. And on the other there is this--that there, passive, and, to
+superficial eyes, impotent, He hangs the helpless Victim of Roman
+soldiers and of Jewish priests. The short and easy vulgar way to
+solve the apparent contradiction was to deny the reality of the one
+of its members; to say 'Miracles? Absurd! He never worked one, or He
+would have been working one now.'
+
+But let their error lead us into truth, and let us grasp the
+relation of the two apparently contradictory facts. 'He saved
+others,' that is certain. He did not 'save Himself,' that is
+as certain. Was the explanation 'cannot'? The priests by 'cannot'
+meant physical impossibility, defect of power, and they were
+wrong. But there is a profound sense in which the word 'cannot'
+is absolutely true. For this is in all time, and in all human
+relations, the law of service--sacrifice; and no man can truly
+help humanity, or an individual, unless he is prepared to
+surrender himself in the service. The lamp burns away in giving
+light. The fire consumes in warming the hearth, and no brotherly
+sympathy or help has ever yet been rendered, or ever will be,
+except at the price of self-surrender. Now, some people think
+that this is the whole explanation of our Lord's history, both
+in His life and in His death. I do not believe that it is the
+whole explanation, but I do believe it carries us some way
+towards the central sanctuary, where the explanation lies. And
+yet it is not complete or adequate, because, to parallel Christ's
+work with the work of any of the rest of us to our brethren,
+however beautiful, disinterested, self-oblivious, and self-consuming
+it may be, seems to me--I say it with deference, though I must here
+remember considerations of brevity and be merely assertive--entirely
+to ignore the unique special characteristic of the work of Jesus
+Christ--viz., that it was the atonement for the sins of the world.
+He could not bear away our sins, unless the burden of them was laid
+on His own back, and He carried our griefs, our sorrows, our diseases,
+and our transgressions. 'He saved others, Himself He cannot save.' But
+the impossibility was purely the result of His own willing and obedient
+love; or, if I put it in more epigrammatic form, the priests' 'cannot'
+was partially true, but if they had said '_would not_' they would
+have hit the mark, and come to full truth. The reason for His death
+becomes clear, and each of the contrasted facts is enhanced, when we
+set side by side the opulence and ease of His manifold miracles and
+the apparent impotence and resourcelessness of the passive Victim on
+the cross.
+
+That 'cannot' did not come from defect of power, but from plenitude
+of love, and it was a 'will not' in its deepest depths. For you will
+find scattered throughout Scripture, especially these Gospels,
+indications from our Lord's own lips, and by His own acts, that, in
+the truest and fullest sense, His sufferings were voluntary. 'No man
+taketh it from me'--He says about His life--'I have power to lay it
+down, and I have power to take it again.' And once He did choose to
+flash out for a moment the always present power, that we might learn
+that when it did not appear, it was not because he could not, but
+because he would not. When the soldiers came to lay their hands upon
+Him, He presented Himself before them, saving them all the trouble
+of search, and when He asked a question, and received the answer
+that it was He of whom they were in search, there came one sudden
+apocalypse of His majesty, and they fell to the ground, and lay
+there prone before Him. They could have had no power at all against
+Him, except He had willed to surrender Himself to them. Again,
+though it is hypercritical perhaps to attach importance to what may
+only be natural idiomatic forms of speech, yet in this connection it
+is not to be overlooked that the language of all the Evangelists, in
+describing the supreme moment of Christ's death, is congruous with
+the idea that He died neither from the exhaustion of crucifixion,
+nor from the thrust of the soldier's spear, but because He would.
+For they all have expressions equivalent to that of one of them, 'He
+gave up His spirit.' Be that as it may, the 'cannot' was a 'will
+not'; and it was neither nails that fastened Him to the tree, nor
+violence that slew Him, but He was fixed there by His own steadfast
+will, and He died because He would. So if we rightly understand the
+'cannot' we may take up with thankfulness the taunt which, as I say,
+is tuned to a testimony, and reiterate adoringly, 'He saved others,
+Himself He cannot save.'
+
+II. The Cross shows us the King on His throne.
+
+To the priests it appeared ludicrous to suppose that a King of
+Israel should, by Israel, be nailed upon the cross. 'Let Him come
+down, and we will believe Him.' They saw the two facts, they
+misconceived their relation. There was a relation between them, and
+it is not difficult for us to apprehend it.
+
+The Cross is Christ's throne. There are two ways in which the
+tragedy of His crucifixion is looked at in the Gospels, one that
+prevails in the three first, another that prevails in the fourth.
+These two seem superficially to be opposite; they are complementary.
+It depends upon your station whether a point in the sky is your
+_zenith_ or your _nadir_. Here it is your zenith; at the antipodes
+it is the nadir. In the first three gospels the aspect of humiliation,
+degradation, inanition, suffering, is prominent in the references to
+the Crucifixion. In the _fourth_ gospel the aspect of glory and
+triumph is uppermost. 'Even so must the Son of Man be lifted up'; 'I,
+if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me'; 'Now the hour is come
+that the Son of Man should be glorified.' And it _is_ His glory, for
+on that Cross Jesus Christ manifests, in transcendent and superlative
+form, at once power and love that are boundless and divine. The Cross
+is the foundation of His kingdom. In his great passage in Philippians
+the Apostle brings together, in the closest causal connection, His
+obedience unto death, the death of the Cross, and His exaltation and
+reception of 'the name that is above every name, that at the name of
+Jesus every knee should bow.' The title over the Cross was meant for
+a gibe. It was a prophecy. By the Cross He becomes the 'King,' and not
+only the 'King of the Jews.' The sceptre that was put in His hand,
+though it was meant for a sneer, was a forecast of a truth, for He
+rules, not with a rod of iron, but with the reed of gentleness; and
+the crown of thorns, that was pressed down on His wounded and
+bleeding head, foretold for our faith the great truth that suffering is
+the foundation of dominion, and that men will bow as to their King
+and Lord before Him who died for them, with a prostration of spirit, a
+loyalty of allegiance, and an alertness of service, which none
+other, monarch or superior, may even dream of attaining. The Cross
+establishes, not destroys, Christ's dominion over men.
+
+Yes; and that Cross wins their faith as nothing else can. The blind
+priests said, 'Let Him come down, and we will believe Him.'
+Precisely because He did not come down, do sad and sorrowful and
+sinful hearts turn to Him from the ends of the earth, and from the
+distances of the ages pour the treasures of their trust and their
+love at His feet. Did you ever think how strange it is, except with
+one explanation, that the gibes of the priests did not turn out to
+be true? Why is it that Christ's shameful death did not burst the
+bubble, as they thought it had done? Why is it that in His case--and
+I was going to say, and it would have been no exaggeration, in His
+case only--the death of the leader did not result in the dispersion
+of the led? Why is it that His fate and future were the opposite of
+that of multitudes of other pseudo-Messiahs, of whom it is true that
+when they were slain their followers came to nought? Why? There is
+only one explanation, I think, and that is that the death was not
+the end, but that He rose again from the dead. My brother, you will
+either have to accept the Resurrection, with all that comes from it,
+or else you will have to join the ranks of the priests, and consider
+that Christ's death blew to atoms Christ's pretensions. If we know
+anything about Him, we know that He asserted miraculous power,
+Messiahship, and a filial relation to God. These things are facts.
+Did He rise or did He not? If He did not, He was an enthusiast. If
+He did, He is the King to whom our hearts can cleave, and to whom
+our loyalty is due.
+
+III. Now, lastly, the Cross shows us the Son, beloved of the Father.
+
+The priests thought that it was altogether incredible that His
+devotion should have been genuine, or His claim to be the Son of God
+should have any reality, since the Cross, to their vulgar eyes,
+disproved them both. Like all coarse-minded people, they estimated
+character by condition, but they who do that make no end of
+mistakes. They had forgotten their own Prophecies, which might have
+told them that 'the Servant of the Lord in whom' His 'heart
+delighted,' was a suffering Servant. But whilst they recognised the
+facts, here again, as in the other two cases, they misconceived the
+relation. We have the means of rectifying the distorted image.
+
+We ought to know, and to be sure, that the Cross of Christ was the
+very token that this was God's 'beloved Son in whom He was well
+pleased.' If we dare venture on the comparison of parts of that
+which is all homogeneous and perfect, we might say that in the
+moment of His death Jesus Christ was more than ever the object of
+the Father's delight.
+
+Why? It is not my purpose now to enlarge upon all the reasons which
+might be suggested. Let me put them together in a sentence or two.
+In that Cross Jesus Christ revealed God as God's heart had always
+yearned to be revealed, infinite in love, pitifulness, forbearance,
+and pardoning mercy. There was the highest manifestation of the
+glory of God. 'What?' you say, 'a poor weak Man, hanging on a cross,
+and dying in the dark--is _that_ the very shining apex of all
+that humanity can know of divinity?' Yes, for it is the pure
+manifestation that God is Love. Therefore the whole sunshine of the
+Father's presence rested on the dying Saviour. It was the hour when
+God most delighted in Him, if I may venture the comparison, for the
+other reasons that then He carried filial obedience to its utmost
+perfection, that then His trust in God was deepest, even at the hour
+when His spirit was darkened by the cloud that the world's sin,
+which He was carrying, had spread thunderous between Him and the
+sunshine of the Father's face. For in that mysterious voice, which
+we can never understand in its depths, there were blended trust and
+desolation, each in its highest degree: 'My God! my God! Why hast
+Thou forsaken Me?' And the Cross was the complete carrying out of
+God's dearest purpose for the world, that He might be 'just, and the
+justifier of him that believeth in Jesus.' Therefore, then--I was
+going to say as never before--was Christ His Son, in whom He
+delighted.
+
+Brethren, let us, led by the errors of these scoffers, grasp the
+truths that they pervert. Let us see that weak Man hanging helpless
+on the cross, whose 'cannot' is the impotence of omnipotence,
+imposed by His own loving will to save a world by the sacrifice of
+Himself. Let us crown Him our King, and let our deepest trust and
+our gladdest obedience be rendered to Him because He did not come
+down from, but 'endured, the cross.' Let us behold with wonder, awe,
+and endless love the Father not withholding His only Son, but
+'delivering Him up to the death for us all,' and from the empty
+grave and the occupied Throne let us learn how the Father by both
+proclaims to all the world concerning Him hanging dying on the
+cross: '_This_ is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.'
+
+
+
+
+THE VEIL RENT
+
+
+    'Behold, the veil of the Temple was rent in twain from
+    the top to the bottom.'--MATT. xxvii. 51.
+
+As I suppose we are all aware, the Jewish Temple was divided into
+three parts: the Outer Court, open to all; the Holy Place, to which
+the ministering priests had daily access to burn incense and trim
+the lamps; and the Holy of Holies, where only the High Priest was
+permitted to go, and that but once a year, on the great Day of
+Atonement. For the other three hundred and sixty-four days the
+shrine lay silent, untrodden, dark. Between it and the less sacred
+Holy Place hung the veil, whose heavy folds only one man was
+permitted to lift or to pass. To all others it was death to peer
+into the mysteries, and even to him, had he gone at another time,
+and without the blood of the sacrifice, death would have ensued.
+
+If we remember all this and try to cast ourselves back in
+imagination to the mental attitude of the ordinary Jew, the incident
+of my text receives its true interpretation. At the moment when the
+loud cry of the dying Christ rung over the heads of the awestruck
+multitude, that veil was, as it were, laid hold of by a pair of
+giant hands and torn asunder, as the Evangelist says, 'from the top
+to the bottom.' The incident was a symbol. In one aspect it
+proclaimed the end of the long years of Israel's prerogative. In
+another it ushered in an epoch of new relations between man and God.
+If Jesus Christ was what He said He was, if His death was what He
+declared it to be, it was fitting that it should be attended by a
+train of subordinate and interpreting wonders. These were, besides
+that of my text, the darkened sun, the trembling earth, the shivered
+rocks, the open graves, the rising saints--all of them, in their
+several ways, illuminating the significance of that death on
+Calvary.
+
+Not less significant is this symbol of my text, and I desire now to
+draw your attention to its meanings.
+
+I. The rent veil proclaims the desecrated temple.
+
+There is a striking old legend, preserved by the somewhat mendacious
+historian of the Jewish people, that, before Jerusalem fell, the
+anxious watchers heard from within the sanctuary a great voice
+saying, 'Let us depart hence!' and through the night were conscious
+of the winnowing of the mighty wings of the withdrawing cherubim.
+And soon a Roman soldier tossed a brand into the most Holy Place,
+and the 'beautiful house where their fathers praised was burned with
+fire.' The legend is pathetic and significant. But that 'departing'
+had taken place forty years before; and at the moment when Jesus
+'gave up the ghost,' purged eyes might have seen the long trail of
+brightness as the winged servitors of the Most High withdrew from
+the desecrated shrine. The veil rent declared that the sacred soil
+within it was now common as any foot of earth in Galilee; and its
+rending, so to speak, made way for a departing God.
+
+That conception, that the death of Christ Jesus was the
+_de-consecration_--if I may coin a word--of the Temple, and the end
+of all its special sanctity, and that thenceforward the Presence had
+departed from it, is distinctly enough taught us by Himself in words
+which move in the same circle of ideas as that in which the symbol
+resides.... You remember, no doubt, that, if we accept the testimony
+of John's Gospel, at the very beginning of our Lord's ministry He
+vindicated His authority to cleanse the sanctuary against the cavils
+of the sticklers for propriety by the enigmatical words, 'Destroy
+this Temple, and in three days I will build it up,' to which the
+Evangelist appends the comment, 'He spake of the Temple of His
+body,' that body in which 'all the fulness of the Godhead' dwelt,
+and which was, and is to-day, all that the Temple shadowed and
+foretold, the dwelling-place of God in humanity, the place of
+sacrifice, the meeting-place between God and man. But just because
+our Lord in these dark words predicted His death and His
+resurrection, He also hinted the destruction of the literal stone
+and lime building, and its rearing again in nobler and more
+spiritual form. When He said, 'Destroy this Temple,' He implied,
+secondarily, the destruction of the house in which He stood, and
+laid that destruction, whensoever it should come to pass, at their
+doors. And, inasmuch as the saying in its deepest depth meant His
+death by their violence and craft, therefore, in that early saying
+of His, was wrapped up the very same truth which was symbolised by
+the rent veil, and was bitterly fulfilled at last. When they slew
+Christ they killed the system under which they lived, and for which
+they would have been glad to die, in a zeal without knowledge; and
+destroyed the very Temple on the distorted charge of being the
+destroyer of which, they handed Him over to the Roman power.
+
+The death of Christ is, then, the desecration and the destruction of
+that Temple. Of course it is; because when a nation that had had
+millenniums of education, of forbearance, of revelation, turned at
+last upon the very climax and brightest central light of all the
+Revelation, standing there amongst them in a bodily form, there was
+nothing more to be done. God had shot His last arrow; His quiver was
+empty. 'Last of all He sent unto them His Son, saying,' with a
+wistful kind of half-confidence, 'They will reverence My Son,' and
+the divine expectation was disappointed, and exhaustless Love was
+empty-handed, and all was over. He could turn to themselves and say,
+'Judge between Me and My vineyard. What more could have been done
+that I have not done to it?' Therefore, there was nothing left but
+to let the angels of destruction loose, and to call for the Roman
+eagles with their broad-spread wings, and their bloody beaks, and
+their strong talons, to gather together round the carcase. When He
+gave up the Ghost, 'the veil of the Temple was rent in twain from
+the top to the bottom.'
+
+A time of repentance was given. It was possible for the most guilty
+participator in that judicial murder to have his gory hands washed
+and made white in the very blood that he had shed; but, failing
+repentance, that death was the death of Israel, and the destruction
+of Israel's Temple. Let us take the lesson, dear brethren. If we
+turn away from that Saviour, and refuse the offered gifts of His
+love, there is no other appeal left in the power of Heaven; and
+there is nothing for it after that except judgment and destruction.
+We can 'crucify the Son of God afresh and put Him to an open shame.'
+And the hearts that are insensitive, as are some of our hearts, to
+that great love and grace, are capable of nothing except to be
+pulverised by means of a judgment. Repentance is possible for us
+all, but, failing that, the continuance of rejection of Christ is
+the pulling down, on our own heads, of the ruins of the Temple, like
+the Israelitish hero in his blindness and despair.
+
+II. Now, secondly, the rent veil means, in another way of looking at
+the incident, light streaming in on the mystery of God.
+
+Let me recall to your imaginations what lay behind that heavy veil.
+In the Temple, in our Lord's time, there was no presence of the
+Shekinah, the light that symbolised the divine presence. There was
+the mercy-seat, with the outstretched wings of the cherubim; there
+were the dimly pictured forms on the tapestry hangings; there was
+silence deep as death; there was darkness absolute and utter, whilst
+the Syrian sun was blazing down outside. Surely that is the symbol
+of the imperfect knowledge or illumination as to the divine nature
+which is over all the world. 'The veil is spread over all nations,
+and the covering over all people.' And surely that sudden, sharp
+tearing asunder of the obscuring medium, and letting the bright
+sunlight stream into every corner of the dark chamber, is for us a
+symbol of the great fact that in the life, and especially in the
+death, of Jesus Christ our Lord, we have light thrown in to the
+depths of God.
+
+What does that Cross tell us about God that the world did not know?
+And how does it tell us? and why does it tell us? It tells us of
+absolute righteousness, of that in the divine nature which cannot
+tolerate sin; of the stern law of retribution which must be wrought
+out, and by which the wages of every sin is death. It tells us not
+only of a divine righteousness which sees guilt and administers
+punishment, but it tells us of a divine love, perfect, infinite,
+utter, perennial, which shrinks from no sacrifice, which stoops to
+the lowest conditions, which itself takes upon it all the miseries
+of humanity, and which dies because it loves and will save men from
+death. And as we look upon that dying Man hanging on the cross, the
+very embodiment and consummation of weakness and of shame, we have
+to say, 'Lo! this is our God! We have waited for Him'--through all
+the weary centuries--'and He will save us.' How does it tell us all
+this? Not by eloquent and gracious thoughts, not by sweet and
+musical words, but by a deed. The only way by which we can know men
+is by what they do. The only way by which we know God is by what He
+does. And so we point to that Cross and say, 'There! not in words,
+not in thoughts, not in speculations, not in hopes and fears and
+peradventures and dim intuitions, but in a solid fact; there is the
+Revelation which lays bare the heart of God, and shows us its very
+throbbing of love to every human soul.' 'The veil was rent in twain
+from the top to the bottom.'
+
+The Cross will reveal God to you only if you believe that Jesus
+Christ was the Incarnate Word. Brethren, if that death was but the
+death of even the very holiest, noblest, sweetest, perfectest soul
+that ever lived on earth and breathed human breath, there is no
+revelation of God in it for us. It tells us what Jesus was, and by a
+very roundabout inference may suggest something of what the divine
+nature is, but unless you can say, as the New Testament says, 'In
+the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
+was God.... And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we
+beheld His glory, the glory as of the only Begotten of the Father,
+full of grace and truth,' I fail to see how the death of Christ can
+be a revelation of the love of God.
+
+I need not occupy time in dilating upon the contrast between this
+solid certitude, and all that the world, apart from Jesus Christ,
+has to lay hold of about God. We want something else than mist on
+which to build, and on which to lay hold. And there is a
+substantial, warm, flesh-and-blood hand, if I may so say, put out to
+us through the mist when we believe in Christ the Son of God, who
+died on the cross for us all. Then, amidst whirling mists and
+tossing seas, there is a fixed point to which we can moor; then our
+confidence is built, not on peradventures or speculations or wishes
+or dreams or hopes, but on a historical fact, and grasping that firm
+we may stand unmoved.
+
+Dear friends, I may be very old-fashioned and very narrow--I suppose
+I am; but I am bound to declare my conviction, which I think every
+day's experience of the tendency of thought only makes more certain,
+that, practically for this generation, the choice lies between
+accepting the life and death of Jesus Christ as the historical
+Revelation of God, or having no knowledge of Him--_knowledge_,
+I say,--of Him at all; you must choose between the barred sanctuary,
+within which lies couched a hidden Something--with a capital S--or
+perhaps a hidden Someone whom you never can know and never will; or
+the rent veil, rent by Christ's death, through which you can pass,
+and behold the mercy-seat and, above the outstretched wings of the
+adoring cherubim, the Father whose name is Love.
+
+III. Lastly, the rent veil permits any and every man to draw near to
+God.
+
+You remember what I have already said as to the jealous guarding of
+the privacy of that inner shrine, and how not only the common herd
+of the laity, but the whole of the priesthood, with the solitary
+exception of its titular head, were shut out from ever entering it.
+In the old times of Israel there was only one man alive at once who
+had ever been beyond the veil. And now that it is rent, what does
+that show but this, that by the death of Jesus Christ any one, every
+one, is welcome to pass in to the very innermost sanctuary, and to
+dwell, nestling as close as he will, to the very heart of the
+throned God? There is a double veil, if I may so say, between man
+and God: the side turned outward is woven by our own sins; and the
+other turned inwards is made out of the necessary antagonism of the
+divine nature to man's sin. There hangs the veil, and when the
+Psalmist asked, 'Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord; or who
+shall stand in His holy place?' he was putting a question which
+echoes despairingly in the very heart of all religions. And he
+answered it as conscience ever answers it when it gets fair play:
+'He that hath clean hands and a pure heart, who hath not lifted up
+his soul unto vanity.' And where or who is he? Nowhere; nobody.
+Access is barred, because it is impossible that a holy and righteous
+God should communicate the selectest gifts of His love, even the
+sense of His favour, and of harmony and fellowship with Him, to
+sinful men, and barred, because it is impossible that men, with the
+consciousness of evil and the burden of guilt sometimes chafing
+their shoulders, and always bowing down their backs, should desire
+to possess, or be capable of possessing, that fellowship and union
+with God. A black, frowning wall, if I may change the metaphor of my
+text, rises between us and God. But One comes with the sacrificial
+vessel in His hand, and pours His blood on the barrier, and that
+melts the black blocks that rise between us and God, and the path is
+patent and permeable for every foot. 'The veil of the Temple was
+rent in twain' when Christ died. That death, because it is a
+sacrifice, makes it possible that the whole fulness of the divine
+love should be poured upon man. That death moves our hearts, takes
+away our sense of guilt, draws us nearer to Him; and so both by its
+operation--not on the love of God--but on the government of God, and
+by its operation on the consciousness of men, throws open the path
+into His very presence.
+
+If I might use abstract words, I would say that Christ's death
+potentially opens the path for every man, which being put into plain
+English--which is better--is just that by the death of Christ every
+man can, if he will, go to God, and live beside Him. And our faith
+is our personal laying hold of that great sacrifice and treading on
+that path. It turns the 'potentiality' into an actuality, the
+possibility into a fact. If we believe on Him who died on the cross
+for us all, then by that way we come to God, than which there is
+none other given under heaven among men.
+
+So all believers are priests, or none of them are. The absolute
+right of direct access to God, without the intervention of any man
+who has an officially greater nearness to Him than others, and
+through whom as through a channel the grace of sacrament comes, is
+contained in the great symbol of my text. And it is a truth that
+this day needs. On the one hand there is agnostic unbelief, which
+needs to see in the rent veil the illumination streaming through it
+on to the depths of God; and on the other hand there is the
+complementary error--and the two always breed each other--the
+superstition which drags back by an anachronism the old Jewish
+notions of priesthood into the Christian Church. It needs to see in
+the rent veil the charter of universal priesthood for all believers,
+and to hearken to the words which declare, 'Ye are a chosen
+generation, a spiritual house, a royal priesthood, that ye should
+offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable unto God by Jesus Christ.'
+That is the lesson that this day wants. 'Having, therefore,
+brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest of all, by the blood of
+Jesus, by a new and living way, which He has consecrated for us
+through the veil, that is His flesh, let us draw near with true
+hearts in full assurance of faith.'
+
+
+
+
+THE PRINCE OF LIFE
+
+
+    'In the end of the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward
+    the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the
+    other Mary to see the sepulchre. 2. And, behold, there
+    was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord
+    descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the
+    stone from the door, and sat upon it. 3. His countenance
+    was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow:
+    4. And for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became
+    as dead men. 5. And the angel answered and said unto the
+    women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which
+    was crucified. 6. He is not here: for He is risen, as He
+    said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. 7. And go
+    quickly, and tell His disciples that He is risen from
+    the dead; and, behold, He goeth before you into Galilee;
+    there shall ye see Him: lo, I have told you. 8. And they
+    departed quickly from the sepulchre with fear and great
+    joy; and did run to bring His disciples word. 9. And as
+    they went to tell His disciples, behold, Jesus met them,
+    saying, All hail. And they came and held Him by the
+    feet, and worshipped Him. 10. Then said Jesus unto them,
+    Be not afraid: go tell My brethren that they go into
+    Galilee, and there shall they see Me. 11. Now, when
+    they were going, behold, some of the watch came into
+    the city, and shewed unto the chief priests all the
+    things that were done. 12. And when they were assembled
+    with the elders, and had taken counsel, they gave large
+    money unto the soldiers, 13. Saying, Say ye, His
+    disciples came by night, and stole Him away while we
+    slept. 14. And if this come to the governor's ears, we
+    will persuade him, and secure you. 15. So they took the
+    money, and did as they were taught: and this saying is
+    commonly reported among the Jews until this day.'
+    --MATT. xxviii. 1-15.
+
+The attempts at harmonising the resurrection narratives are not only
+unsatisfactory, but they tend to blur the distinctive characteristics
+of each account. We shall therefore confine ourselves entirely to
+Matthew's version, and leave the others alone, with the simple
+remark that a condensed report of a series of events does not deny
+what it omits, nor contradict a fuller one. The peculiarities of
+Matthew's last chapter are largely due to the purpose of his gospel.
+ Throughout, it has been the record of the Galilean ministry, the
+picture of the King of Israel, and of His treatment by those who
+should have been His subjects. This chapter establishes the fact of
+His resurrection; but, passing by the Jerusalem appearances of the
+risen Lord, as being granted to individuals and having less bearing
+on His royalty, emphasises two points: His rejection by the
+representatives of the nation, whose lie is endorsed by popular
+acceptance; and the solemn assumption, in Galilee, so familiar to
+the reader, of universal dominion, with the world-wide commission,
+in which the kingdom bursts the narrow national limits and becomes
+co-extensive with humanity. It is better to learn the meaning of
+Matthew's selection of his incidents than to wipe out instructive
+peculiarities in the vain attempt after harmony.
+
+First, notice his silence (in which all the four narratives are
+alike) as to the time and circumstances of the resurrection itself.
+That had taken place before the grey twilight summoned the faithful
+women, and before the earthquake and the angel's descent. No eye saw
+Him rise. The guards were not asleep, for the statement that they
+were is a lie put into their mouths by the rulers; but though they
+kept jealous watch, His rising was invisible to them. 'The prison
+was shut with all safety,' for the stone was rolled away after He
+was risen, 'and the keepers standing before the doors,' but there
+was 'no man within.' As in the evening of that day He appeared in
+the closed chamber, so He passed from the sealed grave. Divine
+decorum required that that transcendent act should be done without
+mortal observers of the actual rising of the Sun which scatters for
+ever the darkness of death.
+
+Matthew next notices the angel ministrant and herald. His narrative
+leaves the impression that the earthquake and appearance of the
+angel immediately preceded the arrival of the women, and the
+'Behold!' suggests that they felt and saw both. But that is a piece
+of chronology on which there may be difference of opinion. The other
+narratives tell of two angels. Matthew's mention of one only may be
+due either to the fact that one was speaker, or to the subjective
+impressions of his informant, who saw but the one, or to variation
+in the number visible at different times. We know too little of the
+laws which determine their appearances to be warranted in finding
+contradiction or difficulty here. The power of seeing may depend on
+the condition of the beholder. It may depend, not as with gross
+material bodies, on optics, but on the volition of the radiant
+beings seen. They may pass from visibility to its opposite, lightly
+and repeatedly, flickering into and out of sight, as the Pleiades
+seem to do. Where there is such store of possibilities, he is rash
+who talks glibly about contradictions.
+
+Of far more value is it to note the purpose served by this waiting
+angel. We heard much of a herald angel of the Lord in the story of
+the Nativity. We hear nothing of him during the life of Christ. Now
+again he appears, as the stars, quenched in the noontide, shine
+again when the sun is out of the sky. He attends as humble servitor,
+in token that the highest beings gazed on that empty grave with
+reverent adoration, and were honoured by being allowed to guard the
+sacred place. Death was an undreaded thing to them, and no hopes for
+themselves blossomed from Christ's grave; but He who had lain in it
+was their King as well as ours, and new lessons of divine love were
+taught them, as they wondered and watched. They come to minister by
+act and word to the weeping women's faith and joy. Their appearance
+paralyses the guards, who would have kept the Marys from the grave.
+They roll away the great circular stone, which women's hands,
+however nerved by love, could not have moved in its grooves. They
+speak tender words to them. There by the empty tomb, the strong
+heavenly and the weak earthly lovers of the risen King meet
+together, and clasp hands of help, the pledge and first-fruits of
+the standing order henceforth, and the inauguration of their office
+of 'ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for ... heirs of
+salvation.' The risen Christ hath made both one. The servants of the
+same King must needs be friends of one another.
+
+The angel's words fall into three parts. First, he calms fears by the
+assurance that the seekers for Christ are dear to Him. 'Fear not _ye_'
+glances at the prostrate watchers, and almost acknowledges the
+reasonableness of their abject terror. To them he could not but be
+hostile, but to hearts that longed for their and his Lord, he and all
+his mighty fellows were brethren. Let us learn that all God's angels
+are our lovers and helpers, if we love and seek for Jesus. Superstition
+has peopled the gulf between God and man with crowds of beings;
+revelation assures us that it is full of creatures who excel in strength.
+Men have cowered before them, but 'whether they be thrones, or
+dominions, or principalities, or powers,' our King was their Creator,
+and is their Sovereign, and, if we serve Him, all these are on our
+side. The true deliverer from superstitious terrors is the risen Christ.
+Again, the angel announces in simplest words the glorious fact, 'He
+is risen,' and helps them to receive it by a double way. He reminds
+them of Christ's own words, which had seemed so mysterious and
+had turned out so simple, so incredible, and now had proved so true.
+He calls them with a smile of welcome to draw near, and with him to
+look into the empty place. The invitation extends to us all, for the
+one assurance of immortality; and the only answer to the despairing
+question, 'If a man die, shall he live again?' which is solid enough
+to resist the corrosion of modern doubt as of ancient ignorance, is
+that empty grave, and the filled throne, which was its necessary
+consequence. By it we measure the love that stooped so low, we
+school our hearts to anticipate without dread or reluctance our own
+lying down there, we fasten our faith on the risen Forerunner, and
+rejoice in the triumphant assurance of a living Christ. If the
+wonder of the women's stunned gaze is no more ours, our calm
+acceptance of the familiar fact need be none the less glad, and our
+estimate of its far-reaching results more complete than their tumult
+of feeling permitted to them.
+
+No wonder that, swiftly, new duty which was privilege followed on
+the new, glad knowledge. It was emphatically 'a day of good
+tidings,' and they could not hold their peace. A brief glance,
+enough for certitude and joy, was permitted; and then, with urgent
+haste, they are sent to be apostles to the Apostles. The possession
+of the news of a risen Saviour binds the possessors to be its
+preachers. Where it is received in any power, it will impel to
+utterance. He who can keep silence has never felt, as he ought, the
+worth of the word, nor realised the reason why he has seen the Cross
+or the empty grave. 'He goeth before you into Galilee; there shall
+ye see.' It was but two complete days and one night since Christ had
+said to the disciples that He would rise again, and, as the Shepherd
+of the scattered flock, go before them into Galilee. How long ago
+since that saying it would seem! The reasons for Matthew's omission
+of all the other appearances of our Lord in Jerusalem, with the
+exception of the one which immediately follows, and for the stress
+he lays on this rendezvous in their native Galilee, have already
+been touched on, and need not detain us now.
+
+The next point in the narrative is the glad interview with the risen
+Jesus. The women had been at the grave but for a few moments. But
+they lived more in these than in years of quiet. Time is very
+elastic, and five minutes or five seconds may change a life. These
+few moments changed a world. Haste, winged by fear which had no
+torment, and by joy which found relief in swift movement, sent them
+running, forgetful of conventional proprieties, towards the
+awakening city. Probably Mary Magdalene had left them, as soon as
+they saw the open grave, and had hurried back alone to tell the
+tidings. And now the crowning joy and wonder comes. How simply it is
+told!--the introductory 'Behold!' just hinting at the wonderfulness,
+and perhaps at the suddenness, of our Lord's appearance, and the
+rest being in the quietest and fewest words possible. Note the deep
+significance of the name 'Jesus' here. The angel spoke of 'the
+Lord,' but all the rest of the chapter speaks of 'Jesus.' The joy
+and hope that flow from the Resurrection depend on the fact of His
+humanity. He comes out of the grave, the same brother of our mortal
+flesh as before. It was no phantom whose feet they clasped, and He
+is not withdrawn from them by His mysterious experience. All through
+the Resurrection histories and the narrative of the forty days, the
+same emphasis attaches to the name, which culminates in the angel's
+assurance at the Ascension, that 'this same Jesus,' in His true
+humanity, who has gone up on high our Forerunner, shall come again
+our Brother and our Judge. 'It is _Christ_ that died, yea
+rather, that is risen again'; but that triumphant assurance loses
+all its blessedness, unless we say too, '_Jesus_ died for our
+sins according to the Scriptures, and ... rose again the third day.'
+
+Note, too, the calmness of His greeting. He uses the common form of
+salutation, as if He had but been absent on some common occasion,
+and met them in ordinary circumstances. He speaks out of His own
+deep tranquillity, and desires to impart it to their agitated
+spirits. He would calm their joy, that it may be the deeper, like
+His own. If we may give any weight to the original meaning of the
+formula of greeting which He employs, we may see blessed prophecy in
+it. The lips of the risen Christ bid us all 'rejoice.' His
+salutation is no empty wish, but a command which makes its own
+fulfilment possible. If our hearts welcome Him, and our faith is
+firm in His risen power and love, then He gives us a deep and
+central gladness, which nothing
+
+  'That is at enmity with joy
+   Can utterly abolish or destroy.'
+
+The rush to His feet, and the silent clasp of adoration, are
+eloquent of a tumult of feeling most natural, and yet not without
+turbid elements, which He does not wholly approve. We have not here
+the prohibition of such a touch which was spoken to Mary, but we
+have substantially the same substitution, by His command, of
+practical service for mere emotion. That carries a lesson always in
+season. We cannot love Christ too much, nor try to get too near Him,
+to touch Him with the hand of our faith. But there have been modes
+of religious emotion, represented by hymns and popular books, which
+have not mingled reverence rightly with love, and have spoken of
+Him, and of the emotions binding us to Him, in tones unwholesomely
+like those belonging to earthly passion. But, apart from that, Jesus
+taught these women, and us through them, that it is better to
+proclaim His Resurrection than to lie at His feet; and that, however
+sweet the blessedness which we find in Him may be, it is meant to
+put a message into our lips, which others need. Our sight of Him
+gives us something to say, and binds us to say it. It was a blessing
+to the women to have work to do, in doing which their strained
+emotions might subside. It was a blessing to the mournful company in
+the upper room to have their hearts prepared for His coming by these
+heralds. It was a wonderful token of His unchanged love, and an
+answer to fears and doubts of how they might find Him, that He sends
+the message to them as brethren.
+
+In the hurry of that Easter morning, they had no time to ponder on
+all that it had brought them. The Resurrection as the demonstration
+of Christ's divinity and of the acceptance of His perfect sacrifice,
+or as the pledge of their resurrection, or as the type of their
+Christian life, was for future experience to grasp. For that day, it
+was enough to pass from despair to joy, and to let the astounding
+fact flood them with sunny hope.
+
+We know the vast sweep of the consequences and consolations of it
+far better than they did. There is no reason, in our distance from
+it, for its diminishing either in magnitude, in certitude, or in
+blessedness in our eyes. No fact in the history of the world stands
+on such firm evidence as the resurrection of Jesus Christ. No age of
+the world ever needed to believe it more than this one does. It
+becomes us all to grasp it for ourselves with an iron tenacity of
+hold, and to echo, in the face of the materialisms and know-nothing
+philosophy of this day, the old ringing confession, 'Now is Christ
+risen from the dead!'
+
+We need say little about the last point in this narrative--the
+obstinate blindness of the rulers, and their transparent lie to
+account for the empty grave. The guard reports to the rulers, not to
+the governor, as they had been handed over by Pilate for special
+service. But they were Roman soldiers, as appears from the danger
+which the rulers provided against, that of their alleged crime
+against military discipline, in sleeping at their post, coming to
+his ears. The trumped-up story is too puerile to have taken in any
+one who did not wish to believe it. How could they tell what
+happened when they were asleep? How could such an operation as
+forcing back a heavy stone, and exhuming a corpse, have been carried
+on without waking them? How could such a timid set of people have
+mustered up courage for such a bold act? What did they do it for?
+Not to bury their Lord. He had been lovingly laid there by reverent
+hands, and costly spices strewn upon the sacred limbs. The only
+possible motive would be that the disciples might tell lies about
+His resurrection. That hypothesis that the Resurrection was a
+deliberately concocted falsehood has proved too strong for the
+stomach of modern unbelief, and has been long abandoned, as it had
+need to be. When figs grow on thistles, such characters as the early
+Christians, martyrs, heroes, saints, will be produced by a system
+which has a lie, known to be one, for its foundation. But the lame
+story is significant in two ways. It confesses, by its desperate
+attempt to turn the corner of the difficulty, that the great rock,
+on which all denials of Christ's resurrection split, is the simple
+question--If He did not rise again, what became of the body? The
+priests' answer is absurd, but it, at all events, acknowledges that
+the grave was empty, and that it is incumbent to produce an
+explanation which reasonable men can accept without laughter.
+
+Further, this last appearance of the rulers in the gospel is full of
+tragic significance, and is especially important to Matthew, whose
+narrative deals especially with Jesus as the King and Messiah of
+Israel. This is the end of centuries of prophecy and patience! This
+is what all God's culture of His vineyard has come to! The
+husbandmen cast the Heir out of the vineyard, and slew him. But
+there was a deeper depth than even that. They would not be persuaded
+when He rose again from the dead. They entrenched themselves in a
+lie, which only showed that they had a glimmering of the truth and
+hated it. And the lie was willingly swallowed by the mass of the
+nation, who thereby showed that they were of the same stuff as they
+who made it. A conspiracy of falsehood, which knew itself to be
+such, was the last act of that august council of Israel. It is an
+awful lesson of the penalties of unfaithfulness to the light
+possessed, an awful instance of 'judicial blindness.' So sets the
+sun of Israel. And therefore Matthew's Gospel turns away from the
+apostate nation, which has rejected its King, to tell, in its last
+words, of His assumption of universal dominion, and of the passage
+of the glad news from Israel to the world.
+
+
+
+
+THE RISEN LORD'S GREETINGS AND GIFTS
+
+
+    'And as they went to tell His disciples, behold, Jesus
+    met them, saying, All hail.'--MATT. xxviii. 9.
+
+    'Then the same day at evening ... came Jesus and stood
+    in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.'
+    --JOHN xx. 19.
+
+So did our Lord greet His sad followers. The first of these
+salutations was addressed to the women as they hurried in the
+morning from the empty tomb bewildered; the second to the disciples
+assembled in the upper room in the evening of the same day. Both are
+ordinary greetings. The first is that usual in Greek, and literally
+means 'Rejoice'; the second is that common in Hebrew. The divergence
+between the two may be owing to the Evangelist Matthew having
+rendered the words which our Lord actually did speak, in the tongue
+familiar to His time, into their equivalent Greek. But whatever
+account may be given of the divergence does not materially affect
+the significance which I find in the salutations. And I desire to
+turn to them for a few moments now, because I think that, if we
+ponder them, we may gain some precious lessons from these Easter
+greetings of the Lord Himself.
+
+I. First, then, notice their strange and majestic simplicity.
+
+He meets His followers after Calvary and the Tomb and the
+Resurrection, with the same words with which two casual
+acquaintances, after some slight absence, might salute one another
+by the way. Their very simplicity is their sublimity here. For think
+of what tremendous experiences He had passed through since they saw
+Him last, and of what a rush of rapture and disturbance of joy shook
+the minds of the disciples, and then estimate the calm and calming
+power of that matter-of-fact and simple greeting. It bears upon its
+very front the mark of truth. Would anybody have imagined the scene
+so? There have been one or two great poets who might conceivably
+have risen to the height of putting such words under such
+circumstances into the mouths of creatures of their own imagination.
+Analogous instances of the utmost simplicity of expression in
+moments of intense feeling may be quoted from Aschylus or
+Shakespeare, and are regarded as the high-water marks of genius. But
+does any one suppose that these evangelists were exceptionally
+gifted souls of that sort, or that they could have imagined anything
+like this--so strange in its calm, so unnatural at first sight, and
+yet vindicating itself as so profoundly natural and sublime--unless
+for the simple reason that they had heard it themselves, or been
+told it by credible witnesses? Neither the delicate pencil of the
+great dramatic genius nor the coarser brush of legend can have drawn
+such an incident as this, and it seems to me that the only
+reasonable explanation of it is that these greetings are what He
+really did say.
+
+For, as I have remarked, unnatural as it seems at first sight, if
+we think for a moment, the very simplicity and calm, and, I was
+going to say, the _matter-of-factness_, of such a greeting, as
+the first that escaped from lips that had passed through death and
+yet were red and vocal, is congruous with the deepest truths of
+His nature. He has come from that tremendous conflict, and He
+reappears, not flushed with triumph, nor bearing any trace of effort,
+but surrounded as by a nimbus with that strange tranquillity which
+evermore enwrapped Him. So small does the awful scene which He has
+passed through seem to this divine-human Man, and so utterly are
+the old ties and bonds unaffected by it, that when He meets His
+followers, all He has to say to them as His first greeting is,
+'Peace be unto you!'--the well-worn salutation that was bandied to
+and fro in every market-place and scene where men were wont to meet.
+Thus He indicates the divine tranquillity of His nature; thus He
+minimises the fact of death; thus He reduces it to its true
+insignificance as a parenthesis across which may pass unaffected all
+sweet familiarities and loving friendships; thus He reknits the
+broken ties, and, though the form of their intercourse is hereafter
+to be profoundly modified, the substance of it remains, whereof He
+giveth assurance unto them in these His first words from the dead. So,
+as to a man standing on some mountain plateau, the deep gorges which
+seam it become invisible, and the unbroken level runs right on. So,
+there are a marvellous proof of the majesty and tranquillity of the
+divine Man, a glorious manifestation of His superiority over death;
+a blessed assurance of the reknitting of all ancient ties, after it
+as before it, coming to us from pondering on the trivial words--trivial
+from other lips, but profoundly significant on His--wherewith He
+greeted His servants when He rose again from the dead.
+
+II. Then note, secondly, the universal destination of the greetings
+of the risen Lord.
+
+I have said that it is possibly a mere accident that we should have
+the two forms of salutation preserved for us here; and that it is
+quite conceivable that our Lord really spoke but one, which has been
+preserved unaltered from its Hebrew or Aramaic original in John, and
+rendered by its Greek equivalent by the Evangelist Matthew.
+
+But be that as it may, I cannot help feeling that in this fact, that
+the one salutation is the common greeting among Greek-speaking peoples,
+and the other the common greeting amongst Easterns, we may permissibly
+find the thought of the universal aspect of the gifts and greetings of
+the risen Christ. He comes to all men, and each man hears Him, 'in his
+own tongue wherein he was born,' breathing forth to him greetings
+which are promises, and promises which are gifts. Just as the mocking
+inscription on the Cross proclaimed, in 'Hebrew and Greek and Latin,'
+the three tongues known to its readers, the one kingdom of the
+crucified King--so in the greetings from the grave, the one declares
+that, to all the desires of eager, ardent, sensuous, joy-loving
+Westerns, and all the aspirations of repose-loving Easterns, who had
+had bitter experience of the pangs and pains of a state of warfare,
+Jesus Christ is ready to respond and to bring answering gifts.
+Whatsoever any community or individual has conceived as its highest
+ideal of blessedness and of good, that the risen Christ hath in His
+hands to bestow. He takes men's ideals of blessedness, and deepens
+and purifies and refines them.
+
+The Greek notion of joy as being the good to be most wished for
+those dear to us, is but a shallow one. They had to learn, and their
+philosophy and their poetry and their art came to corruption because
+they would not learn, that the corn of wheat must be cast into the
+ground and die before it bring forth fruit. They knew little of the
+blessing and meaning of sorrow, and therefore the false glitter
+passed away, and the pursuit of the ideal became gross and foul and
+sensuous. And, on the other hand, the Jew, with his longing for
+peace, had an equally shallow and unworthy conception of what it
+meant, and what was needed to produce it. If he had only external
+concord with men, and a competency of outward good within his reach
+without too much trouble, he thought that because he 'had much goods
+laid up for many years' he might 'take his ease; and eat, and drink,
+and be merry.' But Jesus Christ comes to satisfy both aspirations by
+contradicting both, and to reveal to Greek and Jew how much deeper
+and diviner was his desire than he dreamed it to be; and, therefore,
+how impossible it was to find the joy that would last, in the
+dancing fireflies of external satisfactions or the delights of art
+and beauty; and how impossible it was to find the repose that
+ennobled and was wedded to action, in anything short of union with
+God.
+
+The Lord Christ comes out of the grave in which He lay for every
+man, and brings to each man's door, in a dialect intelligible to the
+man himself, the satisfaction of the single soul's aspirations and
+ideals, as well as of the national desires. His gifts and greetings
+are of universal destination, meant for us all and adapted for us
+each.
+
+III. Then, thirdly, notice the unfailing efficacy of the Lord's
+greetings.
+
+Look at these people to whom He spoke. Remember what they were
+between the Friday and the Sunday morning; utterly cowed and beaten,
+the women, in accordance with the feminine nature, apparently more
+deeply touched by the personal loss of the Friend and Comforter; and
+the men apparently, whilst sharing that sorrow, also touched by
+despair at the going to water of all the hopes that they had been
+building upon His official character and position. 'We trusted that
+it had been He which should have redeemed Israel,' they said, 'as
+they walked and were sad.' They were on the point of parting. The
+Keystone withdrawn, the stones were ready to fall apart. Then came
+_something_--let us leave a blank for a moment--then  came
+_something_; and those who had been cowards, dissolved in
+sorrow and relaxed by despair, in eight-and-forty hours became
+heroes. From that time, when, by all reasonable logic and common
+sense applied to men's motives, the Crucifixion should have crushed
+their dreams and dissolved their society, a precisely opposite
+effect ensues, and not only did the Church continue, but the men
+changed their characters, and became, somehow or other, full of
+these very two things which Christ wished for them--namely, joy and
+peace.
+
+Now I want to know--what bridges that gulf? How do you get the Peter
+of the Acts of the Apostles out of the Peter of the Gospels? Is
+there any way of explaining that revolution of character, whilst yet
+its broad outlines remain identical, which befell him and all of
+them, except the old-fashioned one that the _something_ which
+came in between was the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the
+consequent gift of joy and peace in Him, a joy that no troubles or
+persecutions could shake, a peace that no conflicts could for a
+moment disturb? It seems to me that every theory of Christianity
+which boggles at accepting the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as a
+plain fact, is shattered to pieces on the sharp-pointed rock of this
+one demand--'Very well! If it is not a fact, account for the
+existence of the Church, and for the change in the characters of its
+members.' You may wriggle as you like, but you will never get a
+reasonable theory of these two undeniable facts until you believe
+that He rose from the dead. In His right hand He carried peace, and
+in His left joy. He gave these to them, and therefore 'out of
+weakness they were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to
+flight the armies of the aliens,' and when the time came, 'were
+tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better
+resurrection.' There is omnipotent efficacy in Christ's greetings.
+
+The one instance opens up the general law, that His wishes are
+gifts, that all His words are acts, that He speaks and it is done,
+and that when He desires for us joy, it is a deed of conveyance and
+gift, and invests us with the joy that He desires if we observe the
+conditions.
+
+Christ's wishes are omnipotent, ours are powerless. We wish for our
+friends many good things, and the event turns wishes to mockery, and
+the garlands which we prepared for their birthdays have sometimes to
+be hung on their tombs. The limitations of human friendship and of
+our deepest and sincerest wishes, like a dark background, enhance
+the boundless efficacy of the greetings of the Master, which are not
+only wishes but bestowments of the thing wished, and therein given,
+by Him.
+
+IV. So, lastly, notice our share in this twofold greeting.
+
+When it was first heard, I suppose that the disciples and the women
+apprehended the salutation only in its most outward form, and that
+all other thoughts were lost in the mere rapture of the sudden
+change from the desolate sense of loss to the glad consciousness of
+renewed possession. When the women clung to His feet on that Easter
+morning, they had no thought of anything but--'we clasp Thee again,
+O Soul of our souls.' But then, as time went on, the meaning and
+blessedness and far-reaching issues of the Resurrection became more
+plain to them. And I think we can see traces of the process, in the
+development of Christian teaching as presented in the Acts of the
+Apostles and in the Epistles. Peter in his early sermons dwells on
+the Resurrection all but exclusively from one point of view--viz.,
+as being the great proof of Christ's Messiahship. Then there came by
+degrees, as is represented in the same Peter's letter, and
+abundantly in the Apostle Paul's, the recognition of the light which
+the Resurrection of Jesus Christ threw upon immortality; as a
+prophecy and a pattern thereof. Then, when the historical fact had
+become fully accepted and universally diffused, and its bearings
+upon men's future had been as fully apprehended as is possible here,
+there came, finally, the thought that the Resurrection of Jesus
+Christ was the symbol of the new life, which from that risen Lord
+passed into all those who loved and trusted Him.
+
+Now, in all these three aspects--as proof of Messiahship, as the
+pattern and prophecy of immortality, and as the symbol of the better
+life which is accessible for us, here and now--the Resurrection of
+Jesus Christ stands for us even more truly than for the rapturous
+women who caught His feet, or for the thankful men who looked upon
+Him in the upper chamber, as the source of peace and of joy.
+
+For, dear brethren, therein is set forth for us the Christ whose
+work is thereby declared to be finished and acceptable to God, and
+all sorrow of sin, all guilt, all disturbance of heart and mind by
+reason of evil passions and burning memories of former iniquity, and
+all disturbance of our concord with God, are at once and for ever
+swept away. If Jesus Christ was 'declared to be the Son of God with
+power by His Resurrection from the dead,' and if in that
+Resurrection, as is most surely the case, the broad seal of the
+divine acceptance is set to the charter of our forgiveness and
+sonship by the blood of the Cross, then joy and peace come to us
+from Him and from it.
+
+Again, the resurrection of Jesus Christ sets Him forth before us as
+the pattern and the prophecy of immortal life. This Samson has taken
+the gates of the prison-house on His broad shoulders and carried
+them away, and now no man is kept imprisoned evermore in that
+darkness. The earthquake has opened the doors and loosened every
+man's bonds. Jesus Christ hath risen from the dead, and therein not
+only demonstrated the certainty that life subsists through death,
+and that a bodily life is possible thereafter, but hath set before
+all those who give the keeping of their souls into His hands the
+glorious belief that 'the body of their humiliation shall be'
+'changed into the likeness of the body of His glory, according to
+the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto
+Himself.' Therefore the sorrows of death, for ourselves and for our
+dear ones, the agitation which it causes, and all its darkness into
+which we shrink from passing, are swept away when He comes forth
+from the grave, serene, radiant, and victorious, to die no more, but
+to dispense amongst us His peace and His joy.
+
+And, again, the risen Christ is the source of a new life drawn from
+Him and received into the heart by faith in His sacrifice and
+Resurrection and glory. And if I have, deep-seated in my soul,
+though it may be in imperfect maturity, that life which is hid with
+Christ in God, an inward fountain of gladness, far better than the
+effervescent, and therefore soon flat, waters of Greek or earthly
+joy, is mine; and in my inmost being dwells a depth of calm peace
+which no outward disturbance can touch, any more than the winds that
+rave along the surface of the ocean affect its unmoved and unsounded
+abysses. Jesus Christ comes to thee, my brother, weary, distracted,
+care-laden, sin-laden, sorrowful and fearful. And He says to each of
+us from the throne what He said in the upper room before the Cross,
+and on leaving the grave after it, 'My joy will remain in you, and
+your joy shall be full. My peace I leave to you, My peace I give
+unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you.'
+
+
+
+
+ON THE MOUNTAIN
+
+
+    'Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into
+    a mountain where Jesus had appointed them. 17. And when
+    they saw Him, they worshipped Him: but some doubted.'
+    --MATT. xxviii. 16, 17.
+
+    'After that, He was seen of above five hundred brethren
+    at once.'--1 COR. xv. 4
+
+To infer an historian's ignorance from his silence is a short and
+easy, but a rash, method. Matthew has nothing to say of our Lord's
+appearances in Jerusalem, except in regard to that of the women in
+the early morning of Easter Day. But it does not follow that he was
+ignorant of these appearances. Imperfect knowledge may be the
+explanation; but the scope and design of his Gospel is much more
+likely to be so. It is emphatically the Gospel of the King of
+Israel, and it moves, with the exception of the story of the
+Passion, wholly within the limits of the Galilean ministry. What
+more probable than that the same motive which induced Jesus to
+select the mountain which He had appointed as the scene of this
+meeting should have induced the Evangelist to pass by all the other
+manifestations in order to fix upon this one? It was fitting that in
+Galilee, where He had walked in lowly gentleness, 'kindly with His
+kind,' He should assume His sovereign authority. It was fitting that
+in 'Galilee of the Gentiles,' that outlying and despised province,
+half heathen in the eyes of the narrow-minded Pharisaic Jerusalem,
+He should proclaim the widening of His kingdom from Israel to all
+nations.
+
+If we had Matthew's words only, we should suppose that none but the
+eleven were present on this occasion. But it is obviously the same
+incident to which Paul refers when he speaks of the appearance to
+'five hundred brethren at once.' These were the Galilean disciples
+who had been faithful in the days of His lowliness, and were thus
+now assembled to hear His proclamation of exaltation. Apparently the
+meeting had been arranged beforehand. They came without Him to 'the
+mountain where Jesus had appointed.' Probably it was the same spot
+on which the so-called Sermon on the Mount, the first proclamation
+of the King, had been delivered, and it was naturally chosen to be
+the scene of a yet more exalted proclamation. A thousand tender
+memories and associations clustered round the spot. So we have to
+think of the five hundred gathered in eager expectancy; and we
+notice how unlike the manner of His coming is to that of the former
+manifestations. _Then_, suddenly, He became visibly present
+where a moment before He had been unseen. But _now_ He gradually
+approaches, for the doubting and the worshipping took place 'when
+they saw Him,' and before 'He came to them.' I suppose we may
+conceive of Him as coming down the hill and drawing near to them,
+and then, when He stands above them, and yet close to them--else the
+five hundred could not have seen Him 'at once'--doubts vanish; and
+they listen with silent awe and love. The words are majestic; all is
+regal. There is no veiled personality now, as there had been to Mary,
+and to the two on the road to Emmaus. There is no greeting now, as
+there had been in the upper chamber; no affording of a demonstration
+of the reality of His appearance, as there had been to Thomas and to
+the others. He stands amongst them as the King, and the music of His
+words, deep as the roll of thunder, and sweet as harpers harping with
+their harps, makes all comment or paraphrase sound thin and poor. But
+yet so many great and precious lessons are hived in the words that we
+must reverently ponder them. The material is so abundant that I can
+but touch it in the slightest possible fashion. This great utterance
+of our Lord's falls into three parts: a great claim, a great commission,
+a great promise.
+
+I. There is a Great Claim.
+
+'All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth.' No words can
+more absolutely express unconditional, unlimited authority and
+sovereignty. Mark the variety of the gift--'all power'; every kind
+of force, every kind of dominion is in His hands. Mark the sphere of
+sovereignty--'in heaven and in earth.' Now, brethren, if we know
+anything about Jesus Christ, we know that He made this claim. There
+is no reason, except the unwillingness of some people to admit that
+claim, for casting any sort of doubt upon these words, or making any
+distinction in authority between them and the rest of the words of
+graciousness which the whole world has taken to its heart. But if He
+said this, what becomes of His right to the veneration of mankind,
+as the Perfect Example of the self-sacrificing, self-oblivious
+religious life? It is a mystery that I cannot solve, how any man can
+keep his reverence for Jesus, and refuse to believe that beneath
+these tremendous words there lies a solemn and solid reality.
+
+Notice, too, that there is implied a definite point of time at which
+this all-embracing authority was given. You will find in the Revised
+Version a small alteration in the reading, which makes a great
+difference in the sense. It reads, 'All power _has been_ given';
+and that points, as I say, to a definite period. _When_ was it
+given? Let another portion of Scripture answer the question--'Declared
+to be the Son of God with power, by the resurrection from the dead.'
+_Then_ to the Man Jesus was given authority over heaven and earth.
+All the early Christian documents concur in this view of the connection
+between the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and His investiture
+with this sovereign power. Hearken to Paul, 'Became obedient unto
+death, even the death of the Cross; wherefore God also hath highly
+exalted Him, and given Him a name that is above every name.' Hearken
+to Peter, 'Who raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory.' Hearken
+to the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 'We see Jesus crowned
+with glory and honour for the suffering of death.' Hearken to John,
+'To Him that is the Faithful Witness, and the First-born from the
+dead, and the Prince of the kings of the earth.' Look with his
+eyes to the vision of the 'Lamb as it had been slain,' enthroned
+in the midst of the throne, and say whether this unanimous consent
+of the earliest Christian teachers is explicable on any reasonable
+grounds, unless there had been underlying it just the words of our
+text, and the Master Himself had taught them that all power was
+given to Him in heaven and in earth. As it seems to me impossible
+to account for the existence of the Church if we deny the
+Resurrection, so it seems to me impossible to account for the faith
+of the earliest stratum of the Christian Church without the
+acceptance of some such declaration as this, as having come from the
+Lord Himself. And so the hands that were pierced with the nails wield
+the sceptre of the Universe, and on the brows that were wounded and
+bleeding with the crown of thorns are wreathed the many crowns of
+universal Kinghood.
+
+But we have further to notice that in this investiture, with 'all
+power in heaven and on earth,' we have not merely the attestation of
+the perfection of His obedience, the completeness of His work, and
+the power of His sacrifice, but that we have also the elevation of
+Manhood to enthronement with Divinity. For the _new_ thing that
+came to Jesus after His resurrection was that His humanity was taken
+into, and became participant of, 'the glory which I had with Thee,
+before the world was.' Then our nature, when perfect and sinless, is
+so cognate and kindred with the Divine that humanity is capable of
+being invested with, and bearing, that 'exceeding and eternal weight
+of glory.' In that elevation of the Man Christ Jesus, we may read a
+prophecy, that shall not be unfulfilled, of the destiny of all those
+who conform to Him through faith, love, and obedience, finally to
+sit down with Him on His throne, even as He is set down with the
+Father on His throne.
+
+Ah! brethren, Christianity has dark and low views of human nature,
+and men say they are too low and too dark. It is 'Nature's sternest
+painter,' and, therefore, 'its best.' But if on its palette the
+blacks are blacker than anywhere else, its range of colour is
+greater, and its white is more lustrous. No system thinks so
+condemnatorily of human nature as it is; none thinks so glowingly of
+human nature as it may become. There are bass notes far down beyond
+the limits of the scale to which ears dulled by the world and sin
+and sorrow are sensitive; and there are clear, high tones, thrilling
+and shrilling far above the range of perception of such ears. The
+man that is in the lowest depths may rise with Jesus to the highest,
+but it must be by the same road by which the Master went. 'If we
+suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him,' and only 'if.' There
+is no other path to the Throne but the Cross. _Via crucis, via
+lucis_--the way of the Cross is the way of light. It is to those
+who have accepted their Gethsemanes and their Calvarys that He
+appoints a kingdom, as His Father has appointed unto Him.
+
+So much, then, for the first point here in these words; turn now to
+the second.
+
+II. The Great Commission.
+
+One might have expected that the immediate inference to be drawn from
+'All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth' would have been
+some word of encouragement and strengthening to those who were so soon
+to be left, and who were beginning to be conscious of their feebleness.
+But there is nothing more striking in the whole of the incidents of
+those forty days than the prominence which is given in them to the
+work of the Church when the Master had left it, and to the imperative
+obligations devolving upon it. And so here, not encouragement, but
+obligation is the inference that is drawn from that tremendous claim.
+'Because I have all power, therefore you are charged with the duty
+of winning the world for its King.' The all-ruling Christ calls for
+the universal proclamation of His sovereignty by His disciples. These
+five hundred little understood the sweep of the commandment, and, as
+history shows, terribly failed to apprehend the emancipating power
+of it. But He says to us, as to them, 'I am not content with the
+authority given to Me by God, unless I have the authority that each
+man for himself can give Me, by willing surrender of his heart and
+will to Me.' Jesus Christ craves no empty rule, no mere elevation
+by virtue of Divine supremacy, over men. He regards that elevation
+as incomplete without the voluntary surrender of men to become His
+subjects and champions. Without its own consent He does not count
+that His universal power is established in a human heart. Though
+that dominion be all-embracing like the ocean, and stretching into
+all corners of the universe, and dominating over all ages, yet in
+that ocean there may stand up black and dry rocks, barren as they
+are dry, and blasted as they are black, because, with the awful
+power of a human will, men have said, 'We will not have this Man
+to reign over us.' It is willing subjects whom Christ seeks, in
+order to make the Divine grant of authority a reality.
+
+In that work He needs His servants. The gift of God notwithstanding,
+the power of His Cross notwithstanding, the perfection and
+completeness of His great reconciling and redeeming work
+notwithstanding, all these are vain unless we, His servants, will
+take them in our hands as our weapons, and go forth on the warfare
+to which He has summoned us. This is the command laid upon us all,
+'Make disciples of all nations.' Only so will the reality correspond
+to the initial and all-embracing grant.
+
+It would take us too far to deal at all adequately, or in anything
+but the most superficial fashion, with the remaining parts of this
+great commission. 'Make disciples of all nations'--that is the first
+thing. Then comes the second step: 'Baptizing them into the name of
+the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.' Who are to be
+baptized? Now, notice, if I may venture upon being slightly
+technical for a moment, that the word 'nations' in the preceding
+clause is a neuter one, and that the word for 'them' in this clause
+is a masculine, which seems to me fairly to imply that the command
+'baptizing them' does not refer to 'all nations,' but to the
+disciples latent among them, and to be drawn from them. Surely,
+surely the great claim of absolute and unbounded power has for its
+consequence something better than the lame and impotent conclusion
+of appointing an indiscriminate rite, as the means of making
+disciples! Surely that is not in accordance with the spirituality of
+the Christian faith!
+
+'Baptizing them into the Name'--the name is one, that of the Father,
+and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Does that mean the name of God,
+and of a man, and of an influence, all jumbled up together in
+blasphemous and irrational union? Surely, if Father, Son, and Holy
+Spirit have one name, the name of Divinity, then it is but a step to
+say that three Persons are one God! But there is a great deal more
+here than a baptismal formula, for to be baptized into the Name is
+but the symbol of being plunged into communion with this one
+threefold God of our salvation. The ideal state of the Christian
+disciple is that he shall be as a vase dropped into the Atlantic,
+encompassed about with God, and filled with Him. We all 'live, and
+move, and have our being' in Him, but some of us have so wrapped
+ourselves, if I may venture to use such a figure, in waterproof
+covering, that, though we are floating in an ocean of Divinity, not
+a drop finds its way in. Cast the covering aside, and you will be
+saturated with God, and only in the measure in which you live and
+move and have your being in the Name are you disciples.
+
+There is another step still. Making disciples and bringing into
+communion with the Godhead is not all that is to flow from, and
+correspond to, and realise in the individual, the absolute authority
+of Jesus Christ--'Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I
+have commanded you.' We hear a great deal in these days about the
+worthlessness of mere dogmatic Christianity. Jesus Christ
+anticipated all that talk, and guarded it from exaggeration. For
+what He tells us here that we are to train ourselves and others in,
+is not creed but conduct; not things to be believed or _credenda_
+but things to be done or _agenda_--'teaching them to observe all
+things whatsoever I have commanded you.' A creed that is not wrought
+out in actions is empty; conduct that is not informed, penetrated,
+regulated by creed, is unworthy of a man, not to say of a Christian.
+What we are to know we are to know in order that we may do, and so
+inherit the benediction, which is never bestowed upon them that
+know, but upon them that, knowing these things, are blessed _in_,
+as well as _for_, the doing of them.
+
+That training is to be continuous, educating to new views of duty;
+new applications of old truths, new sensitiveness of conscience,
+unveiling to us, ever as we climb, new heights to which we aspire.
+The Christian Church has not yet learnt--thank God it is learning,
+though by slow degrees--all the moral and practical implications and
+applications of 'the truth as it is in Jesus.' And so these are the
+three things by which the Church recognises and corresponds to the
+universal dominion of Christ, the making disciples universally; the
+bringing them into the communion of the Father, the Son, and the
+Holy Spirit; and the training of them to conduct ever approximating
+more and more to the Divine ideal of humanity in the glorified
+Christ.
+
+And now I must gather just into a sentence or two what is to be said
+about the last point. There is--
+
+III. The Great Promise.
+
+'I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world,' or, as it
+might be read, 'with you all the days, even to the accomplishment of
+the age.' Note that emphatic 'I am,' which does not only denote
+certainty, but is the speech of Him who is lifted above the lower
+regions where Time rolls and the succession of events occurs. That
+'I am' covers all the varieties of _was, is, will be_. Notice
+the long vista of variously tinted days which opens here. Howsoever
+many they be, howsoever different their complexion, days of summer
+and days of winter, days of sunshine and days of storm, days of
+buoyant youth and days of stagnant, stereotyped old age, days of
+apparent failure and days of apparent prosperity, He is with us in
+them all. They change, He is 'the same yesterday, and to-day, and
+for ever.' Notice the illimitable extent of the promise--'even unto
+the end.' We are always tempted to think that long ago the earth was
+more full of God than it is to-day, and that away forward in the
+future it will again be fuller, but that this moment is comparatively
+empty. The heavens touch the earth on the horizon in front and behind,
+and they are highest and remotest above us just where we stand. But
+no past day had more of Christ in it than to-day has, and that He
+has gone away is the condition of His coming. 'He therefore departed
+for a season, that we might receive Him for ever.'
+
+But mark that the promise comes after a command, and is contingent,
+for all its blessedness and power, upon our obedience to the
+prescribed duty. That duty is primarily to make disciples of all
+nations, and the discharge of it is so closely connected with the
+realisation of the promise that a non-missionary Church never has
+much of Christ's presence. But obedience to all the King's commands
+is required if we stand before Him, and are to enjoy His smile. If
+you wish to keep Christ very near you, and to feel Him with you, the
+way to do so is no mere cultivation of religious emotion, or
+saturating your mind with religious books and thoughts, though these
+have their place; but on the dusty road of life doing His will and
+keeping His commandments. 'If a man love Me he will keep My words,
+and My Father will love Him. We will come to Him, and make our abode
+with Him.'
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Expositions of Holy Scripture
+by Alexander Maclaren
+
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+Project Gutenberg's Expositions of Holy Scripture, by Alexander Maclaren
+#2 in our series by Alexander Maclaren
+
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: Expositions of Holy Scripture
+       St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII
+
+Author: Alexander Maclaren
+
+Release Date: January, 2005 [EBook #7351]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on April 19, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-Latin-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Anne Folland, Charles Franks and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE
+
+ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D., Litt. D.
+
+
+ST. MATTHEW
+
+_Chaps. IX to XXVIII_
+
+
+
+
+EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE
+
+ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D., Litt. D.
+
+
+ST. MATTHEW
+
+_Chaps. IX to XVII_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHRIST'S ENCOURAGEMENTS (Matt. ix. 2)
+
+SOUL-HEALING FIRST: BODY-HEALING SECOND (Matt. ix. 6)
+
+THE CALL OF MATTHEW (Matt. ix. 9-17)
+
+THE TOUCH OF FAITH AND THE TOUCH OF CHRIST (Matt. ix. 18-31)
+
+A CHRISTLIKE JUDGMENT OF MEN (MATT. ix. 36)
+
+THE OBSCURE APOSTLES (Matt. x. 5)
+
+CHRIST'S CHARGE TO HIS HERALDS (Matt. x. 5-16)
+
+THE WIDENED MISSION, ITS PERILS AND DEFENCES (Matt. x. 16-31)
+
+LIKE TEACHER, LIKE SCHOLAR (Matt x. 24, 25)
+
+THE KING'S CHARGE TO HIS AMBASSADORS (Matt. x. 32-42)
+
+A LIFE LOST AND FOUND (Matt. x. 39)
+
+THE GREATEST IN THE KINGDOM, AND THEIR REWARD (Matt. x. 41, 42)
+
+JOHN'S DOUBTS OF JESUS, AND JESUS' PRAISE OF JOHN  (Matt. xi. 2-15)
+
+THE FRIEND OF PUBLICANS AND SINNERS (Matt. xi. 19)
+
+SODOM, CAPERNAUM, MANCHESTER (Matt. xi. 20)
+
+CHRIST'S STRANGE THANKSGIVING (Matt. xi. 25)
+
+THE REST GIVER (Matt. xi. 28, 29)
+
+THE PHARISEES' SABBATH AND CHRIST'S (Matt. xii. 1-14)
+
+AN ATTEMPT TO ACCOUNT FOR JESUS (Matt. xii. 24)
+
+'MAKE THE TREE GOOD' (Matt. xii. 33)
+
+'A GREATER THAN JONAS' (Matt. xii. 41)
+
+'A GREATER THAN SOLOMON' (Matt. xii. 42)
+
+FOUR SOWINGS AND ONE RIPENING (Matt. xiii. 1-9)
+
+EARS AND NO EARS (Matt. xiii. 9)
+
+'TO HIM THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN' (Matt. xiii. 12)
+
+SEEING AND BLIND (Matt. xiii. 13)
+
+MINGLED IN GROWTH, SEPARATED IN MATURITY (Matt. xiii. 24-30)
+
+LEAVEN (Matt. xiii. 33)
+
+TREASURE AND PEARL (Matt. xiii. 44-46)
+
+THE MARTYRDOM OF JOHN (Matt. xiv. 1-12)
+
+THE GRAVE OF THE DEAD JOHN AND THE GRAVE OF THE LIVING JESUS (Matt.
+xiv. 12; xxviii. 8)
+
+THE FOOD OF THE WORLD (Matt. xiv. 19, 20)
+
+THE KING'S HIGHWAY (Matt. xiv. 22-36)
+
+PETER ON THE WAVES (Matt. xiv. 28)
+
+THB CRUMBS AND THE BREAD (Matt. xv. 21-31)
+
+THE DIVINE CHRIST CONFESSED, THE SUFFERING CHRIST DENIED (Matt. xvi.
+13-28)
+
+CHRIST FORESEEING THE CROSS (Matt. xvi. 21)
+
+THE KING IN HIS BEAUTY (Matt. xvii, 1-13)
+
+THE SECRET OF POWER. (Matt. xvii. 19, 20)
+
+THE COIN IN THE FISH'S MOUTH (Matt. xvii. 25, 26)
+
+
+
+
+CHRIST'S ENCOURAGEMENTS
+
+
+    'Son, be of good cheer.'--MATT. ix. 2.
+
+This word of encouragement, which exhorts to both cheerfulness and
+courage, is often upon Christ's lips. It is only once employed in
+the Gospels by any other than He. If we throw together the various
+instances in which He thus speaks, we may get a somewhat striking
+view of the hindrances to such a temper of bold, buoyant cheerfulness
+which the world presents, and of the means for securing it which
+Christ provides.
+
+But before I consider these individually, let me point you to this
+thought, that such a disposition, facing the inevitable sorrows,
+evils, and toilsome tasks of life with glad and courageous buoyancy,
+is a Christian duty, and is a temper not merely to be longed for,
+but consciously and definitely to be striven after.
+
+We have a great deal more in our power, in the regulation of moods and
+tempers and dispositions, than we often are willing to acknowledge to
+ourselves. Our 'low' times--when we fret and are dull, and all things
+seem wrapped in gloom, and we are ready to sit down and bewail ourselves,
+like Job on his dunghill--are often quite as much the results of our
+own imperfect Christianity as the response of our feelings to external
+circumstances. It is by no means an unnecessary reminder for us, who
+have heavy tasks set us, which often seem too heavy, and are surrounded,
+as we all are, with crowding temptations to be bitter and melancholy
+and sad, that Christ commands us to be, and therefore we ought to be,
+'of good cheer.'
+
+Another observation may be made as preliminary, and that is that
+Jesus Christ never tells people to cheer up without giving them
+reason to do so. We shall see presently that in all cases where the
+words occur they are immediately followed by words or deeds of His
+which hold forth something on which, if the hearer's faith lay hold,
+darkness and gloom will fly like morning mists before the rising
+sun. The world comes to us and says, in the midst of our sorrows and
+our difficulties, 'Be of good cheer,' and says it in vain, and
+generally only rubs salt into the sore by saying it. Jesus Christ
+never thus vainly preaches the duty of encouraging ourselves without
+giving us ample reasons for the cheerfulness which He enjoins.
+
+With these two remarks to begin with--that we ought to make it a
+part of our Christian discipline of ourselves to seek to cultivate a
+continuous and equable temperament of calm, courageous good cheer;
+and that Jesus Christ never commands such a temper without showing
+cause for our obedience--let us turn for a few moments to the
+various instances in which this expression falls from His lips.
+
+I. Now the first of them is this of my text, and from it we learn
+this truth, that Christ's first contribution to our temper of
+equable, courageous cheerfulness is the assurance that all our sins
+are forgiven.
+
+'Son, be of good cheer,' said He to that poor palsied sufferer lying
+there upon the little light bed in front of Him. He had been brought
+to Christ to be cured of his palsy. Our Lord seems to offer him a
+very irrelevant blessing when, instead of the healing of his limbs,
+He offers him the forgiveness of his sins. That was possibly not
+what he wanted most, certainly it was not what the friends who had
+brought him wanted for him, but Jesus knew better than they what the
+man suffered most from and most needed to have cured. They would
+have said 'Palsy.' He said, 'Yes! but palsy that comes from sin.'
+For, no doubt, the sick man's disease was 'a sin of flesh avenged in
+kind,' and so Christ went to the fountain-head when He said, 'Thy
+sins be forgiven thee.' He therein implied, not only that the man
+was longing for something more than his four kindly but ignorant
+bearers there knew, but also that the root of his disease was
+extirpated when his sins were forgiven.
+
+And so, in like manner, 'thus conscience doth make cowards of us
+all.' There is nothing that so drapes a soul with darkness as either
+the consciousness of unforgiven sin or the want of consciousness of
+forgiven sin. There may be plenty of superficial cheerfulness. I
+know that; and I know what the bitter wise man called it, 'the
+crackling of thorns under the pot,' which, the more they crackle,
+the faster they turn into powdery ash and lose all their warmth. For
+stable, deep, lifelong, reliable courage and cheerfulness, there
+must be thorough work made with the black spot in the heart, and the
+black lines in the history. And unless our comforters can come to us
+and say, 'Thy sins be forgiven thee,' they are only chattering
+nonsense, and singing songs to a heavy heart which will make an
+effervescence 'like vinegar on nitre,' when they say to us, 'Be of
+good cheer.' How can I be glad if there lie coiled in my heart that
+consciousness of alienation and disorder in my relations to God,
+which all men carry with them, though they overlay it and try to
+forget it? There is no basis for a peaceful gladness worthy of a man
+except that which digs deep down into the very secrets of the heart,
+and lays the first course of the building in the consciousness of
+pardoned sin. 'Son, be of good cheer!' Lift up thy head. Face
+smaller evils without discomposure, and with quietly throbbing
+pulses, for the fountain of possible terrors and calamities is
+stanched and stayed with, 'Thy sins are forgiven thee.'
+
+Side by side with this first instance, illustrating the same general
+thought, though from a somewhat different point of view, I may put
+another of the instances in which the same phrase was soothingly on our
+Lord's lips. 'Daughter,' said He to the poor woman with the issue of
+blood, 'be of good cheer. Thy faith hath saved thee.' The consciousness
+of a living union with God through Christ by faith, which results in
+the present possession of a real, though it may be a partial, salvation,
+is indispensable to the temper of equable cheerfulness of which I have
+been speaking. Apart from that consciousness, you may have plenty of
+excitement, but no lasting calm. The contrast between the drugged and
+effervescent potion which the world gives as a cup of gladness, and the
+pure tonic which Jesus Christ administers for the same purpose, is
+infinite. He says to us, 'I forgive thy sins; by thy faith I save thee;
+go in peace.' Then the burdened heart is freed from its oppression, and
+the downcast face is lifted up, and all things around change, as when
+the sunshine comes out on the wintry landscape, and the very snow
+sparkles into diamonds. So much, then, for the first of the instances
+of the use of this phrase.
+
+II. We now take a second. Jesus Christ ministers to us cheerful
+courage because He manifests Himself to us as a Companion in the
+storm (Matt. xiv. 27).
+
+The narrative is very familiar to us, so that I need not enlarge
+upon it. You remember the scene--our Lord alone on the mountain in
+prayer, the darkness coming down upon the little boat, the storm
+rising as the darkness fell, the wind howling down the gorges of the
+mountains round the landlocked lake, the crew 'toiling in rowing,
+for the wind was contrary.' And then, all at once, out of the
+mysterious obscurity beneath the shadow of the hills, Something is
+seen moving, and it comes nearer; and the waves become solid beneath
+that light and noiseless foot, as steadily nearer He comes. Jesus
+Christ uses the billows as the pavement over which He approaches His
+servants, and the storms which beat on us are His occasion for
+drawing very near. Then they think Him a spirit, and cry out with
+voices that were heard amidst the howling of the tempest, and struck
+upon the ear of whomsoever told the Evangelist the story. They cry
+out with a shriek of terror--because Jesus Christ is coming to them
+in so strange a fashion! Have _we_ never shrieked and groaned,
+and passionately wept aloud for the same reason; and mistaken the
+Lord of love and consolation for some grisly spectre? When He comes
+it is with the old word on His lips, 'Be of good cheer.'
+
+'Tell us not to be frightened when we see something stalking across
+the waves in the darkness!' 'It is I'; surely that is enough. The
+Companion in the storm is the Calmer of the terror. He who recognises
+Jesus Christ as drawing near to his heart over wild billows may well
+'be of good cheer,' since the storm but brings his truest treasure
+to him.
+
+  'Well roars the storm to those who hear
+   A deeper Voice across the storm.'
+
+And He who, with unwetted foot, can tread on the wave, and with
+quiet voice heard above the shriek of the blast can say, 'It is I,'
+has the right to say, 'Be of good cheer,' and never says it in vain
+to such as take Him into their lives however tempest-tossed, and
+into their hearts however tremulous.
+
+III. A third instance of the occurrence of this word of cheer
+presents Jesus as ministering cheerful courage to us by reason of
+His being victor in the strife with the world (John xvi. 33).
+
+'In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I
+have overcome the world.'
+
+Of course 'the world' which He overcame is the whole aggregate of
+things and persons considered as separated from God, and as being
+the great Antagonist and counter power to a holy life of obedience
+and filial devotion. At that last moment when, according to all
+outward seeming and the estimate of things which sense would make,
+He was utterly and hopelessly and all but ignominiously beaten, He
+says, 'I have overcome the world.' What! Thou! within four-and-twenty
+hours of Thy Cross? Is that victory? Yes! For he conquers the world
+who uses all its opposition as well as its real good to help him,
+absolutely and utterly, to do the will of God. And he is conquered
+by the world who lets it, by its glozing sweetnesses and flatteries,
+or by its knitted brows and frowning eyes and threatening hand,
+hinder him from the path of perfect consecration and entire conformity
+to the Father's will.
+
+Christ has conquered. What does that matter to us? Why, it matters
+this, that we may have the Spirit of Jesus Christ in our hearts to
+make us also victorious in the same fight. And whosoever will lay
+his weakness on that strong arm, and open his emptiness to receive
+the fulness of that victorious Spirit for the very spirit of his
+life, will be 'more than conqueror through Him that loved us,' and
+can front all the evils, dangers, threatenings, temptations of the
+world, its heaped sweets and its frowning antagonisms, with the calm
+confidence that none of them are able to daunt him; and that the
+Victor Lord will cover his head in the day of battle and deliver him
+from every evil work. 'Be of good cheer, for I have overcome the
+world, and play your parts like men in the good fight of faith; for
+I am at your back, and will help you with Mine own strength.'
+
+IV. The last instance that I point to of the use of this phrase is
+one in which it was spoken by Christ's voice from heaven (Acts
+xxiii. 11). It was the voice which was heard by the Apostle Paul
+after he had been almost torn in pieces by the crowd in the Temple,
+and had been bestowed for security, by the half-contemptuous
+protection of the Roman governor, in the castle, and was looking
+onward into a very doubtful future, not knowing how many hours'
+purchase his life might be worth. That same night the Lord appeared
+to him and said, 'Be of good cheer, Paul, for as thou hast testified
+of Me in Jerusalem, so must thou bear witness also at Rome.' That is
+to say, 'No man can touch you until I let him, and nobody shall touch
+you until you have done your work and spoken out your testimony.
+Jerusalem is a little sphere; Rome is a great one. The tools to the
+hand that can use them. The reward for work is more work, and work
+in a larger sphere. So cheer up! for I have much for you to do yet.'
+
+And the spirit of that encouragement may go with us all, breeding in
+us the quiet confidence that no matter who may thwart or hinder, no
+matter what dangers or evils may seem to ring us round, the Master
+who bids us 'Be of good cheer' will give us a charmed life, and
+nothing shall by any means hurt us until He says to us, 'Be of good
+courage; for you have done your work; and now come and rest.' 'Wait
+on the Lord. Be of good courage, and He shall strengthen thine
+heart; wait, I say, on the Lord.'
+
+
+
+
+SOUL-HEALING FIRST: BODY-HEALING SECOND
+
+
+    'That ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on
+    earth to forgive sins (then saith He to the sick of the
+    palsy), Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine
+    house.'--MATT. ix. 6.
+
+The great example of our Lord's teaching in the Sermon on the Mount is
+followed, in this and the preceding chapter, by a similar collection
+of His works of healing. These are divided into three groups, each
+consisting of three members. This miracle is the last of the second
+triad, of which the other two members are the miraculous stilling
+of the tempest and the casting out of the demons from the men in the
+country of the Gergesenes.
+
+One may discern a certain analogy in these three members of this
+central group. In all of them our Lord appears as the peace-bringer.
+But the spheres are different. The calm which was breathed over the
+stormy lake is peace of a lower kind than that which filled the soul
+of the demoniacs when the power that made discord within had been
+cast out. Even that peace was lower in kind than that which brought
+sweet repose in the assurance of pardon to this poor paralytic.
+Forgiveness speaks of a loftier blessing than even the casting out
+of demons. The manifestation of power and love steadily rises to a
+climax.
+
+The most important part of this story, then, is not the mere healing
+of the disease, but the forgiveness of sins which accompanies it.
+And the large teaching which our Lord gives as to the relation
+between His miracles and His standing work, His ordinary work which
+He has been doing all through the ages, which He is doing to-day,
+which He is ready to do for you and me if we will let Him, towers
+high above the mere miracle, which is honoured by being the signal
+attestation of that work.
+
+Therefore I would turn to this story now, not for the sake of
+dealing with the mere miraculous event, but in order to draw the
+important lessons from it which lie upon its very surface.
+
+I. The first thought that is suggested here is that our deepest need
+is forgiveness.
+
+How strangely irrelevant and beside the mark, at first sight, seems
+the answer which Christ gives to the eager zeal and earnestness of
+the man and his bearers. Christ's word is 'Son,' or as the original
+might more literally and even more tenderly be rendered, 'Child--be
+of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee.' That seemed far away from
+their want. It _was_ far from their wish, but yet it was the
+shortest road to its accomplishment. Christ here goes straight to
+the heart of the necessity, when, passing by the disease for the
+moment, He speaks the great word of pardon. The palsy was probably
+the result of the sufferer's vice, and probably, too, he felt,
+whatever may have been his friends' wishes for him, that he needed
+forgiveness most. Such a conclusion as to his state of mind seems a
+fair inference from our Lord's words to him, for Christ would never
+have offered forgiveness to an impenitent or indifferent heart.
+
+So we may learn that our chief and prime need is forgiveness. Amid
+all our clamours and hungry needs, that is our deepest. Is not a
+man's chief relation in this world his relation to God? Is not that
+the most important thing about all of us? If that be wrong, will not
+everything be wrong? If that be right, will not everything come right?
+And is it not true that for you and me, and for all our fellows,
+whatever be the surface diversities of character, civilisation,
+culture, taste and the like, there is one deep experience common to
+every human spirit, and that is the fact, and in some sense more or
+less acutely the consciousness of the fact, that 'we have sinned,
+and come short of the glory of God'?
+
+There is the fontal source of all sorrow, for even to the most
+superficial observation ninety per cent., at any rate, of man's
+misery comes either from his own or from others' wrongdoing, and for
+the rest, it is regarded in the eye of faith as being sorrow that is
+needful because of sin, in order to discipline and to purify. But
+here stands the fact, that king and clown, philosopher and fool, men
+of culture and men of ignorance, all of us, through all the ages,
+manifest the unity of our nature in this--I was going to say most
+chiefly--that lapses from the path of rectitude, and indulgence in
+habits, thoughts, feelings, and actions, which even our consciences
+tell us are wrong, characterise us all.
+
+Hence the profound wisdom of Christ and of His Gospel in that, when
+it begins the task of healing, it does not peddle and potter on the
+surface, but goes straight to the heart, with true instinct flies at
+the head, like a wise physician pays little heed to secondary and
+unimportant symptoms, but grapples with the disease, makes the tree
+good, and leaves the good tree to make, as it will, the fruit good.
+
+The first thing to do to heal men's misery, is to make them pure; and
+the first step in the great method by which a man can be made pure,
+is to assure him of a divine forgiveness for the past. So the sneers
+that we often hear about Christian 'philanthropists taking tracts to
+people when they want soup,' and the like, are excessively shallow
+sneers, and indicate nothing more than this, that the critic has
+superficially diagnosed the disease, and is wofully wrong about the
+remedy. God forbid that I should say one word that would seem to
+depreciate the value of other forms of beneficence, or to cast doubt
+upon the purity of motives, or even to be lacking in admiration for the
+enthusiasm that fills and guides many an earnest man and woman, working
+amongst the squalid vice of our great cities and of our complex and
+barbarous civilisation to-day. I would recognise all their work as
+good and blessed; but, oh! dear brethren, it deals with the surface,
+and you will have to go a great deal deeper down than æsthetic, or
+intellectual, or economical, or political reformation and changes
+reach, before you touch the real reason why men and women are
+miserable in this world. And you will only effectually cure the
+misery, but you certainly then will do it, when you begin where the
+misery begins, and deal first with sin. The true 'saviour of society'
+is the man that can go to his brother, and as a minister declaratory
+of the divine heart can say--'Brother, be of good cheer; thy sins be
+forgiven thee.' And then, after that, the palsy will go out of his
+limbs, and a new nervous energy will come into them, and he will
+rise, take up his bed, and walk.
+
+II. Now, in the next place, notice, as coming out of this incident
+before us, the thought that forgiveness is an exclusively divine
+act.
+
+There was, sitting by, with their jealous and therefore blind eyes,
+a whole crowd of wise men and religious formalists of the first
+water, collected together as a kind of ecclesiastical inquisition
+and board of triers, as one of the other evangelists tells us, out
+of every corner of the land. They had no care for the dewy pity that
+was in Christ's looks, or for the nascent hope that began to swim up
+into the poor, dim eye of the paralytic. But they had keen scent for
+heresy, and so they fastened with true feline instinct upon the one
+thing, 'This man speaketh blasphemies. Who can forgive sins but God
+alone?'
+
+Ah! if you want to get people blind as bats to the radiant beauty of
+some lofty character, and insensible as rocks to the wants of a sad
+humanity, commend me to your religious formalists, whose religion is
+mainly a bundle of red tape tied round men's limbs to keep them from
+getting at things that they would like. These are the people who
+will be as hard as the nether millstones, and utterly blind to all
+enthusiasm and to all goodness.
+
+But yet these Pharisees are right; perfectly right. Forgiveness
+_is_ an exclusively divine act. Of course. For sin has to do
+with God only; vice has to do with the laws of morality; crime has
+to do with the laws of the land. The same act may be vice, crime,
+and sin. In the one aspect it has to do with myself, in the other
+with my fellows, in the last with God. And so evil considered as sin
+comes under God's control only, and only He against whom it has been
+committed can forgive.
+
+What is forgiveness? The sweeping aside of penalties? the shutting
+up of some more or less material hell? By no means: penalties are
+often left; when sins are crimes they are generally left; when sins
+are vices they are always left, thank God! But in so far as sin is
+sin, considered as being the perversion and setting wrong of my
+relation to Him, its consequences, which are its penalties, are
+swept away by forgiveness; for forgiveness, in its essence and
+deepest meaning, is neither more nor less than that the love of the
+person against whom the wrong has been done shall flow out,
+notwithstanding the wrong. Pardon is love rising above the ice-dam
+which we have piled in its course, and pouring into our hearts.
+
+When you fathers and mothers forgive your children, what does it
+mean? Does it not mean that your love is neither deflected nor
+embittered any more, by reason of their wrongdoing, but pours upon
+them as of old? So God's forgiveness is at bottom--'Child! there is
+nothing in my heart to thee, but pure and perfect love.' We fill the
+sky with mists, through which the sun itself has to look like a red
+ball of lurid fire. But it shines on the upper side of the mists all
+the same, and all the time, and thins them away and scatters them
+utterly, and shines forth in its own brightness on the rejoicing
+heart. Pardon is God's love, unchecked and unembittered, granted to
+the wrongdoer. And that is a divine act, and a divine act alone.
+Pharisees and Scribes were perfectly right. No man can forgive sins
+but God only.
+
+And I might add, though it is somewhat aside from my direct purpose,
+God _can_ forgive sin; which some people nowadays say is
+impossible. The apparent impossibility arises only from shallow and
+erroneous notions of what forgiveness is. God does not--it might be
+too bold to say God cannot, if we believe in miracles--but as a
+matter of fact, God does not, usually interfere to hinder men from
+reaping, as regards this life, what they have sown. But as I say,
+that is not forgiveness; and is there any reason conceivable why it
+should be impossible for the divine love to pour down upon a sinful
+man who has forsaken his sin, and is trusting in God's mercy in
+Christ, just as if his sin was non-existent, in so far as it could
+condition or interfere with the flow of the divine mercy?
+
+And I may say, further, we need a definite divine assurance of pardon.
+Ah! if you have ever been down into the cellars of your own hearts,
+and seen the ugly things that coil there, you will know that a vague
+trust in a vague God and a vague mercy is not enough to still the
+conscience that has once been stung into action. My brothers, you
+want neither priests nor ceremonies on the one hand, nor a mere
+peradventure of 'Oh! God is merciful!' on the other, in order to deal
+with that deepest need of your heart. Nothing but the King's own
+sign-manual on the pardon makes it valid; and unless you and I can,
+somehow or other, come to close grips with God, and get into actual
+contact with Him, and hear, somehow, with infallible certitude, as
+from His own lips, the assurance of forgiveness, there is not enough
+for our needs.
+
+III. So I come to say, in the next place, that the incident before
+us teaches us that Jesus Christ claims and exercises this divine
+prerogative of forgiveness.
+
+Mark His answer to these cavillers. He admits their promises absolutely.
+They said, 'No man can forgive sins but God only.' If Christ was only a
+man, like us, standing in the same relation to the divine pardon that
+other teachers, saints, and prophets have stood, and had nothing more
+to do with it than simply, as I might do, to say to a troubled heart,
+'My brother, be quite sure that God has forgiven you'; if Christ's
+relation to the divine forgiveness was nothing more than ministerial
+and declaratory, why, in the name, not of common sense only, but of
+veracity, did He not turn round to these men and say so? He was bound,
+by all the obligations of a religious teacher, to disclaim, as you or
+I would have done under similar circumstances, the misapprehension of
+His words: 'I use blasphemies? No! I am not speaking blasphemies. I
+know that God only can forgive sins, and I am doing no more than
+telling my poor brother here that his sins are forgiven by God.' But
+that is not His answer at all. What He says in effect is--'Yes; you are
+quite right. No man can forgive sins, but God only. _I_ forgive sins.
+Whom think ye, then, that I, the Son of Man am? It is easy to say "Thy
+sins be forgiven thee"--far easier to say that than to say "Take up thy
+bed and walk," because one can verify and check the accomplishment of
+the saying in the one case, and one cannot in the other. The sentences
+are equally easy to pronounce, the things are equally difficult for a
+_man_ to do, but the difference is that one of them can be verified
+and the other of them cannot. I will do the visible impossibility, and
+then I leave you to judge whether I can do the invisible one or not.'
+
+Now, dear brethren, I have only one word to say about that, and it
+is this. We are here brought sharp up to a fork in the road. I know
+that it is not always a satisfactory way of arguing to compel a man
+to take one horn or other of an alternative, but it is quite fair to
+do go in the present case; and I would press it upon some of you
+who, I think, urgently need to consider the dilemma. Either the
+Pharisees were quite right, and Jesus Christ, the meek, the humble,
+the Pattern of all lowly gentleness, the Teacher whom nineteen
+centuries confess that they have not exhausted, was an audacious
+blasphemer, or He was God manifest in the flesh. The whole context
+forbids us to take these words, 'Thy sins be forgiven thee,' as
+anything less than the voice of divine love wiping out the man's
+transgressions; and if Jesus Christ pretended or presumed to do
+that, there is no hypothesis that I know of which can save His
+character for the reverence of man, but that which sees in Him God
+revealed in manhood; the world's Judge, from whom the world may
+receive divine forgiveness.
+
+IV. Jesus Christ here brings visible facts into the witness-box as
+the attesters of His invisible powers.
+
+Of course the miracle was such a witness in a special way, inasmuch as
+it and forgiveness were equally divine prerogatives and acts. I need
+not dwell now upon what I have already observed in my introductory
+remarks, that our Lord here teaches us the relative importance of the
+attesting miracle and the thing attested, and regards the miracle as
+subordinate to the higher and spiritual work of bringing pardon.
+
+But we may widen out this into the thought that the subsidiary
+effects of Christian faith in individuals, and of the less complete
+Christian faith which is diffused over society, do stand as very
+strong evidences of the reality of Christ's professions and claims
+to exercise this invisible power of pardon. Or, to put it into a
+concrete form, and to take an illustration which may need large
+deductions.--Go into a Salvation Army meeting. Admit the extravagance,
+the coarseness, and all the rest which we educated and superfine
+Christians cannot stand. But when you have blown away the froth, is
+there not something left in the cup which looks uncommonly like the
+wine of the Kingdom? Are there not visible results of that, as of
+every earnest effort to carry the message of forgiveness to men,
+which create an immense presumption in favour of its reality and
+divine origin? Men reclaimed, passions tamed, homes that were
+pandemoniums made Bethels, houses of God. Wherever Christ's
+forgiving power really comes into a heart, life is beautified, is
+purified, is ennobled; and secondary and material benefits follow in
+the train.
+
+I claim all the difference between Christendom and Heathendom as
+attestation of the reality of Christ's divine and atoning work. I
+say, and I believe it to be a valid and a good argument as against
+much of the doubt of this day, 'If you seek His monument, look
+around.' His own answer to the question, 'Art thou He that should
+come?' is valid still: 'Go and tell John the things that ye see and
+hear'; the dead are raised, the deaf ears are opened; faculties that
+lie dormant are quickened, and in a thousand ways the swift spirit
+of life flows from Him and vitalises the dead masses of humanity.
+
+Let any system of belief or of no belief do the like if it can. This
+rod has budded at any rate, let the magicians do the same with their
+enchantments.
+
+Now, Christian men and women, 'ye are My witnesses,' saith the Lord.
+The world takes its notions of Christianity, and its belief in the
+power of Christianity, a great deal more from you than it does from
+preachers and apologists. _You_ are the Bibles that most men
+read. See to it that your lives represent worthily the redeeming and
+the ennobling power of your Master.
+
+And as for the rest of you, do not waste your time trying to purify
+the stream twenty miles down from the fountainhead, but go to the
+source. Do not believe, brother, that your palsy, or your fever,
+your paralysis of will towards good, or the unwholesome ardour with
+which you are impelled to wrong, and the consequent misery and
+restlessness, can ever be healed until you go to Christ--the
+forgiving Christ--and let Him lay His hand upon you; and from His
+own sweet and infallible lips hear the word that shall come as a
+charm through all your nature: 'Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.'
+'Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened; then shall the lame man
+leap as an hart';--then limitations, sorrows, miseries, will pass
+away, and forgiveness will bear fruit in joy and power, in holiness,
+health and peace.
+
+
+
+
+THE CALL OF MATTHEW
+
+
+    'And as Jesus passed forth from thence, He saw a man,
+    named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom: and
+    He saith unto him, Follow Me. And he arose, and
+    followed Him. 10. And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at
+    meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners
+    came and sat down with Him and His disciples. 11. And
+    when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto His disciples,
+    Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?
+    12. But when Jesus heard that, He said unto them, They
+    that be whole need not a physician, but they that are
+    sick. 13. But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will
+    have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to
+    call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. 14. Then
+    came to Him the disciples of John, saying, Why do we
+    and the Pharisees fast oft, but Thy disciples fast not?
+    15. And Jesus said unto them, Can the children of the
+    bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with
+    them? but the days will come, when the bridegroom shall
+    be taken from them, and then shall they fast. 16. No
+    man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment,
+    for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the
+    garment, and the rent is made worse. 17. Neither do men
+    put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break,
+    and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but
+    they put new wine into new bottles, and both are
+    preserved.'--MATT. ix. 9-17.
+
+All three evangelists connect the call of Matthew immediately with the
+cure of the paralytic, and follow it with an account of Christ's answers
+to sundry cavils from Pharisees and John's disciples. No doubt, the
+spectacle of this new Teacher taking a publican into His circle of
+disciples, and, not content with such an outrage on all proper patriotic
+feeling, following it up with scandalous companionship with the sort
+of people that a publican could get to accept his hospitality, sharpened
+hatred and made suspicion prick its ears. Mark and Luke call the
+publican Levi, he calls himself Matthew, the former being probably his
+name before his discipleship, the latter, that by which he was known
+thereafter. Possibly Jesus gave it him, as in the cases of Simon, and
+perhaps Bartholomew. But, however acquired, it superseded the old one,
+as the fact that it appears in the lists of the apostles in both the
+other evangelists and in Acts, shows. Its use here may be a trace of
+a touching desire to make sure that readers, who only knew him as
+Matthew, should understand who this publican was. It is like the little
+likenesses of themselves, in some corner of a background, that early
+painters used to slip into a picture of Madonna and angels. There was
+no vanity in the wish, for he says nothing about his sacrifices,
+leaving it to Luke to tell that 'he left all,' but he _does_
+crave that his brethren, who read, should know that it was he whom
+Jesus honoured by His call.
+
+The condensed narrative emphasises three things, (1) his occupation
+with his ordinary business when that wonderful summons thrilled his
+soul; (2) the curt authoritative command, and (3) the swift obedience.
+As to the first, Capernaum was on a great trade route, and the
+custom-house officers there would have their hands full. This one was
+busy at his work, hateful and shameful as it was in Jewish eyes, and
+into that sordid atmosphere, like a flash of light into a mephitic
+cavern full of unclean creatures, came the transcendent mercy of
+Jesus' summons. There is no region of life so foul, so mean, so
+despicable in men's eyes, but that the quickening Voice will enter
+there. We do not need to be in temples or about sacred tasks in order
+to hear it. It summons us in, and sometimes from, our daily work. Well
+for those who know whose Voice it is, and do not mistake it for some
+Eli's!
+
+No doubt this was not the first of Matthew's knowledge of Jesus.
+Living in Capernaum, he would have had many opportunities of hearing
+Him or of Him, and his heart and conscience may have been stirred.
+As he sat in his 'tolbooth,' feeling contempt and hatred poured on
+him, he, no doubt, had had longings to get nearer to the One whose
+voice was gentle, and His looks, love. So the call would come to him
+as the fulfilment of a dim hope, and it would be a joyful surprise
+to know that Jesus wished to have him for a disciple as much as he
+wished to have Jesus for a Teacher. The ring of fire and hate within
+which he had been imprisoned was broken, and there was One who cared
+to have him, and who would not shrink from his touch. In the light
+of that assurance, the call became, not a summons to give anything
+up, but an invitation to receive a better possession than all with
+which he was called to part. And if we saw things as they are, would
+it not always be so to us? 'Follow Me' does mean, Forsake earth and
+self, but it means still more: Take what is more than all. It parts
+from these because it unites to Jesus. Therefore it means gain, not
+deprivation. And it condenses all rules for life into one, for to
+follow Him is the sum of all duty, and yields the perfect pattern of
+conduct and character, while it is also the secret of all blessedness,
+and the talisman that assures a man of continual progress. They who
+follow are near, and will reach, Him. Of course, if His servants
+follow Him, it stands to reason that one day, 'where I am there shall
+also My servants be.' So in that command lie a sufficient guide for
+earth, and a sure guarantee for heaven.
+
+'And he arose and followed Him.' That is the only thing that we are
+told of Matthew. We hear no more of him, except that he made a feast
+in his house on the occasion. No doubt he did his work as an apostle,
+but oblivion has swallowed up all that. A happy fate to be known to all
+the world for all time, only by this one thing, that he unconditionally,
+immediately and joyfully obeyed Christ's call! He might have said: 'How
+can I leave my work? I must make up my accounts, hand over my papers,
+do a hundred things in order to wind up matters, and I must postpone
+following till then.' But he sprang up at once. He would have abundant
+opportunities to settle all details afterwards, but if he let this
+opportunity of taking his place as a disciple pass, he might never
+have another. There are some things that are best done gradually and
+slowly, but obedience to Christ's call is not one of them. Prompt
+obedience is the only safety. The psalmist knew the danger of delay
+when he said: 'I made haste and delayed not, but made haste to keep Thy
+commandments.'
+
+Matthew does not tell us that _he_ made the feast, but Luke
+does. It was the natural expression of his thankfulness and joy for
+the new bond. His knowledge was small, but his love was great. How
+could he honour Jesus enough? But he was a pariah in Capernaum, and
+the only guests he could assemble were, like himself, outcasts from
+'respectable society.' In popular estimation all publicans were
+regarded without any more ado as 'sinners,' but probably that
+designation is here applied to disreputable folks of various kinds
+and degrees of shadiness, who gravitated to Matthew and his class,
+because, like him, they were repulsed by every one else. Even
+outcasts hunger for society, and manage to get a community of their
+own, in which they find some glow of comradeship, and some defence
+from hatred and contempt. Even lepers herd together and have their
+own rules of intercourse.
+
+But what a scandal in the eyes not only of Pharisees, but of all the
+proper people in Capernaum, Jesus' going to such a gathering of
+disreputables would be, we may estimate if we remember that they did
+not know His reason, but thought that He went because He liked the
+atmosphere and the company. 'Like draws to like' was the conclusion
+suggested, in the absence of His own explanation. The Pharisee
+conceived that his duty in regard to publicans and sinners was to keep
+as far from them as he could, and his strait-laced self-righteousness
+had never dreamed of going to them with an open heart, and trying to
+win them to a better life. Many so-called followers of Jesus still
+take that attitude. They gather up their skirts round them daintily,
+and never think that it would be liker their Lord to sweep away the
+mud than to pick their steps through it, caring mainly to keep their
+own shoes clean.
+
+The feast was probably spread in some courtyard or open space, to
+which, as is the Eastern custom, uninvited spectators could have
+access. It is quite in accordance with the usage of the times and
+land that the Pharisees should have been onlookers, and should have
+been able to talk to the disciples. No doubt their colloquy became
+animated, and perhaps loud, so that it could easily attract Christ's
+attention. He answered for Himself, and the tone of His reply is
+friendly and explanatory, as if He recognised that the questioners
+genuinely wished to know 'why' He was sitting in such company.
+
+It discloses His motive, and thereby sweeps away all insinuations
+that He consorted with sinners because their company was congenial.
+It was precisely for the opposite reason, because He was so unlike
+them. He came among these sinners as a physician; and who wonders at
+_his_ being beside the sick? He does not spend his days by
+their bedsides because he likes the atmosphere, but because it is
+his business to make them well. Now, in that comparison, Jesus
+pronounces no opinion on the correctness of the Pharisees' estimate
+of themselves as 'righteous,' or of publicans as sinners, but simply
+takes them on their own ground. But He does make a great claim for
+Himself, and speaks out of His consciousness of power to heal men's
+worst disease, sin. It is a tremendous assertion to make of oneself,
+and its greatness is enhanced by the quiet way in which it is stated
+as a thought familiar to Himself. What right had He to pose as the
+physician for humanity, and how can such a claim be reconciled with
+His being 'meek and lowly in heart'? If He Himself was one of the
+sick and needed healing, how can He be the healer of the rest? If
+being a sinful man, as we all are, He made such a claim, what becomes
+of the reverence which is paid to Him as a great religious Teacher,
+and where has His 'sweet reasonableness' vanished?
+
+Jesus passes from explanation of His personal relation to the
+publicans to adduce the broad principle which should shape the
+Pharisees' relation to them, as it had shaped His. Hosea had said
+long ago that God delighted more in 'mercy' than in 'sacrifice.'
+Kindly helpfulness to men is better worship than exact performance
+of any ritual. Sacrifice propitiates God, but mercy imitates Him,
+and imitation is the perfection of divine service. Jesus here speaks
+as all the prophets had spoken, and smites with a deadly stroke the
+mechanical formalism which in every age stiffens religion into
+ceremonies and neglects love towards God, expressed in mercy to men.
+He lays bare the secret of His own life, and He thereby lays on His
+followers the obligation of making it the moving impulse of theirs.
+
+The great general truth is followed, as it has been preceded, by a
+plain statement of Jesus' own conception of His mission in the
+world. 'I came,' says He, hinting at the fact that He was before He
+was born, and that His Incarnation was His voluntary act. True, He
+was sent, and we speak of His mission, but also He 'came,' and we
+speak of His advent. 'To repentance' is omitted by the best editors
+as being brought over from Luke, where it is genuine. But it is a
+correct gloss on the simple word 'call,' though 'repentance' is but
+a small part of that to which He summons. He calls us to repent; He
+calls us to Himself; He calls us to self-surrender; He calls us to
+Eternal Life; He calls us to a better feast than Matthew had spread.
+But we must recognise that we are sinners, or we shall never realise
+that His invitation is for us, nor ever feel that we need a physician,
+and have in Him, and in Him alone, the Physician whom we need.
+
+The Pharisees objected to Jesus' feasting, and could scarcely in the
+same breath find fault with Him for not fasting, but they put
+forward some of John's disciples to bring that fresh objection.
+Common hatred is a strong cement, and often holds opposites together
+for a while. It was bad for John's followers that they should be
+willing to say, 'We and the Pharisees.' They had travelled far from
+the days when their master had called the same class a 'generation
+of vipers'! Their keen desire to uphold the honour of their teacher,
+whose light they saw paling before the younger Jesus, made them
+hostile to Him, and, as is usually the case, the followers were more
+partisan than the leader. Religious antagonism sometimes stoops to
+very strange alliances. The two questions brought together in this
+context are noticeably alike, and noticeably different. Both ask for
+the reason of conduct which they do not go the length of impugning.
+They seem to be desirous of enlightenment, they are really eager to
+condemn. Both avoid seeming to call in question the acts of the
+persons addressed, for the Pharisees interrogate the _disciples_ as
+to the reason for _Jesus'_ conduct, while John's disciples ask
+from _Jesus_ the reason of His disciples' conduct. In both, mock
+respectfulness covers lively hatred.
+
+Our Lord's first answer is as profound as it is beautiful, and
+veils, while it reveals, a lofty claim for Himself and a solemn
+foresight of His death, and lays down a great and fruitful principle
+as to the relations between spiritual moods and outward acts of
+religion. His speaking of Himself as 'the Bridegroom' would recall
+to some of His questioners, and that with a touch of shame, John's
+nobly humble acceptance of the subordinate place of the bridegroom's
+friend and elevation of Jesus to that of the bridegroom. But it was
+not merely a rebuking quotation from John's witness, but the
+expression of His own unclouded and continual consciousness of what
+He was to humanity, and of what humanity could find in Him, as well
+as a sovereign appropriating to Himself of many prophetic strains.
+What depth of love, what mysterious blending of spirit, what adoring,
+lowly obedience, what perfection of protecting care, what rapture of
+possession, what rest of heart in trust, what dower of riches are
+dimly shadowed in that wonderful emblem, will never be known till
+the hour of the marriage-supper of the Lamb, when 'His bride hath
+made herself ready.' But across the light there flits a shadow. It
+is but for a moment, and it meant little to the hearers, but it meant
+much to Him. For He could not look forward to winning His bride
+without seeing the grim Cross, and even athwart the brightness of
+the days of companionship with His humble friends, came the darkness
+on His soul, though not on theirs, of the violent end when He 'shall
+be taken from them.' The hint fell apparently on deaf ears, but it
+witnesses to the continual presence in the mind of Jesus of His
+sufferings and death. The certainty that He must die was not forced
+on Him by the failure of His efforts as His career unfolded itself.
+It was no disappointment of bright earlier hopes, as is the case
+with many a disillusionised reformer, who thought at the outset
+that he had only to speak and all men would listen. It was the
+clearly discerned goal from the first. 'The Son of Man came ... to
+give His life a ransom.'
+
+But our Lord here lays down a broad principle, which, if applied as it
+was meant to be, would lift a heavy burden of outward observance off
+the Christian consciousness. Fast when you are sad; feast when you are
+glad. Let the disposition, the mood, the moment's circumstance, mould
+your action. There is no virtue or sanctity in observances which do not
+correspond to the inner self. What a charter of liberty is proclaimed
+in these quiet words! What mountains of ceremonial unreality, oppressive
+to the spirit, are cast into the sea by them! How different Christendom
+would have been and would be to-day, if Christians had learned the
+lesson of these words!
+
+The two condensed parables or extended metaphors, which follow the
+vindication of the disciples, carry the matter further, and lay down
+a principle which is intended to cover not only the question in
+hand, their non-observance of Jewish regulations as to fasting, but
+the whole subject of the relations of the new word, which Jesus felt
+that He brought, to the old system. The same consciousness of His
+unique mission which prompted His use of the term 'bridegroom,'
+shines through the two metaphors of the new cloth and the new wine.
+He knows that He is about to bring a new garb to men, and to give
+them new wine to drink, and He knows that what He brings is no mere
+patch on a worn-out system, but a new fermenting force, which
+demands fresh vehicles and modes of expression. The two metaphors
+take up different aspects of one thought. To try to mend an old coat
+with a bit of unshrunk cloth would only make a worse dissolution of
+continuity, for as soon as a shower fell on it the patch would
+shrink, and, in shrinking, pull the thin pieces of the old garment
+adjoining it to itself. Judaism was already 'rent' and worn too thin
+to be capable of repair. The only thing to be done was 'as a
+vesture' to 'fold it up' and shape a new garment out of new cloth.
+What was true as to the supremely new thing which He brought into
+the world remains true, in less eminent degree, of the less acute
+differences between the Old and the New, within Christianity itself.
+There do come times when its externals become antiquated, worn thin
+and torn, and when patching is useless. Christian men, like others,
+constitutionally incline to conservatism or to progress, and the one
+temperament needs to be warned against obstinately preserving old
+clothes, and the other against eagerly insisting that they are past
+mending.
+
+But a patch and a worn garment do not wholly describe the relations
+of the old and the new. Freshly made wine, still fermenting, and
+old, stiff wine-skins which have lost their elasticity suggest
+further thoughts. Now we have to do with containing vessel _versus_
+contents, with a fermenting force _versus_ stiffened forms. To put
+that into these will destroy both. For example, if the struggle of
+the Judaisers in the early Church had succeeded, and Christianity
+had become a Jewish sect, it would have dwindled to nothing, as the
+Jewish-minded Christians did. The wine must have bottles. Every
+great spiritual renovating force must embody itself in institutions.
+Spiritual emotions must express themselves in acts of worship,
+spiritual convictions must speak in a creed. But the containing
+vessel must be congruous with, and still more, it must be created by,
+the contained force, as there are creatures who frame their shells
+to fit the convolutions of their bodies, and build them up from their
+own substance. Forms are good, as long as they can stretch if need be;
+when they are too stiff to expand, they restrict rather than contain
+the wine, and if short-sighted obstinacy insists on keeping _it_ in
+_them_, there will be a great spill and loss of much that is
+precious.
+
+
+
+
+THE TOUCH OF FAITH AND THE TOUCH OF CHRIST
+
+
+    'While He spake these things unto them, behold, there
+    came a certain ruler, and worshipped Him, saying, My
+    daughter is even now dead: but come and lay Thy hand
+    upon her, and she shall live. 19. And Jesus arose,
+    and followed him, and so did His disciples. 20. And,
+    behold, a woman, which was diseased with an issue of
+    blood twelve years, came behind Him, and touched the
+    hem of His garment: 21. For she said within herself,
+    If I may but touch His garment, I shall be whole.
+    22. But Jesus turned Him about, and when He saw her,
+    He said, Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath
+    made thee whole. And the woman was made whole from
+    that hour. 23. And when Jesus came into the ruler's
+    house, and saw the minstrels and the people making a
+    noise. 24. He said unto them, Give place: for the maid
+    is not dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed Him to
+    scorn. 25. But when the people were put forth, He went
+    in, and took her by the hand, and the maid arose.
+    26. And the fame hereof went abroad into all that land.
+    27. And when Jesus departed thence, two blind men
+    followed Him, crying, and saying, Thou Son of David,
+    have mercy on us. 28. And when He was come into the
+    house, the blind men came to Him: and Jesus saith unto
+    them, Believe ye that I am able to do this? They said
+    unto Him, Yea, Lord. 29. Then touched He their eyes,
+    saying, According to your faith be it unto you. 30. And
+    their eyes were opened; and Jesus straitly charged them,
+    saying, See that no man know it. 31. But they, when they
+    were departed, spread abroad His fame in all that
+    country.'--MATT. ix. 18-31.
+
+The three miracles included in the present section belong to the
+last group of this series. Those of the second group were all
+effected by Christ's word. Those now to be considered are all
+effected by touch. The first two are intertwined. The narrative of
+the healing of the woman is embedded in the account of the raising
+of Jairus's daughter.
+
+Mark the impression of calm consciousness of power and leisurely
+dignity produced by Christ's having time to pause, even on such an
+errand, in order to heal, by the way, the other sufferer. The father
+and the disciples would wonder at Him as He stayed His steps, and be
+apt to feel that priceless moments were being lost; but He knows His
+own resources, and can afford to let the child die while He heals
+the woman. The one shall receive no harm by the delay, and the other
+will be blessed. Our Lord is sitting at the feast which Matthew gave
+on the occasion of his call, engaged in vindicating His sharing in
+innocent festivity against the cavils of the Pharisees, when the
+summons to the death-bed comes to Him from the lips of the father,
+who breaks in on the banquet with his imploring cry. Matthew gives
+the story much more summarily than the other evangelists, and does
+not distinguish, as they do, between Jairus's first words, 'at the
+point of death, and the message of her actual decease, which met
+them on the way. The call of sorrow always reaches Christ's ear, and
+the cry for help is never deemed by Him an interruption. So this
+'man, gluttonous and a wine-bibber,' as these Pharisees thought Him,
+willingly and at once leaves the house of feasting for that of
+mourning. How near together, in this awful life of ours, the two
+lie, and how thin the partition walls! Well for those whose feasts
+do not bar them out from hearing the weeping next door.
+
+As the crowd accompanies Jesus, His hasting love is, for a moment,
+diverted by another sufferer. We never go on an errand of mercy but we
+pass a hundred other sorrowing hearts, so close packed lie the griefs
+of men. This woman is a poor shrinking creature, broken down by long
+illness (which had lasted for the same length of time as the joyous
+life of Jairus's child), made more timid by disappointed hopes of
+cure, and depressed by poverty to which her many doctors had brought
+her. She does not venture to stop this new Rabbi-physician, as He
+goes with the church dignitary of the town to heal his daughter, but
+lets Him pass before she can make up her mind to go near Him; and
+then she comes creeping up behind the crowd, puts out her wasted,
+trembling hand to the hem of His garment,--and she is whole.
+
+The other evangelists give us a more extended account, but Matthew
+throws into prominence, in his condensed narrative, the essential
+points.
+
+Notice her real but imperfect faith. There was unquestionable
+confidence in Christ's power, and very genuine desire for healing.
+But it was a very ignorant faith. She believes that her touch of the
+garment will heal without Christ's will or knowledge, much more His
+pitying love, having any part in it. She thinks that she may win her
+desire furtively, and may carry it away, and He be none the wiser nor
+the poorer for the stolen blessing. What utter, blank ignorance of His
+character and way of working! What gross superstition! Yes, and withal
+what a hunger of desire, what absolute assurance of confidence that
+one finger-tip on His robe was enough! Therefore she had her desire,
+and her Healer recognised her faith as true, though blended with much
+ignorance of Him. Her error was very like that which many Christians
+entertain with less excuse. To attach importance to external means of
+grace, rites, ordinances, sacraments, outward connection with Christian
+organisations, is the very same misconception in a slightly different
+form. Such error is always near us; it is especially rife in countries
+where there has long been a visible Church. It has received strange
+new vigour to-day, partly by reaction from extreme rationalism, partly
+by the growing cultivation of the aesthetic faculties. It is threatening
+to corrupt the simplicity and spirituality of Christian worship, and
+needs to be strenuously resisted. But the more we have to fight
+against it, the more do we need to remember that, along with this
+clinging to the hem of the garment instead of to the heart of its
+Wearer, there may be a very real trust, which might shame some of
+those who profess to hold a less sensuous form of faith. Many a poor
+soul clasping a crucifix clings to the Cross. Many a devout heart
+kneeling at mass sees through the incense-smoke the face of Christ.
+
+This woman's faith was selfish. She wanted health; she did not care
+much about the Healer. She would have been quite contented to have
+had no more to do with Him, if she could only have stolen out of the
+crowd cured. She would have had little gratitude to the unconscious
+Giver of a stolen good. So, many a Christian life in its earlier
+stages is more absorbed with its own deep misery and its desire for
+deliverance, than with Him. Love comes after, born of the experience
+of His love. But faith precedes love, and the predominant motive
+impelling to faith at first is distinctly self-regard. That is all as
+it should be. The most purely self-absorbed wish to escape from the
+most rudely pictured hell is often the beginning of a true trust in
+Christ, which, in due time, will be elevated into perfect consecration.
+Some of our modern teachers, who are shocked at Christianity because
+it lays the foundation of the most self-denying morality in such
+'selfishness,' would be none the worse for going to school to this
+story, and learning from it how a desire for nothing more than to
+get rid of a painful disease, started a process which turned a life
+into a peaceful, thankful surrender of the cured self to the love
+and service of the mighty Healer.
+
+Observe, next, how Christ answers the imperfect faith, and, by
+answering, corrects and confirms it. Matthew omits Christ's question
+as to who touched Him, the disciples' reply, and His renewed
+asseveration that He was conscious of power having gone forth from
+Him. All these belong to the loving method by which our Lord sought
+to draw forth an open acknowledgment. Womanly diffidence, enfeebled
+health, her special disease, all made the woman wish to hide herself.
+She wanted to steal away unnoticed, as she hoped that she had come.
+But Christ forces her to stand out before all the crowd, and there,
+with all eyes upon her,--cold, cruel eyes, some of them--to conquer
+her shame, and tell all the truth. Strange kindness that; strangely
+contrasted with His ordinary desire to avoid notoriety, and with His
+ordinary tender consideration for shrinking weakness! He did it for
+her sake, not for His own. She is changed from timidity to courage.
+At one moment she stretches out her wasted finger, a tremulous
+invalid; at the next, she flings herself at His feet, a confessor.
+He would have us testify for Him, because faith unavowed, like a
+plant in the dark, is apt to become pale and sickly; but ere He bids
+us own His name, He pours into our hearts, in answer to our secret
+appeal, the health of His own life, and the blissful consciousness
+of that great gift which makes the tongue of the dumb sing.
+
+His words to her are full of tenderness. She receives the name of
+'daughter.' Gently He encourages her timidity by that 'Be of good
+cheer,' and then He sets right her error: 'Thy faith'--not thy
+finger--'hath made thee whole.' There was no real connection between
+the touch of the robe and healing; but the woman thought that there
+was, and so Christ stooped to her childish thought, and allowed her
+to prescribe the road which His mercy should take. But He would not
+leave her with her error. The true means of contact between us and
+Him is not our outward contact with external means of grace, but the
+touch of our spirits by faith. Faith is nothing in itself, and heals
+only because it brings us into union with His power, which is the
+sole cause of our healing. Faith is the hand which receives the
+blessing. It may be a wasted and tremulous hand, like that which
+this woman laid lightly on His robe. But He feels its touch, though
+a universe presses on Him, and He answers. Not the garment's hem,
+but Christ's love, is the cause of our salvation. Not an outward
+contact with it or with Him, but faith, is the condition on which
+His life, which knows no disease, pours into our souls. The hand of
+my faith lifted to Him will receive into its empty palm and clasping
+fingers the special blessing for my special wants.
+
+The other evangelists tell us that, at the moment of His words to
+the woman, the messengers came bearing tidings of the child's death.
+How Jairus must have grudged the pause! A word from Christ, like the
+pressure of His hand, heartened him. Like a river turned from its
+course for a space, to fill some empty reservoir, His love comes
+back to its original direction. How abundant the power and mercy, to
+which such a work as that just done was but a parenthesis! The
+doleful music and the shrill shrieks of Eastern mourning, which met
+them as they entered Jairus's house, disturbed the sanctity of the
+hour, and were in strong contrast with the majestic calmness of
+Jesus. Not amid venal lamentations and excited cries will He do His
+work. He bids the noisy crowd forth with curt, almost stern, command,
+and therein rebukes all such hollow and tumultuous scenes, in the
+presence of the stillness of death, still more where faith in Him
+has robbed it of its terror, in robbing it of its perpetuity. It is
+strange that believing readers should have thought that our Lord meant
+to say that the little girl was not really dead, but only in a swoon.
+The scornful laughter of the flute-players and hired mourners
+understood Him better. They knew that it was real death, as men
+count death, and, as has often been the case, the laughter of His
+foes has served to establish the truth. That was not worthy to be
+called death from which the child was so soon and easily to be
+awaked. But, besides this special application to the case in hand,
+that great saying of our Lord's carries the blessed truth that,
+since He has come, death is softened into sleep for all who love
+Him. The euphemism is not peculiar to Christianity, but has a deeper
+meaning on Christian lips than when Greeks or Romans spoke of the
+eternal sleep. Others speak of death by any name rather than its
+own, because they fear it so much. The Christian does so, because he
+fears it so little,--and, as a matter of fact, the use of the word
+death as meaning merely the separation of soul and body by the
+physical act is exceptional in the New Testament. This name of
+sleep, sanctioned thus by Christ, is the sweetest of all. It speaks
+of the cessation of connection with the world of sense, and 'long
+disquiet merged in rest.' It does not imply unconsciousness, for we
+are not unconscious when we sleep, but only unaware of externals. It
+holds the promise of waking when the sun comes. So it has driven out
+the ugly old name. Our tears flow less bitterly when we think of our
+dear ones as 'sleeping in Jesus.' Their bodies, like this little
+child's, are dead, but _they_ are not. They rest, conscious of
+their own blessedness and of Him 'in whom they live, and have their
+being,' whether they 'move' or no.
+
+Then comes the great deed. The crowd is shut out. For such a work
+silence is befitting. The father and mother, with His foremost three
+disciples, go with Him into the chamber. There is no effort, repeated
+and gradually successful, as when Elisha raised the dead boy; no
+praying, as when Peter raised Dorcas; only the touch of the hand in
+which life throbbed in fulness, and, as the other narratives record,
+two words, spoken strangely to, and yet more strangely heard by, the
+dull, cold ear of death. Their echo lingered long with Peter, and
+Mark gives us them in the original Aramaic. But Matthew passes them
+by, as he seems here to have desired to emphasise the power of
+Christ's touch. But touch or word, the real cause of the miracle
+was simply His will; and whether He used media to help men's faith,
+or said only 'I will,' mattered little. He varied His methods as the
+circumstances of the recipients required, and in order that they and
+we might learn that He was tied to none. These miracles of raising
+the dead are three in number. Jairus's daughter is raised from her
+bed, just having passed away; the widow's son at Nain from his bier,
+having been for a little longer separated from his body; Lazarus
+from the grave, having been dead four days. A few minutes, or days,
+or four thousand years, are one to His power. These three are in
+some sense the first-fruits of the great harvest; the stars that
+shone out singly before all the heaven is in a blaze. For, though
+they died again, and so left to Him the precedence in resurrection,
+as in all besides, they are still prophetic of His power in the hour
+when they 'that sleep in the dust' shall awake at His voice. Blessed
+they who, like this little maiden, are awakened, not only by His
+voice, but by His touch, and to find, as she did, their hand in His!
+
+The third of these miracles, which Matthew seems to reckon as the
+second in the group, because he treats the two former as so closely
+connected as to be but one in numeration, need not detain us long.
+It is found only in this Gospel. The first point to be observed in it
+is the cry of these two blind men. There is something pathetic and
+exquisitely natural in the two being together, as is also the case in
+the similar miracle, at a later period, on the outskirts of Jericho.
+Equal sorrows drive men together for such poor help and solace as
+they can give each other. They have common experiences which isolate
+them from others, and they creep close for warmth and companionship.
+All the blind men in the Gospels have certain resemblances. One is
+that they are all sturdily persevering, as perhaps was easier for
+them because they could not see the impatience of the listeners, and
+possibly because, in most cases, persistent begging was their trade,
+and they were used to refusals. But a more important trait is their
+recognition of Jesus as 'Son of David.' Blind as they are, they see
+more than do the seeing. Thrown in upon themselves, they may have
+been led to ponder the old words, and by their affliction been made
+more ready to welcome One who, if He were Messiah, was coming with a
+special blessing for them--'to open the blind eyes.' Men who deeply
+desire a good are quick to listen to the promise of its accomplishment.
+So these two followed Him along the road, loudly and perseveringly
+calling out their profession of faith, and their entreaty for sight.
+
+The next point is our Lord's treatment. He let them cry on, apparently
+ unheeding. Had, then, the two miracles just done exhausted His stock
+of power or of pity? Certainly His reason was, as it always was, their
+good. We do not know why it was better for them to have to wait, and
+continue their entreaty; but we may be quite sure that the reason for
+all His delays is the same,--the larger blessing which comes with the
+answer when it comes, and the large blessings which may be gathered
+while we wait its coming. Christ's question to them, when at last
+they have found their way even indoors, holds out more hope than they
+had yet received. By it, Christ established a close relation with them,
+and implied to them that He was willing to answer their cry. One can
+fancy how the poor blind faces would light up with a flush of eager
+expectation, and how swift would be the answer. The question is not
+cold or inquisitorial. It is more than half a promise, and a powerful
+aid to the faith which it requires.
+
+There is something very beautiful and pathetic in the simple brevity
+of the unhesitating answer, 'Yea, Lord.' Sincerity needs few words.
+Faith can put an infinite deal of meaning into a monosyllable. Their
+eagerness to reach the goal made their answer brief. But it was
+enough. Again the hand which had clasped the maiden's palm is put
+out and laid gently on the useless eyes, and the great word spoken,
+'According to your faith be it unto you.' Their blindness made the
+touch peculiarly fitting in their case, as bringing evidence of
+sense to those who could not see the gracious pity of His looks. The
+word spoken was, like that to the centurion, a declaration of the
+power of faith, which determines the measure, and often the manner,
+of His gifts to us. The containing vessel not only settles the
+quantity of, but the shape assumed by, the water which is taken up
+in it from the sea. Faith, which keeps inside of Christ's promises
+(and what goes outside of them is not faith), decides how much of
+Christ we shall have for our very own. He condescends to run the
+molten gold of His mercies into the moulds which our faith prepares.
+
+These two men, who had used their tongues so well in their persistent
+cry for healing, went away to make a worse use of them in telling
+everywhere of their cure. Jesus desired silence. Possibly He did
+not wish His reputation as a mere worker of miracles to be spread
+abroad. In all His earlier ministry He avoided publicity, singularly
+contrasting therein with the evident desire to make Himself the
+centre of observation which marks its close. He dreaded the smoky
+flame of popular excitement. His message was to individuals, not to
+crowds. It was a natural impulse to tell the benefits these two had
+received; but truer gratitude and deeper faith would have made them
+obey His lightest word, and have shut their mouths. We honour Christ
+most, not by taking our way of honouring Him, but by absolute obedience.
+
+The final miracle of the nine (or ten) marshalled in long procession
+in chapters viii. and ix. is told with singular brevity. There is
+nothing individual in our Lord's treatment of the sufferer, as there
+was in the previous healing of the two blind men, and no details are
+given of either the appeal to His pity or the method of His cure.
+The dumb demoniac could lift no cry, nor exercise any faith, and all
+the petitions and hopes of his bearers were expressed in the act of
+bringing the sufferer thither, and silently setting him there before
+these eyes of universal pity. It was enough. With Jesus, to see was
+to compassionate, and to compassionate was to help. In the other
+instances of casting out demons, the method is an authoritative
+command, addressed not to the possessed, but to the alien personality
+that has seized on him, and we conclude that such was the method
+here. Jesus undoubtedly believed in demoniacal possession, if we can
+at all rely on the Gospel narratives; and it may be humbly suggested
+that there are dark depths in humanity, which had need to be fathomed
+more completely, before any one is warranted in dogmatically
+pronouncing that He was wrong in His diagnosis. There are ugly facts
+which should give pause to those who are inclined to say--'There are
+no demons, and if there were, they could not dominate a human
+consciousness.'
+
+But the effects of the miracle are emphasised more than itself. They
+are two, neither of them what might or should have been. The dumb
+man is not said to have used his recovered speech to thank his
+deliverer, nor is there any sign that he clung to Him, either for
+fear of being captured again or in passionate gratitude. It looks as
+if he selfishly bore away his blessing and cared nothing for its
+giver. That is very human, and we all are too often guilty of the
+same sin. Nor was the effect on the multitudes much better, for they
+were only struck with vulgar wonder, which had no moral quality in
+it and led to nothing. They saw 'the miracle,' that is, the
+wonderfulness of the act made some dint even on their minds, but
+these were either too fluid to retain the impression, or too hard to
+let it be deep, and so it soon filled up again. We have to think of
+Christ's deeds as 'signs,' not only as 'wonders,' or they will do
+little to draw us to Him. Wonder is a necessarily evanescent
+emotion, which may indeed set something better stirring in us, but
+is quite as likely to die barren.
+
+The Pharisees did not wonder, and did look into the phenomenon with
+sharp eyes; and in so far, they were in advance of the gaping
+multitudes. They were much too superior persons to be astonished at
+anything, and they had already settled on a formula which was
+delightfully easy of application, and had the further advantage of
+turning the miracles into evidences that the doer of them was a
+child of the Devil. It appears to have been a well-worked formula
+too, for it is found again in chap. xii. 24, and in Luke xi. 15, in
+the account of another cure of a dumb demoniac. It is possible that
+the incident now before us may be the same as this, but there is
+nothing improbable in the occurrence of such a case twice, nor in
+the repetition of what had become the commonplace of the Pharisaic
+polemic. But what a piercing example that explanation is of the
+blinding power of prejudice, determined to hold on to a foregone
+conclusion, and not to see the sun at noon! Jesus in league with
+'the prince of the devils'! And that was gravely said by religious
+authorities! They saw the loveliness of His perfect life, His gentle
+goodness, His self-forgetting love, His swift-springing pity, and
+they set it all down to His commerce with the Evil One. He was so
+good that He must be more than humanly bad.
+
+
+
+
+A CHRISTLIKE JUDGMENT OF MEN
+
+
+    'But when He saw the multitudes, He was moved with
+    compassion on them, because they fainted, and were
+    scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.'
+    --MATT. ix. 36.
+
+In the course of our Lord's wandering life of teaching and healing,
+there had naturally gathered around Him a large number of persons who
+followed Him from place to place, and we have here cast into a symbol
+the impression produced upon Him by their outward condition. That is
+to say, He sees them lying there weary, and footsore, and travel-stained.
+They have flung themselves down by the wayside. There is no leader or
+guide, no Joshua or director to order their march; they are a worn-out,
+tired, unregulated mob, and the sight smites upon His eye, and it
+smites upon His heart. He says to Himself, if I may venture to put
+words into His lips, 'There are a worse weariness, and a worse wandering,
+and a worse anarchy, and a worse disorder afflicting men than that poor
+mob of tired pedestrians shows.' Matthew, who was always fond of showing
+the links and connections between the Old Testament and the New, casts
+our Lord's impression of what He then saw into language borrowed from
+the prophecy of Ezekiel (ch. xxxiv.), which tells of a flock that is
+scattered in a dark and cloudy day, that is broken, and torn, and
+driven away. I venture to see in the text three points: (1) Christ
+teaching us how to look at men; (2) Christ teaching us how to feel at
+such a sight; and (3) Christ teaching us what to do with the feeling.
+'When He saw the multitude, He was moved with compassion, because they
+fainted and were scattered abroad.' 'Then He said unto His disciples,
+the harvest is plenteous, the labourers are few, pray ye the Lord of
+the harvest to send forth labourers unto the harvest.' And then there
+follows, 'And when He had called unto Him His twelve disciples, He gave
+them power against unclean spirits to cast them out.' There are, then,
+these three points;--just a word or two about each of them.
+
+I. Here we have our Lord teaching us how to look at men.
+
+The picture of my text is, of course, in its broad outlines, very
+clear and intelligible, but there may be a little difficulty as to
+the precise force of the language. The obscurity of it is in some
+degree reflected in the margin of our Bibles; so, perhaps, you will
+permit one word of an expository nature. The description of the
+flock, 'Because they fainted and were scattered abroad,' is couched
+in the original in a couple of words, one of which means properly
+'torn' or 'fainting,' according as one or other of two readings of
+the text is adopted, and the other means 'lying down.' Now, the
+former of these gives a very pathetic picture if we apply it to the
+individuals that made up the flock. We have then the image of the
+poor sheep that has lost its way, struggling through briars and
+thorns, getting out of them with its fleece all torn and hanging in
+strips dangling at its heels, or of it as lacerated by the beasts of
+the field to whom it is a prey. If we take the metaphor, as seems
+more probably to be intended, as applying not so much to the
+individuals as to the flock, then it comes to mean 'torn asunder,'
+'thrown apart,' and gives us the notion of anarchic confusion into
+which the flock comes if there be no shepherd to lead it. Then the
+other word, which our Bible translates 'were scattered abroad,'
+seems to mean more properly 'lying down,' and it gives the idea of
+the poor, wearied creature, after all its struggles and wanderings,
+utterly beaten and dejected, having lost its way, at its wits' end
+and resourceless, flinging itself down there in despair, and panting
+its timid life out anywhere where it finds itself. So it comes to be
+a picture of the utter weariness and hopelessness of all men's
+efforts apart from that Guide and Shepherd, who alone can lead them
+in the way. And then both of these miserable states, the laceration
+if you take the one explanation, the disintegration and casting
+apart if you take the other, the weariness and exhaustion, are
+traced to their source, they are 'as sheep having no shepherd.' He
+has gone, and so all this comes. With this explanation we may take
+the points of view that are thus suggested simply as they lie before
+us.
+
+First of all, notice how here, as always to Jesus Christ, the
+outward was nothing, except as a symbol and manifestation of the
+inward; how the thing that He saw in a man was not the external
+accidents of circumstance or position, for His true, clear gaze and
+His loving, wise heart went straight to the essence of the matter,
+and dealt with the man not according to what he might happen to be
+in the categories of earth, but to what he was in the categories of
+heaven. All the same to Him whether it was some poor harlot, or a
+rabbi; all the same to Him whether it was Pilate on the judgment-seat,
+or the penitent thief hanging at His side. These gauds and shows were
+nothing; sheer away He cut them all, and went down to the hidden heart
+of the man, and He allocated and ranged them according to that.
+Christian men and women, do you try to do the same thing, and to get
+rid of all these superficial veils and curtains with which we drape
+ourselves and attitudinise in the world, and to see men as Christ saw
+them, both in regard to your judgment of them, and in regard to your
+judgment of yourselves? 'I am a scholar and a wise man; a great thinker;
+a rich merchant; a man of rising importance and influence.' Very well;
+what does that matter? 'I am ignorant or a pauper'; be it so. Let us
+get below all that. The one question worth asking and worth answering
+is, 'How am I affected towards Him?' There are many temporary and
+local principles of arrangement and order among men; but they will
+all vanish some day, and there will be one regulating and arranging
+principle, and it is this: 'Do I love God in Jesus Christ, or do I
+not?' Oh! for myself, for yourself, and for all our outlook towards
+others, let us not forget that the inmost, deepest, hidden man of the
+heart is the man, and that all else is naught, and that its whole
+character is absolutely determined by its relation to Jesus Christ.
+
+But this is somewhat aside from my main purpose, which is rather
+briefly to expand the various phases which, as I have already
+suggested, are included in such an emblem. The first of them is
+this: Try to think for yourselves of the condition of humanity as
+apart from Christ--shepherdless. That old metaphor of a shepherd
+which comes out of the Old Testament is there sometimes used to
+indicate a prophet, and sometimes to indicate a king. I suppose we
+may put both of these uses together, as far as our present purposes
+are concerned; and this is what I want to insist upon. I dare say
+some people here will think it is very old-fashioned, very narrow in
+these broad and liberal days; but what I would say is this, that
+unless Jesus Christ is both Guide and Teacher, we have neither guide
+nor teacher but are shepherdless without Him. There are plenty of
+rulers. There was no lack of other authority in the days of His
+flesh. There were crowds of rabbis, guides, and directors. The life
+of the nation was throttled by the authorities that had planted
+themselves upon its back, and yet Christ saw that there were none of
+those who were fit for the work, or afforded the adequate guidance.
+And so it is, now and always. There have been hosts of men who have
+sought to impose their authority upon an era. Where is there one
+that has swayed passion, that has ruled hearts, that has impressed
+his own image on the will, that has made obedience an honour, and
+absolute, abject devotion to his command a very patent of nobility?
+Here, and nowhere beside. Besides that Christ there is no ruler
+amongst men who can come to them and say to his servant, 'Go,' and
+he goeth, and to this man, 'Do this,' and he doeth it. Obedience to
+any besides is treason against the dignity of our own nature;
+disobedience to Him is both treason against our nature and blasphemy
+against God. 'Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ, Thou art the
+everlasting Son of the Father.' _There_ is the deepest reason
+for His rule.
+
+And as for 'teacher,' whom are we to put up beside Him? Is it to be
+these dim figures of religious reformers that are gliding,
+ghostlike, to their doom, being wrapped round and round about by
+ever thicker and thicker folds of the inevitable oblivion that
+swallows all that is human? Brethren, by common consent it is Christ
+or nobody. Aaron dies upon Hor; Moses dies upon Pisgah; the
+teachers, the leaders, the guides, the under-shepherds, pass away
+one by one; and if this Christ be but a Man and a Teacher, He too
+will pass away. Shall I be thought very blind to the signs of the
+times if I say that I see no sign of His dominion being exhausted,
+of His influence being diminished, of His guidance being capable of
+being dispensed with? You may say, 'Oh, we do not want any teacher
+or guide; we do not want a shepherd.' I am not going to enter upon
+that question now at all, except just to say this, that the instincts
+of humanity rise up in contradiction, as it seems to me, of that cold
+and cheerless creed, and that we have this fact staring us in the
+face, that men are made capable of a devotion and submission the
+most passionate, the most absolute, the most mighty force in their
+lives, to human guides and ensamples, and that it is all wasted unless
+there be somewhere a Man, our Brother, who shall come to us and say,
+'All that ever went before Me are thieves and robbers; I am the Good
+Shepherd; follow Me, and ye shall not walk in darkness,' 'He saw the
+multitudes as sheep having no shepherd.'
+
+Still further, take that other phase of the metaphor which, as I
+suggested, the text includes, namely, the idea of disintegration,
+the rending apart of social ties and union, unless there be the
+centre of unity in the shepherd of the flock. 'I will smite the
+shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered,' says the old prophecy.
+Of course, for what is there to hold them together unless it be
+their guide and their director? So we are brought face to face with
+this plain prosaic rendering of the metaphor--that but for the centre
+of unity provided for mankind in the person and work of Jesus Christ,
+there is no satisfaction of the deep hunger for unity and society
+with which in that case God would have cursed mankind. For whilst
+there are many other bonds most true, most blessed, God-given, and
+mighty, such as that of the sacred unity of the family, and that of
+the nation and many others of which we need not speak, yet all these
+are constantly being disintegrated by the unresting waves of that
+gnawing sea of selfishness, if I may so say, which, like the waters
+upon our eastern coasts, eats and eats for ever at the base of the
+cliffs, so that society in all its forms, whether it be built upon
+identity of opinion, which is perhaps the shabbiest bond of all, or
+whether it be built upon purposes of mutual action, which is a great
+deal better, or whether it be built upon hatred of other people,
+which is the modern form of patriotism, or whether it be built upon
+the domestic affections, which are the purest and highest of all--all
+the other bonds of society, such as creeds, schools, nations,
+associations, leagues, families, denominations, all go sooner or
+later. The base is eaten out of them, because every man that belongs
+to them has in him that tyrannous, dominant self, which is ever
+seeking to assert its own supremacy. Here is Babel, with its
+half-finished tower, built on slime; and there is Pentecost, with
+its great Spirit; here is the confusion, there is the unifying; here
+the disintegration, there the power that draws them all together.
+'They were scattered abroad as sheep having no shepherd,' and one
+looks out over the world and sees great tracts of country and long
+dismal generations of time, in which the very thought of unity and
+charity and human bonds knitting men together has faded from the
+consciousness of the race, and then one turns to blessed, sweet,
+simple words that say, 'there shall be one flock and one shepherd,'
+and 'I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.'
+Drawing thus, He will draw them into the eternal, mighty bond of
+union that shall never be broken, and is all the more precious and
+all the more true because it is not a unity like the vulgar unities
+that express themselves in external associations. You know, of
+course or if you do not know it will be a good thing that you should
+know, that that verse in John's Gospel which I have quoted has been
+terribly mangled by a little slip of our translators. Christ said,
+'Other sheep I must bring which are not of this fold,' the fold
+being the external unity of the Jewish church--an enclosure made of
+hurdles that you can stick in the ground. 'I shall bring them,' says
+He, 'and there shall be one'--(not, as our Bible says, 'fold,'--but
+something far better)--'there shall be one flock'; which becomes a
+unity not by wattling round about it on the outside, but by a
+shepherd standing in the middle. 'There shall be one flock and one
+shepherd'--a unity which is neither the destruction of the variety of
+the churches, nor the crushing of men, nationalities, and types of
+character all down into one dead level beneath the heel of a conqueror,
+but the unity which subsists in the many operations of the one Spirit,
+and is expressed by all the forms of the one inspired grace.
+
+Then passing by altogether the other idea which I said was only
+doubtfully suggested by the words--namely, that of laceration and
+wounding--let me say a word about the last of the aspects of
+humanity when Christless, which is set forth in this text, and that
+is, the dejected weariness arising from the fruitless wanderings
+wherewith men are cursed. As a verse in the Book of Proverbs puts
+it, 'The labour of the foolish wearieth every one of them, because
+they know not how to go to the city.' Putting aside the metaphor,
+the plain truth which it embodies is just this, that there is in all
+men's souls a deep longing after peace and rest, after goodness and
+beauty and truth, and that all the strenuous efforts to satisfy
+these longings, either by social reforms or by individual culture
+and discipline, are pathetically vain and profitless, because there
+is none to guide them. The sheep go wandering in any direction, and
+with no goal; and wherever one has jumped, a dozen others will go
+after him, and so they are wearied out long before the day's journey
+is ended, and they never reach the goal. Put that into less vivid,
+and, therefore, as people generally suppose, more accurate,
+language, and it is a statement of the universal law of human
+history that, after any epoch of great aspirations and strong
+excitement of the noblest parts of human nature, there has always
+come a reaction of corruption and a collapse from weariness. What
+did 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' end in? A guillotine. What do
+all similar epochs end in, when they do not take the Christ to march
+ahead of them? An utter disgust and disillusion, and a despair of
+all progress. That is why wild revolutionists in their youth are
+always obstinate Conservatives in their old age. The wandering sheep
+are footsore, and they fling themselves down by the wayside. That is
+why heathenism presents to us the aspect that it does. There is
+nothing about it that seems to me more tragical than the weary
+languor that besets it. Do you ever think of the depth of pathetic,
+tragic meaning that there is in that verse in one of the Psalms,
+'Such as sit in darkness and in the shadow of death'? There they
+sit, because there is no hope in rising and moving. They would have
+to grope if they arose, and so with folded hands they sit like the
+Buddha, which one great section of heathenism has taken as being the
+true emblem and ideal of the noblest life. Absolute passivity lays
+hold upon them all--torpor, stagnation, no dream of advance or
+progress. The sheep are dejected, despairing, anarchic, disintegrated,
+lacerated, guideless, and shepherdless--away from Christ. So He
+thought them. God give you and me grace, dear brethren, to see, as
+Christ saw, the condition of humanity and our own apart from Him.
+
+II. And now let me say a word in the next place as to the second
+movement of His mind and heart here. He teaches us not only how to
+think of men, but how that sight should touch us.
+
+'He was moved with compassion on them when He saw the multitude'--with
+the eye of a god, I was going to say, and the heart of a man. Pity
+belongs to the idea of divinity; compassion belongs to the idea of
+divinity incarnate; and the motion that passed across His heart is the
+motion that I would seek may pass, with its sweet and healing breath,
+across yours and mine. The right emotion for a Christian looking on
+the Christless crowds is pity, not aversion; pity, not anger; pity, not
+curiosity; pity, not indifference. How many of us walk the streets of
+the towns in which our lot is cast, and never know one touch of that
+emotion, when we look at these people here in England torn, and anarchic,
+and wearied, and shepherdless, within sound of our psalm-singing in
+our chapels? Why, on any Sunday there are thousands of men and women
+standing about the streets who, we may be sure, have not seen the
+inside of a church or a chapel since they were married, and that not
+one in five hundred of all the good people that are going with their
+prayer-books and hymn-books to church and chapel ever think anything
+about them as they pass them by; and some of them, perhaps, if they
+come to any especially disreputable one, will gather up their skirts
+and keep on the safe side of the pavement, and there an end of it. But
+Jesus Christ had no aversions. His white purity was a great deal nearer
+to the blackness of the woman that was a sinner, than was the leprous
+whiteness of the whited sepulchre of the self-righteous Pharisee. He
+had neither aversion, nor anger, nor indifference.
+
+And, if I might venture to touch upon another matter, compassion and
+not curiosity is an especial lesson for the day to the more thoughtful
+and cultivated amongst our congregations. I have just said that the
+appropriate Christian feeling in contemplating the state of the sheep
+without the Shepherd is compassion, not curiosity. That reminder is
+particularly needful in view of the prominence to-day of investigations
+into the new science of Comparative Religion. I speak with most
+unfeigned respect of it and of its teachers, and gratefully hail the
+wonderful light that it is casting upon ideas underlying the strange
+and often savage and obscene rites of heathenism; but it has a side of
+danger in it against which I would warn you all, especially young,
+reading men and women. The time has not yet come when we can afford to
+let such investigations be our principal occupation in the face of
+heathenism. If idolatry was dead we could afford to do that, but it
+is alive--the more's the pity; and it is not only a curious instance
+of the workings of man's intelligence, and a great apocalypse of
+earlier stages of society, but, besides that, it is a lie that is
+deceiving and damning our brethren, and we have got to kill it first
+and dissect it afterwards. So I say, do not only think of heathenism
+in its various forms as a subject for speculation and analysis; as
+much as you like of that, only do not let it drive out the other
+thing, and after you have tried to understand it, then come back to
+my text, 'He was moved with compassion.' And so pity, and neither
+anger, nor aversion, nor curiosity, nor indifference is what I urge
+as the Christian emotion.
+
+III. Let us take this text as teaching us how Christ would have us
+act, after such emotion built and based upon such a look.
+
+It is perfectly legitimate, although it is by no means the highest
+motive, to appeal to feeling as a stimulus to action. We have a
+right to base our urging of Christian men and women to missionary
+work either at home or abroad, upon the ground of the condition of
+the men to whom the Gospel has to be carried. I know that if taken
+alone it is a very inadequate motive. I believe that any failure
+that may be manifest in the interest of Christian people in
+missionary work is largely traceable to the blunder we have made in
+dwelling on superficial motives more than we ought to have done, in
+proportion to the degree in which we have dwelt on the deepest. We
+have been gathering the surface-water instead of going right down to
+the green sand, to which the artesian well must be sunk if the
+stream is to come up without pumping or wasting. So I say that a
+deeper reason than the sorrow and darkness of the heathen is--'the
+love of Christ constraineth me'; but yet the first is a legitimate
+one. Only remember this, that Bishop Butler taught us long ago, that
+if you excite emotions which are intended to lead to action, and the
+action does not follow, the excitation of the emotion without its
+appropriate action makes the heart a great deal harder than it was
+before. That is why it is playing with edged tools to speak so much
+to our Christian audiences, as we sometimes hear done, about the
+condition of the heathen as a stimulus to missionary work. If a man
+does not respond and do something, some crust of callousness and
+coldness comes over his own heart. You cannot indulge in the luxury
+of emotion which you do not use to drive your spindles, without
+doing yourselves harm. It is never intended to be blown off as waste
+steam and allowed to vanish into the air. It is meant to be conserved
+and guided, and to have something done with it. Therefore beware of
+sentimental contemplation of the sad condition of the shepherdless
+sheep which does not move you to do anything to help them.
+
+One word more. Take my text as a guide to the form of action into
+which we are to cast the emotions that should spring from this gaze
+upon the world. I will only name three points. Christ opened His
+mouth and spake to them, and taught them many things; Christ said to
+His disciples, 'Pray ye the Lord of the harvest'; and Christ sent
+out His apostles to preach the Kingdom. These three things in their
+bearing upon us are--personal work, prayer, help to send forth
+Christ's messengers. There is nothing like personal work for making
+a man understand and feel the miseries of his fellows. Christian men
+and women, it is your first business everywhere to proclaim the name
+of Jesus Christ, and no prayers and no subscriptions absolve you
+from that. In this army a man cannot buy himself off and send in a
+substitute at the cost of an annual guinea. If Christ sent the
+apostles, do you hold up the hands of the apostles' successors, and
+so by God's grace you and I may help on the coming of that blessed
+day when there shall be one flock and one Shepherd, and when 'the
+Lamb that is in the midst of the throne'--for the Shepherd is
+Himself a lamb--'shall feed them and lead them, and God shall wipe
+away all tears from their eyes.'
+
+
+
+
+THE OBSCURE APOSTLES
+
+
+    'These twelve Jesus sent forth.'--MATT. x. 5.
+
+And half of 'these twelve' are never heard of as doing any work for
+Christ. Peter and James and John we know; the other James and Judas
+have possibly left us short letters; Matthew gives us a Gospel; and
+of all the rest no trace is left. Some of them are never so much as
+named again, except in the list at the beginning of the Acts of the
+Apostles; and none of them except the three who 'seemed to be pillars'
+appear to have been of much importance in the early diffusion of the
+Gospel.
+
+There are many instructive and interesting points in reference to
+the Apostolate. The number of twelve, in obvious allusion to the
+tribes of Israel, proclaims the eternal certainty of the divine
+promises to His people, and the dignity of the New Testament Church
+as their true heir. The ties of relationship which knit so many of
+the apostles together, the order of the names varying, but within
+certain limits, in the different catalogues, the uncultivated
+provincial rudeness of most of them, would all afford material for
+important reflections. But, perhaps, not the least important fact
+about the Apostolate is that one to which we have referred, which
+like the names of countries on the map, escapes notice because it is
+'writ' so 'large'--namely, the small place which the apostles as a
+body fill in the subsequent narrative, and the entire oblivion into
+which so many of them pass from the moment of their appointment.
+
+It is to that fact that we wish to turn attention now. It may
+suggest some considerations worth pondering, and among other things,
+may help to show the exaggeration of the functions of the office by
+the opposite extremes of priests and rationalists. The one school
+makes it the depository of exclusive supernatural powers; the other
+regards it as a master-stroke of organisation, to which the early
+rapid growth of Christianity was largely due. The facts seem to show
+that it was neither.
+
+I. The first thought which this peculiar and unexpected silence
+suggests is of the True Worker in the Church's progress.
+
+The way in which the New Testament drops these apostles is of a piece
+with the whole tone of the Bible. Throughout, men are introduced into
+its narratives and allowed to slip out with well-marked indifference.
+Nowhere do we get more vivid, penetrating portraiture, but nowhere do
+we see such carelessness about following the fortunes or completing the
+biographies even of those who have filled the largest space in its pages.
+
+Recall, for example, the way in which the New Testament deals with
+'the very chiefest' apostles, the illustrious triad of Peter, James,
+and John. The first escapes from prison; we see him hammering at
+Mary's door in the grey of the morning, and after brief, eager talk
+with his friends he vanishes to hide in 'another place,' and is no
+more heard of, except for a moment in the great council, held in
+Jerusalem, about the admission of Gentiles to the Church. The second
+of the three is killed off in a parenthesis. The third is only seen
+twice in the Book of the Acts, as a silent companion of Peter at a
+miracle and before the Sanhedrim. Remember how Paul is left in his
+own hired house, within sight of trial and sentence, and neither the
+original writer of the book nor any later hand thought it worth
+while to add three lines to tell the world what became of him. A
+strange way to write history, and a most imperfect narrative, surely!
+Yes, unless there be some peculiarity in the purpose of the book,
+which explains this cold-blooded, inartistic, and tantalising habit
+of letting men leap upon the stage as if they had dropped from the
+clouds, and vanish from it as abruptly as if they had fallen through
+a trap-door.
+
+Such a peculiarity there is. One of the three to whom we have
+referred has explained it in the words with which he closes his
+gospel, words which might stand for the motto of the whole book,
+'These are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Son of
+God.' The true purpose is not to speak of men except in so far as
+they 'bore witness to that light' and were illuminated for a moment
+by contact with Him. From the beginning the true 'Hero' of the Bible
+is God; its theme is His self-revelation culminating for evermore in
+the Man Jesus. All other men interest the writers only as they are
+subsidiary or antagonistic to that revelation. As long as that
+breath blows through them they are music; else they are but common
+reeds. Men are nothing except as instruments and organs of God. He
+is all, and His whole fulness is in Jesus Christ. Christ is the sole
+worker in the progress of His Church. That is the teaching of all
+the New Testament. The thought is expressed in the deepest, simplest
+form in His own unapproachable words, unfathomable as they are in
+their depth of meaning, and inexhaustible in their power to
+strengthen and to cheer: 'I am the vine, ye are the branches,
+without Me ye can do nothing.' It shapes the whole treatment of the
+history of the so-called 'Acts of the Apostles,' which by its very
+first sentence proclaims itself to be the Acts of the ascended
+Jesus, 'the former treatise' being declared to have had for its
+subject 'all that Jesus _began_ to do and teach while on earth,
+and this treatise being manifestly the continuance of the same
+theme, and the record of the heavenly activity of the Lord. So the
+thought runs through all the book: 'The help that is done on earth,
+He does it all Himself.'
+
+_So_ let us think of Him and of His relation to us as well as
+to that early Church. His continuous energy is pouring down on us if
+we will accept it. _In_ us, _for_ us, _by_ us He works. 'My Father worketh
+hitherto, said He when here, 'and I work'; and now, exalted on high,
+He has passed into that divine repose, which is at the same time the
+most energetic divine activity. He is all in all to His people. He is
+all their strength, wisdom, and righteousness. They are but the clouds
+irradiated by the sun and bathed in its brightness; He is the light
+which flames in their grey mist and turns it to a glory. They are but
+the belts and cranks and wheels; He is the power. They are but the
+channel, muddy and dry; He is the flashing life that fills it and makes
+it a joy. They are the body; He is the soul dwelling in every part to
+save it from corruption and give movement and warmth.
+
+  'Thou art the organ, whose full breath is thunder;
+   I am the keys, beneath thy fingers pressed.'
+
+If this be true, how it should deliver us from all overestimate of
+men, to which our human affections and our feeble faith tempt us so
+sorely! There _is_ One man, and One man only, whose biography
+is a 'Gospel, who owes nothing to circumstances, and who originates
+the power which He wields; One who is a new beginning, and has
+changed the whole current of human history, One to whom we are right
+to bring offerings of the gold, and incense, and myrrh of our
+hearts, and wills, and minds, which it is blasphemy and degradation
+to lay at the feet of any others. We may utterly love, trust, and
+obey Jesus Christ. We dare not do so to any other. The inscription
+written over the whole book, that it may be transcribed on our whole
+nature, is, 'No man any more save Jesus only.'
+
+If this thought be true, what confidence it ought to give us as we
+think of the tasks and fortunes of the Church! If we think only of the
+difficulties and of the enormous work before us, so disproportioned
+to our weak powers, we shall be disposed to agree with our enemies,
+who talk as if Christianity was on the point of perishing, as they
+have been doing ever since it began. But the outlook is wonderfully
+different when we take Christ into the account. We are very apt to
+leave Him out of the reckoning. But one man with Christ to back him is
+always in the majority. He flings his sword clashing into one scale,
+and it weighs down all that is in the other. The walls are very lofty
+and strong, and the besiegers few and weak, badly armed, and quite
+unfit for the assault; but if we lift our eyes high enough, we, too,
+shall see a man with a drawn sword over against us, and our hearts
+may leap up in assured confidence of victory as we recognise in Him
+the Captain of the Lord's Host, who has already overcome, and will
+make us valiant in fight and more than conquerors.
+
+When conscious of our own weakness, and tempted to think of our task
+as heavy, or when complacent in our own power, and tempted to regard
+our task as easy, let us think of His ever-present work in and for His
+people, till it braces us for all duty, and rebukes our easy-going
+idleness. Surely from that thought of the active, ascended Christ may
+come to many of His slothful followers the pleading question, as from
+His own lips, 'Dost thou not care that thou hast left me to serve
+alone?' Surely to us all it should bring inspiration and strength,
+courage and confidence, deliverance from man, and elevation above the
+reverence of blind impersonal forces. Surely we may all lay to heart
+the grand lesson that union with Him is our only strength, and oblivion
+of ourselves our highest wisdom. Surely he has best learned his true
+place and the worth of Jesus Christ, who abides with unmoved humility
+at His feet, and, like the lonely, lowly forerunner, puts away all
+temptations to self-assertion while joyfully accepting it as the law
+of his life to
+
+  'Fade in the light of the planet he loves,
+   To fade in his light and to die.'
+
+Blessed is he who is glad to say,' He must increase, I must
+decrease!'
+
+II. This same silence of Scripture as to so many of the apostles may
+be taken as suggesting what the real work of these delegated workers
+was.
+
+It certainly seems very strange that, if they were the possessors of
+such extraordinary powers as the theory of Apostolic Succession
+implies, we should hear so little of these in the narratives. The
+silence of Scripture about them goes a long way to discredit such
+ideas, while it is entirely accordant with a more modest view of the
+apostolic office.
+
+What was an apostle's function during the life of Christ? One of the
+evangelists divides it into three portions: to be with Jesus; to
+preach the kingdom; to cast out devils and to heal. There is nothing
+in these offices peculiar to them. The seventy had miraculous powers
+too, and some at least were our Lord's companions and preachers of
+His kingdom who were simple disciples. What was an apostle's
+function after the resurrection? Peter's words, on proposing the
+election of a new apostle, lay down the duty as simply 'to bear
+witness' of that resurrection. They were not supernatural channels
+of mysterious grace, not lords over God's heritage, not even leaders
+of the Church, but bearers of a testimony to the great historical
+fact, on the acceptance of which all belief in an historical Christ
+depended then and depends now. Each of the greater of the apostles
+is penetrated with the same thought. Paul disclaims anything beside
+in his 'Not I, but the grace of God in me.' Peter thrusts the
+question at the staring crowd, 'Why look ye on us as though by
+_our_ power or holiness _we_ had made this man to walk?' John, in his
+calm way, tells his children at Ephesus, 'Ye need not that any man
+teach you.'
+
+Such an idea of the apostolic office is far more reasonable and
+accordant with Scripture than a figment about unexampled powers and
+authority in the Church. It accounts for the qualifications as
+stated in the same address of Peter's, which merely secure the
+validity of their testimony. The one thing that _must_ be found
+in an apostle was that he should have been in familiar intercourse
+with Christ during his earthly life, both before and after His
+resurrection, in order that he might be able to say, 'I knew Him
+well; I know that He died; I know that He rose again; I saw Him go
+up to heaven.' For such a work there was no need for men of
+commanding power. Plain, simple, honest men who had the requisite
+eye-witness were sufficient. The guidance and the missionary work of
+the Church need not necessarily be in their hands, and, in fact,
+does not seem to have been. In harmony with this view of the office
+and its requisites, we find that Paul rests the validity of his
+apostolate on the fact that 'He was seen of me also,' and regards
+that vision as his true appointment which left him not 'one whit
+behind the very chiefest apostles.' Miraculous gifts indeed they
+had, and miraculous gifts they imparted; but in both instances
+others shared these powers with them. It was no apostle who laid his
+hands on the blinded Saul in that house in Damascus and said,
+'Receive the Holy Ghost.' An apostle stood by passive and wondering
+when the Holy Ghost fell on Cornelius and his comrades. In reality
+apostolic succession is absurd, because there is nothing to succeed
+to, except what cannot be transmitted, personal knowledge of the
+reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. To establish that fact
+as indubitable history is to lay the foundation of the Christian
+Church, and the eleven plain men, who did that, need no
+superstitious mist around them to magnify their greatness.
+
+In so far as any succession to them or any devolution of their office
+is possible, all Christian men inherit it, for to bear witness of the
+living power of the risen Lord is still the office and honour of
+every believing soul. It is still true that the sharpest weapon which
+any man can wield for Christ is the simple adducing of his own personal
+experience. 'That which we have seen and handled we declare' is still
+the best form into which our preaching can be cast. And such a voice
+every man and woman who has found the sweetness and the power of Christ
+filling their own souls, is bound--rather let us say, is privileged--to
+lift up. 'This honour have all the saints.' Christ is the true worker,
+and all our work is but to proclaim Him, and what He has done and is
+doing for ourselves and for all men.
+
+III. We may gather, too, the lesson of how often faithful work is
+unrecorded and forgotten.
+
+No doubt those apostles who have no place in the history toiled
+honestly and did their Lord's commands, and oblivion has swallowed
+it all. Bartholomew and 'Lebbaeus, whose surname was Thaddaeus,' and
+the rest of them, have no place in the record, and their obscure
+work is faded, faithful and good as certainly it was.
+
+So it will be sooner or later with us all. For most of us, our
+service has to be unnoticed and unknown, and the memory of our poor
+work will live perhaps for a year or two in the hearts of some few
+who loved us, but will fade wholly when they follow us into the
+silent land. Well, be it so; we shall sleep none the less sweetly,
+though none be talking about us over our heads. The world has a
+short memory, and, as the years go on, the list that it has to
+remember grows so crowded that it is harder and harder to find room
+to write a new name on it, or to read the old. The letters on the
+tombstones are soon erased by the feet that tramp across the
+churchyard. All that matters very little. The notoriety of our work
+is of no consequence. The earnestness and accuracy with which we
+strike our blow is all-important; but it matters nothing how far it
+echoes. It is not the heaven of heavens to be talked about, nor does
+a man's life consist in the abundance of newspaper or other
+paragraphs about him. 'The love of fame' is, no doubt, sometimes
+found in 'minds' otherwise 'noble,' but in itself is very much the
+reverse of noble. We shall do our work best, and be saved from much
+festering anxiety which corrupts our purest service and fevers our
+serenest thoughts, if we once fairly make up our minds to working
+unnoticed and unknown, and determine that, whether our post be a
+conspicuous or an obscure one, we shall fill it to the utmost of our
+power--careless of praise or censure, because our judgment is with
+our God; careless whether we are unknown or well known, because we
+are known altogether to Him.
+
+The magnitude of our work in men's eyes is as little important as
+the noise of it. Christ gave all the apostles their tasks--to some
+of them to found the Gentile churches, to some of them to leave to
+all generations precious teaching, to some of them none of these
+things. What then? Were the Peters and the Johns more highly
+favoured than the others? Was their work greater in His sight? Not
+so. To Him all service done from the same motive is the same, and
+His measure of excellence is the quantity of love and spiritual
+force in our deeds, not the width of the area over which they
+spread. An estuary that goes wandering over miles of shallows may
+have less water in it, and may creep more languidly, than the
+torrent that thunders through some narrow gorge. The deeds that
+stand highest on the records in heaven are not those which we
+vulgarly call great. Many 'a cup of cold water only' will be found
+to have been rated higher there than jewelled golden chalices
+brimming with rare wines. God's treasures, where He keeps His
+children's gifts, will be like many a mother's secret store of
+relics of her children, full of things of no value, what the world
+calls 'trash,' but precious in His eyes for the love's sake that was
+in them.
+
+All service which is done from the same motive and with the same
+spirit is of the same worth in His eyes. It does not matter whether
+you have the gospel in a penny Testament printed on thin paper with
+black ink and done up in cloth, or in an illuminated missal glowing
+in gold and colour, painted with loving care on fair parchment, and
+bound in jewelled ivory. And so it matters little about the material
+or the scale on which we express our devotion and our aspirations;
+all depends on what we copy, not on the size of the canvas on which,
+or on the material in which, we copy it. 'Small service is true
+service while it lasts,' and the unnoticed insignificant servants
+may do work every whit as good and noble as the most widely known,
+to whom have been intrusted by Christ tasks that mould the ages.
+
+IV. Finally, we may add that forgotten work is remembered, and
+unrecorded names are recorded above.
+
+The names of these almost anonymous apostles have no place in the
+records of the advancement of the Church or of the development of
+Christian doctrine. They drop out of the narrative after the list in
+the first chapter of the Acts. But we do hear of them once more. In
+that last vision of the great city which the seer beheld descending
+from God, we read that in its 'foundations were the names of the
+twelve apostles of the Lamb.' All were graven there--the inconspicuous
+names carved on no record of earth, as well as the familiar ones cut
+deep in the rock to be seen of all men for ever. At the least that
+grand image may tell us that when the perfect state of the Church is
+realised, the work which these men did when their testimony laid its
+foundation, will be for ever associated with their names. Unrecorded
+on earth, they are written in heaven.
+
+The forgotten work and its workers are remembered by Christ. His
+faithful heart and all-seeing eye keep them ever in view. The world,
+and the Church whom these humble men helped, may forget, yet He will
+not forget. From whatever muster-roll of benefactors and helpers
+their names may be absent, they will be in His list. The Apostle
+Paul, in his Epistle to the Philippians, has a saying in which his
+delicate courtesy is beautifully conspicuous, where he half apologises
+for not sending his greetings 'to others my fellow-workers' by name,
+and reminds them that, however their names may be unwritten in his
+letter, they have been inscribed by a mightier hand on a better page,
+and 'are in the Lamb's book of life.' It matters very little from what
+record ours may be absent so long as they are found there. Let us
+rejoice that, though we may live obscure and die forgotten, we may
+have our names written on the breastplate of our High Priest as He
+stands in the Holy Place, the breastplate which lies close to His
+heart of love, and is girded to His arm of power.
+
+The forgotten and unrecorded work lives, too, in the great whole. The
+fruit of our labour may perhaps not be separable from that of others,
+any more than the sowers can go into the reaped harvest-field and
+identify the gathered ears which have sprung from the seed that they
+sowed, but it is there all the same; and whosoever may be unable to
+pick out each man's share in the blessed total outcome, the Lord of
+the harvest knows, and His accurate proportionment of individual
+reward to individual service will not mar the companionship in the
+general gladness, when 'he that soweth and he that reapeth shall
+rejoice together.'
+
+The forgotten work will live, too, in blessed results to the doers.
+Whatever of recognition and honour we may miss here, we cannot be
+robbed of the blessing to ourselves, in the perpetual influence on
+our own character, of every piece of faithful even if imperfect
+service. Habits are formed, emotions deepened, principles confirmed,
+capacities enlarged by every deed done for Christ, and these make an
+over-measure of reward here, and in their perfect form hereafter are
+heaven. Nothing done for Him is ever wasted. 'Thou shalt find it
+after many days.' We are all writing our lives' histories here, as
+if with one of these 'manifold writers'--a black blank page beneath
+the flimsy sheet on which we write, but presently the black page
+will be taken away, and the writing will stand out plain on the page
+behind that we did not see. Life is the filmy, unsubstantial page on
+which our pen rests; the black page is death; and the page beneath
+is that indelible transcript of our earthly actions, which we shall
+find waiting for us to read, with shame and confusion of face, or
+with humble joy, in another world.
+
+Then let us do our work for Christ, not much careful whether it be
+greater or smaller, obscure or conspicuous; assured that whoever
+forgets us and it, He will remember, and however our names may be
+unrecorded on earth, they will be written in heaven, and confessed
+by Him before His Father and the holy angels.
+
+
+
+
+CHRIST'S CHARGE TO HIS HERALDS
+
+
+    'These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them,
+    saying, do not into the way of the Gentiles, and into
+    any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: 6. But go
+    rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. 7. And
+    as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at
+    hand. 8. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the
+    dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely
+    give. 9. Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in
+    your purses, 10. Nor scrip for your journey, neither
+    two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves: for the
+    workman is worthy of his meat. 11. And into whatsoever
+    city or town ye shall enter, enquire who in it is
+    worthy: and there abide till ye go thence. 12. And when
+    ye come into an house, salute it. 13. And if the house
+    be worthy, let your peace come upon it: but if it be
+    not worthy, let your peace return to you. 14. And
+    whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words,
+    when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the
+    dust of your feet. 15. Verily I say unto you, It shall
+    be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in
+    the day of judgment, than for that city. 16. Behold, I
+    send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye
+    therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.'
+    --Matt. x. 5-16.
+
+The letter of these instructions to the apostles has been abrogated
+by Christ, both in reference to the scope of, and the equipment for,
+their mission (Matt. xxviii. 19; Luke xxii. 36). The spirit of them
+remains as the perpetual obligation of all Christian workers, and
+every Christian should belong to that class. Some direct
+evangelistic work ought to be done by every believer, and in doing
+it he will find no better directory than this charge to the
+apostles.
+
+I. We have, first, the apostles' mission in its sphere and manner
+(vs. 5-8). They are told where to go and what to do there. Mark that
+the negative prohibition precedes the positive injunction, as if the
+apostles were already so imbued with the spirit of universalism that
+they would probably have overpassed the bounds which for the present
+were needful. The restriction was transient. It continued in the
+line of divine limitation of the sphere of Revelation which confined
+itself to the Jew, in order that through him it might reach the
+world. That method could not be abandoned till the Jew himself had
+destroyed it by rejecting Christ. Jesus still clung to it. Even when
+the commission was widened to 'all the world,' Paul went 'to the Jew
+first,' till he too was taught by uniform failure that Israel was
+fixed in unbelief.
+
+How tenderly our Lord designates the nation as 'the lost sheep of
+the house of Israel'! He is still influenced by that compassion
+which the sight of the multitudes had moved in Him (chap. ix. 36).
+Lost indeed, wandering with torn fleece, and lying panting, in
+ignorance of their pasture and their Shepherd, they are yet 'sheep,'
+and they belong to that chosen seed, sprung from so venerable
+ancestors, and heirs of so glorious promises. Clear sight of, and
+infinite pity for, men's miseries, must underlie all apostolic
+effort.
+
+The work to be done is twofold--a glad truth is to be proclaimed,
+gracious deeds of power are to be done. How blessed must be the kingdom,
+the forerunners of which are miracles of healing and life-giving! If
+the heralds can do these, what will not the King be able to do? If such
+hues attend the dawn, how radiant will be the noontide! Note 'as ye
+go,' indicating that they were travelling evangelists, and were to
+speak as they went, and go when they had spoken. The road was to be
+their pulpit, and each man they met their audience. What a different
+world it would be if Christians carried their message with them _so_!
+
+'Freely ye have received'; namely, in the first application of the
+words, the message of the coming kingdom and the power to work
+miracles. But the force of the injunction, as applied to us, is even
+more soul-subduing, as our gift is greater, and the freedom of its
+bestowal should evoke deeper gratitude. The deepest springs of the
+heart's love are set flowing by the undeserved, unpurchased gift of
+God, which contains in itself both the most tender and mighty motive
+for self-forgetting labour, and the pattern for Christian service.
+How can one who has received that gift keep it to himself? How can
+he sell what he got for nothing? 'Freely give'--the precept forbids
+the seeking of personal profit or advantage from preaching the
+gospel, and so makes a sharp test of our motives; and it also
+forbids clogging the gift with non-essential conditions, and so
+makes a sharp test of our methods.
+
+II. The prohibition to make gain out of the message, serves as a
+transition to the directions as to equipment. The apostles were to
+go as they stood; for the command is, '_Get_ you no gold,' etc.
+It has been already noted that these prohibitions were abrogated by
+Jesus in view of His departure, and the world-wide mission of the
+Church. But the spirit of them is not abrogated. Note that the
+descending value of the metals named makes an ascending stringency
+in the prohibition. Not even copper money is to be taken. The
+'wallet' was a leather satchel or bag, used by shepherds and others
+to carry a little food; sustenance, then, was also to be left
+uncared for. Dress, too, was to be limited to that in wear; no
+change of inner robe nor a spare pair of shoes was to encumber them,
+nor even a spare staff. If any of them had one in his hand, he was
+to take it (Mark vi. 8). The command was meant to lift the apostles
+above suspicion, to make them manifestly disinterested, to free them
+from anxiety about earthly things, that their message might absorb
+their thoughts and efforts, and to give room for the display of
+Christ's power to provide. It had a promise wrapped in it. He who
+forbade them to provide for themselves thereby pledged Himself to
+take care of them. 'The labourer is worthy of his food.' They may be
+sure of subsistence, and are not to wish for more.
+
+All this has a distinct bearing on modern church arrangements. On
+the one hand, it vindicates the right of those who preach the gospel
+to live of the gospel, and sets any payments to them on the right
+footing, as not being charity or generosity, but the discharge of a
+debt. On the other hand, it enjoins on preachers and others who are
+paid for service not to serve for pay, not to be covetous of large
+remuneration, and to take care that no taint of greed for money
+shall mar their work, but that their conduct may confirm their words
+when they say with Paul, 'We seek not yours, but you.'
+
+III. The conduct required from, and the reception met with by, the
+messengers come next. Christ first enjoins discretion and
+discrimination of character, so far as possible. The messenger of
+the kingdom is not to be mixed up with disreputable people, lest the
+message should suffer. The principle of his choice of a home is to
+be, not position, comfort, or the like, but 'worthiness'; that is,
+predisposition to receive the message. However poor the chamber in
+the house of such, there is the apostle to settle himself. 'If ye
+have judged me to be faithful, come into my house,' said Lydia. The
+less Christ's messengers are at home with Christ's neglecters, the
+calmer their own hearts, and the more potent their message. They
+give the lie to it, if they voluntarily choose as their associates
+those to whom their dearest convictions are idle. Christian charity
+does not blind to distinctions of character. A little common sense
+in reading these will save many a scandal, and much weakening of
+influence.
+
+Christian earnestness does not abolish courtesy. The message is not
+to be blurted out in defiance of even conventional forms. Zeal for
+the Lord is no excuse for rude abruptness. But the salutation of the
+true apostle will deepen the meaning of such forms, and make the
+conventional the real expression of real goodwill. No man should say
+'Peace be unto you' so heartily as Christ's servant. The servant's
+benediction will bring the Master's ratification; for Jesus says,
+'_Let_ your peace come upon it,' as if commanding the good
+which we can only wish. That will be so, if the requisite condition
+is fulfilled. There must be soil for the seed to root in.
+
+But no true wish for others' good--still more, no effort for it--is
+ever void of blessed issue. If the peace does not rest on a house
+into which jarring and sin forbid its entrance, it will not be
+homeless, but come back, like the dove to the ark, and fold its
+wings in the heart of the sender. The reflex influence of Christian
+effort is precious, whatever its direct results are. How the Church
+has been benefited by its missionary enterprises!
+
+Jesus encouraged no illusions in His servants as to their success.
+From the beginning they were led to expect that some would receive
+and some would reject their words. In this rapid preparatory
+mission, there was no time for long delay anywhere; but for us, it
+is not wise to conclude that patient effort will fail because first
+appeals have not succeeded. Much close communion with Jesus, not a
+little self-suppression, and abundant practical wisdom, are needed
+to determine the point at which further efforts are vain. No doubt,
+there is often great waste of strength in trying to impress
+unimpressible people, or to revive some moribund enterprise; but it
+is a pardonable weakness to be reluctant to abandon a field. Still
+it _is_ a weakness, and there come times when the only right
+thing to do is to 'shake off the dust' of the messenger's feet in
+token that all connection is ended, and that he is clear from the
+blood of the rejecters. The awful doom of such is solemnly
+introduced by 'Verily, I say unto you.' It rests on the plain
+principle that the measure of light is the measure of criminality,
+and hence the measure of punishment. The rejecters of Christ among
+us are as much more guilty than 'that city' as its inhabitants were
+than the men of Sodom.
+
+The first section of this charge properly ends with verse 15, the
+following verse being a transition to the second part. The Greek
+puts strong emphasis on 'I.' It is He who sends among wolves,
+therefore He will protect. A strange thing for a shepherd to do! A
+strange encouragement for the apostles on the threshold of their
+work! But the words would often come back to them when beset by the
+pack with their white teeth gleaming, and their howls filling the
+night. They are not promised that they will not be torn, but they
+are assured that, even if they are, the Shepherd wills it, and will
+not lose one of His flock.
+
+What is the Christian defence? Prudence like the serpent's, but not
+the serpent's craft or malice; harmlessness like the dove's, but not
+without the other safeguard of 'wisdom.' The combination is a rare
+one, and the surest way to possess it is to live so close to Jesus
+that we shall be progressively changed into His likeness. Then our
+prudence will never degenerate into cunning, nor our simplicity
+become blindness to dangers. The Christian armour and arms are meek,
+unconquerable patience, and Christ-likeness, To resist is to be
+beaten; to endure unretaliating is to be victorious. 'Be not
+overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.'
+
+
+
+
+THE WIDENED MISSION, ITS PERILS AND DEFENCES
+
+
+    'Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of
+    wolves; be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless
+    as doves. 17. But beware of men: for they will deliver
+    you up to the councils, and they will scourge you in
+    their synagogues; 18. And ye shall be brought before
+    governors and kings for My sake, for a testimony
+    against them and the Gentiles. 19. But when they
+    deliver you up, take no thought how or what ye shall
+    speak: for it shall be given you in that same hour what
+    ye shall speak. 20. For it is not ye that speak, but
+    the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you.
+    21. And the brother shall deliver up the brother to
+    death, and the father the child: and the children shall
+    rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put
+    to death. 22. And ye shall be hated of all men for My
+    name's sake: but he that endureth to the end shall be
+    saved. 23. But when they persecute you in this city,
+    flee ye into another: for verily I say unto you, Ye
+    shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the
+    Son of Man be come. 24. The disciple is not above his
+    master, nor the servant above his lord. 25. It is
+    enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and
+    the servant as his lord. If they have called the master
+    of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they call
+    them of his household? 26. Fear them not therefore: for
+    there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed;
+    and hid, that shall not be known. 27. What I tell you
+    in darkness, that speak ye in light: and what ye hear
+    in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops. 28. And
+    fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to
+    kill the soul: but rather fear Him which is able to
+    destroy both soul and body in hell. 29. Are not two
+    sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not
+    fall on the ground without your Father. 30. But the
+    very hairs of your head are all numbered. 31. Fear ye
+    not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.'
+    --MATT. x. 16-31.
+
+We have already had two instances of Matthew's way of bringing
+together sayings and incidents of a like kind without regard to
+their original connection. The Sermon on the Mount and the series of
+miracles in chapters viii. and ix. are groups, the elements of which
+are for the most part found disconnected in Mark and Luke. This
+charge to the twelve in chapter x. seems to present a third
+instance, and to pass over in verse 16 to a wider mission than that
+of the twelve during our Lord's lifetime, for it forebodes
+persecution, whereas the preceding verses opened no darker prospect
+than that of indifference or non-reception. The 'city' which, in
+that stage of the gospel message, simply would 'not receive you nor
+hear your words,' in this stage has worsened into one where 'they
+persecute you,' and the persecutors are now 'kings' and 'Gentiles,'
+as well as Jewish councils and synagogue-frequenters. The period
+covered in these verses, too, reaches to the 'end,' the final
+revelation of all hidden things.
+
+Obviously, then, our Lord is looking down a far future, and giving a
+charge to the dim crowd of His later disciples, whom His prescient
+eye saw pressing behind the twelve in days to come. He had no dreams
+of swift success, but realised the long, hard fight to which He was
+summoning His disciples. And His frankness in telling them the worst
+that they had to expect was as suggestive as was His freedom from
+the rosy, groundless visions of at once capturing a world which
+enthusiasts are apt to cherish, till hard experience shatters the
+illusions. He knew the future in store for Himself, for His Gospel,
+for His disciples. And He knew that dangers and death itself will
+not appal a soul that is touched into heroic self-forgetfulness by
+His love. 'Set down my name,' says the man in _Pilgrim's Progress_,
+though he knew--may we not say, because he knew?--that the enemies
+were outside waiting to fall on him.
+
+A further difference between this and the preceding section is, that
+there the stress was laid on the contents of the disciples' message,
+but that here it is laid on their sufferings. Not so much by what
+they say, as by how they endure, are they to testify. 'The noble
+army of martyrs praise Thee,' and the primitive Church preached
+Jesus most effectually by dying for Him.
+
+The keynote is struck in verse 16, in which are to be noted the
+'Behold,' which introduces something important and strange, and
+calls for close attention; the majestic '_I_ send you,' which
+moves to obedience whatever the issues, and pledges Him to defend
+the poor men who are going on His errands and the pathetic picture
+of the little flock huddled together, while the gleaming teeth of
+the wolves gnash all round them. A strange theme to drape in a
+metaphor! but does not the very metaphor help to lighten the
+darkness of the picture, as well as speak of His calmness, while He
+contemplates it? If the Shepherd sends His sheep into the midst of
+wolves, surely He will come to their help, and surely any peril is
+more courageously faced when they can say to themselves, 'He put us
+here.' The sheep has no claws to wound with nor teeth to tear with,
+but the defenceless Christian has a defence, and in his very
+weaponlessness wields the sharpest two-edged sword. 'Force from
+force must ever flow.' Resistance is a mistake. The victorious
+antagonist of savage enmity is patient meekness. 'Sufferance is the
+badge of all' true servants of Jesus. Wherever they have been
+misguided enough to depart from Christ's law of endurance and to
+give blow for blow, they have lost their cause in the long run, and
+have hurt their own Christian life more than their enemies' bodies.
+Guilelessness and harmlessness are their weapons. But 'be ye wise as
+serpents' is equally imperative with 'guileless as doves.' Mark the
+fine sanity of that injunction, which not only permits but enjoins
+prudent self-preservation, so long as it does not stoop to crooked
+policy, and is saved from that by dove-like guilelessness. A
+difficult combination, but a possible one, and when realised, a
+beautiful one!
+
+The following verses (17-22) expand the preceding, and mingle in a
+very remarkable way plain predictions of persecution to the death
+and encouragements to front the worst. Jewish councils and
+synagogues, Gentile governors and kings, will unite for once in
+common hatred, than which there is no stronger bond. That is a grim
+prospect to set before a handful of Galilean peasants, but two
+little words turn its terror into joy; it is 'for My sake,' and that
+is enough. Jesus trusted His humble friends, as He trusts all such
+always, and believed that 'for My sake' was a talisman which would
+sweeten the bitterest cup and would make cowards into heroes, and
+send men and women to their deaths triumphant. And history has
+proved that He did not trust them too much. 'For His sake'--is that
+a charm for _us_, which makes the crooked straight and the
+rough places plain, which nerves for suffering and impels to noble
+acts, which moulds life and takes the sting and the terror out of
+death? Nor is that the only encouragement given to the twelve, who
+might well be appalled at the prospect of standing before Gentile
+kings. Jesus seems to discern how they shrank as they listened, at
+the thought of having to bear 'testimony' before exalted personages,
+and, with beautiful adaptation to their weakness, He interjects a
+great promise, which, for the first time, presents the divine Spirit
+as dwelling in the disciples' spirits. The occasion of the dawning
+of that great Christian thought is very noteworthy, and not less so
+is the designation of the Spirit as 'of your Father,' with all the
+implications of paternal care and love which that name carries.
+Special crises bring special helps, and the martyrologies of all
+ages and lands, from Stephen outside the city wall to the last
+Chinese woman, have attested the faithfulness of the Promiser. How
+often have some calm, simple words from some slave girl in Roman
+cities, or some ignorant confessor before Inquisitors, been
+manifestly touched with heavenly light and power, and silenced
+sophistries and threats!
+
+The solemn foretelling of persecution, broken for a moment, goes on
+and becomes even more foreboding, for it speaks of dearest ones
+turned to foes, and the sweet sanctities of family ties dissolved by
+the solvent of the new Faith. There is no enemy like a brother
+estranged, and it is tragically significant that it is in connection
+with the rupture of family bonds that death is first mentioned as
+the price that Christ's messengers would have to pay for
+faithfulness to their message. But the prediction springs at a
+bound, as it were, from the narrow circle of home to the widest
+range, and does not fear to spread before the eyes of the twelve
+that they will become the objects of hatred to the whole human race
+if they are true to Christ's charge. The picture is dark enough, and
+it has turned out to be a true forecast of facts. It suggests two
+questions. What right had Jesus to send men out on such an errand,
+and to bid them gladly die for Him? And what made these men gladly
+take up the burden which He laid on them? He has the right to
+dispose of us, because He is the Son of God who has died for us.
+Otherwise He is not entitled to say to us, Do my bidding, even if it
+leads you to death. His servants find their inspiration to absolute,
+unconditional self-surrender in the Love that has died for them.
+That which gives Him His right to dispose of us in life and death
+gives us the disposition to yield ourselves wholly to Him, to be His
+apostles according to our opportunities, and to say, 'Whether I live
+or die, I am the Lord's.'
+
+That thought of world-wide hatred is soothed by the recurrence of
+the talisman, 'For My name's sake,' and by a moment's showing of a
+fair prospect behind the gloom streaked with lightning in the
+foreground. 'He that endureth to the end shall be saved.' The same
+saying occurs in chapter xxiv. 13, in connection with the prediction
+of the fall of Jerusalem, and in the same connection in Mark xiii.
+13, in both of which places several other sayings which appear in
+this charge to the apostles are found. It is impossible to settle
+which is the original place for these, or whether they were twice
+spoken. The latter supposition is very unfashionable at present, but
+has perhaps more to say for itself than modern critics are willing
+to allow. But Luke (xxi. 19) has a remarkable variation of the
+saying, for his version of it is, 'In your patience, ye shall win
+your souls.' His word 'patience' is a noun cognate with the verb
+rendered in Matthew and Mark 'endureth,' and to 'win one's soul' is
+obviously synonymous with being 'saved.' The saying cannot be
+limited, in any of its forms, to a mere securing of earthly life,
+for in this context it plainly includes those who have been
+delivered to death by parents and brethren, but who by death have
+won their lives, and have been, as Paul expected to be, thereby
+'saved into His heavenly kingdom.' To the Christian, death is the
+usher who introduces him into the presence-chamber of the King, and
+he that loseth his life 'for My name's sake,' finds it glorified in,
+and into, life eternal.
+
+But willingness to endure the utmost is to be accompanied with
+willingness to take all worthy means to escape it. There has been a
+certain unwholesome craving for martyrdom generated in times of
+persecution, which may appear noble but is very wasteful. The worst
+use that you can put a man to is to burn him, and a living witness
+may do more for Christ than a dead martyr. Christian heroism may be
+shown in not being afraid to flee quite as much as in courting, or
+passively awaiting, danger. And Christ's Name will be spread when
+His lovers are hounded from one city to another, just as it was when
+'they that were scattered abroad, went everywhere, preaching the
+word.' When the brands are kicked apart by the heel of violence,
+they kindle flames where they fall.
+
+But the reason for this command to flee is perplexing. 'Ye shall not
+have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come.' Is
+Jesus here reverting to the narrower immediate mission of the
+apostles? What 'coming' is referred to? We have seen that the first
+mission of the twelve was the theme of verses 5-15, and was there
+pursued to its ultimate consequences of final judgment on rejecters,
+whilst the wider horizon of a future mission opens out from verse 16
+onwards. A renewed contraction of the horizon is extremely unlikely.
+It would be as if 'a flower should shut and be a bud again.' The
+recurrence in verse 23 of 'Verily I say unto you,' which has already
+occurred in verse 15, closing the first section of the charge, makes
+it probable that here too a section is completed, and that
+probability is strengthened if it is observed that the same phrase
+occurs, for a third time, in the last verse of the chapter, where
+again the discourse soars to the height of contemplating the final
+reward. The fact that the apostles met with no persecution on their
+first mission, puts out of court the explanation of the words that
+refers them to that mission, and takes the 'coming' to be Jesus' own
+appearances in the places they had preceded Him as His heralds. The
+difficult question as to what is the _terminus ad quem_ pointed
+to here seems best solved by taking the 'coming of the Son of Man'
+to be His judicial manifestation in the destruction of Jerusalem and
+the consequent desolation of many of 'the cities of Israel,' whilst
+at the same time, the nearer and smaller catastrophe is a prophecy
+and symbol of the remoter and greater 'day of the Son of Man' at the
+end of the days. The recognition of that aspect of the fall of
+Jerusalem is forced on us by the eschatological parts of the
+Gospels, which are a bewildering whirl without it. Here, however, it
+is the crash of the fall itself which is in view, and the thought
+conveyed is that there would be cities enough to serve for refuges,
+and scope enough for evangelistic work, till the end of the Jewish
+possession of the land.
+
+In verses 26-31, 'fear not' is thrice spoken, and at each occurrence
+is enforced by a reason. The first of these encouragements is the
+assurance of the certain ultimate world-wide manifestation of hidden
+things. That same dictum occurs in other connections, and with other
+applications, but in the present context can only be taken as an
+assurance that the Gospel message, little known as it thus far was,
+was destined to fill all ears. Therefore the disciples were to be
+fearless in doing their part in making it known, and so working in
+alliance with the divine purpose. It is the same thing that is meant
+by the 'covered' that 'shall be revealed,' the 'hidden' that 'shall
+be known,' 'that which is spoken in darkness,' and 'that which is
+whispered in the ear'; and all four designations refer to the word
+which every Christian has it in charge to sound out. We note that
+Jesus foresees a far wider range of publicity for His servants'
+ministry than for His own, just as He afterwards declared that they
+would do 'greater works' than His. He spoke to a handful of men in
+an obscure corner of the world. His teaching was necessarily largely
+confidential communication to the fit few. But the spark is going to
+be a blaze, and the whisper to become a shout that fills the world.
+Surely, then, we who are working in the line of direction of God's
+working should let no fear make us dumb, but should ever hear and
+obey the command: 'Lift up thy voice with strength, lift it up, be
+not afraid.'
+
+A second reason for fearlessness is the limitation of the enemy's
+power to hurt, reinforced by the thought that, while the penalties
+that man can inflict for faithfulness are only corporeal,
+transitory, and incapable of harming the true self, the consequences
+of unfaithfulness fling the whole man, body and soul, down to utter
+ruin. There is a fear that makes cowards and apostates; there is a
+fear which makes heroes and apostles. He who fears God, with the awe
+that has no torment and is own sister to love, is afraid of nothing
+and of no man. That holy and blessed fear drives out all other, as
+fire draws the heat out of a burn. He that serves Christ is lord of
+the world; he that fears God fronts the world, and is not afraid.
+
+The last reason for fearlessness touches a tender chord, and
+discloses a gracious thought of God as Father, which softens the
+tremendous preceding word: 'Who is able to destroy both soul and
+body in hell.' Take both designations together, and let them work
+together in producing the awe which makes us brave, and the filial
+trust which makes us braver. A bird does not 'fall to the ground'
+unless wounded, and if it falls it dies. Jesus had looked pityingly
+on the great mystery, the woes of the creatures, and had stayed
+Himself on the thought of the all-embracing working of God. The very
+dying sparrow, with broken wing, had its place in that universal
+care. God is 'immanent' in nature. The antithesis often drawn
+between His universal care and His 'special providence' is
+misleading. Providence is special because it is universal. That
+which embraces everything must embrace each thing. But the immanent
+God is 'your Father,' and because of that sonship, 'ye are of more
+value than many sparrows.' There is an ascending order, and an
+increasing closeness and tenderness of relation. 'A man is better
+than a sheep,' and Christians, being God's children, may count on
+getting closer into the Father's heart than the poor crippled bird
+can, or than the godless man can. 'Your Father,' on the one hand,
+can destroy soul and body, therefore fear Him; but, on the other, He
+determines whether you shall 'fall to the ground' or soar above
+dangers, therefore fear none but Him.
+
+
+
+
+LIKE TEACHER, LIKE SCHOLAR
+
+
+    'The disciple is not above his master, nor the servant
+    above his lord. 26. It is enough for the disciple that
+    he be as his master, and the servant as his lord.'
+    --MATT. x. 24, 25.
+
+These words were often on Christ's lips. Like other teachers, He too
+had His favourite sayings, the light of which He was wont to flash
+into many dark places. Such a saying, for instance, was, 'To him
+that hath shall be given.' Such a saying is this of my text; and
+probably several other of our Lord's utterances, which are repeated
+more than once in different Gospels, and have too hastily been
+sometimes assumed to have been introduced erroneously by the
+evangelists, in varying connections.
+
+This half-proverb occurs four times in the Gospels, and in three
+very different connections, pointing to three different subjects.
+Here, and once in John's Gospel, in the fifteenth chapter, it is
+employed to enforce the lesson of the oneness of Christ and His
+disciples in their relation to the world; and that His servants
+cannot expect to be better off than the Master was. 'If they have
+called Me Beelzebub they will not call you anything else.'
+
+Then in Luke's Gospel (vi. 40) it is employed to illustrate the
+principle that the scholar cannot expect to be wiser than his
+master; that a blind teacher will have blind pupils, and that they
+will both fall into the ditch. Of course, the scholar may get beyond
+his master, but then he will get up and go away from the school, and
+will not be his scholar any longer. As long as he is a scholar, the
+best that can happen to him, and that will not often happen, is to
+be on the level of his teacher.
+
+Then in another place in John's Gospel (xiii. 16) the saying is
+employed in reference to a different subject, viz. to teach the
+meaning of the pathetic, symbolical foot-washing, and to enforce the
+exhortation to imitate Jesus Christ, as generally in conduct, so
+specially in His wondrous humility. 'The servant is not greater than
+his lord.' 'I have left you an example that ye should do as I have
+done to you.'
+
+So if we put these three instances together we get a threefold
+illustration of the relation between the disciple and the teacher,
+in respect to wisdom, conduct, and reception by the world. And these
+three, with their bearing on the relation between Christians and
+Jesus Christ, open out large fields of duty and of privilege. The
+very centre of Christianity is discipleship, and the very highest
+hope, as well as the most imperative command which the Gospel brings
+to men is, 'Be like Him whom you profess to have taken as your
+Master. Be like Him here, and you shall be like Him hereafter.'
+
+I. Likeness to the teacher in wisdom is the disciple's perfection.
+
+'If the blind lead the blind both shall fall into the ditch.' 'The
+disciple is not greater than his master.' 'It is enough for the
+disciple that he be as his master.' If that be a true principle,
+that the best that can happen to the scholar is to tread in his
+teacher's footsteps, to see with his eyes, to absorb his wisdom, to
+learn his truth, we may apply it in two opposite directions. First,
+it teaches us the limitations, and the misery, and the folly of
+taking men for our masters; and then, on the other hand, it teaches
+us the large hope, the blessing, freedom, and joy of having Christ
+for our Master.
+
+Now, first, look at the principle as bearing upon the relation of
+disciple and human teacher. All such teachers have their
+limitations. Each man has his little circle of favourite ideas that
+he is perpetually reiterating. In fact, it seems as if one truth was
+about as much as one teacher could manage, and as if, whensoever God
+had any great truth to give to the world, He had to take one man and
+make him its sole apostle. So that teachers become mere fragments,
+and to listen to them is to dwarf and narrow oneself.
+
+The chances are that no scholar shall be on his master's level. The
+eyes that see truth directly and for themselves in this world are
+very few. Most men have to take truth at second-hand, and few indeed
+are they who, like a perfect medium, receive even the fragmentary
+truth that human lips can impart to them, and transmit it as pure as
+they receive it. Disciples present exaggerations, caricatures,
+misconceptions, the limitations of the master becoming even more
+rigid in the pupil. Schools spring up which push the founder's
+teaching to extremes, and draw conclusions from it which he never
+dreamed of. Instead of a fresh voice, we have echoes, which, like
+all echoes, give only a syllable or two out of a sentence. Teachers
+can tell what they see, but they cannot give their followers eyes,
+and so the followers can do little more than repeat what their
+leader said he saw. They are like the little suckers that spring up
+from the 'stool' of a cut-down tree, or like the kinglets among
+whose feebler hands the great empire of an Alexander was divided at
+his death.
+
+It is a dwarfing thing to call any man master upon earth. And yet
+men will give to a man the credence which they refuse to Christ. The
+followers of some of the fashionable teachers of to-day--Comte,
+Spencer, or others--protest, in the name of mental independence,
+against accepting Christ as the absolute teacher of morals and
+religion, and then go away and put a man in the very place which
+they have denied to Him, and swallow down his _dicta_ whole.
+
+Such facts show how heart and mind crave a teacher; how discipleship
+is ingrained in our nature; how we all long for some one who shall
+come to us authoritatively and say, 'Here is truth--believe it and
+live on it.' And yet it is fatal to pin one's faith on any, and it
+is miserable to have to change guides perpetually and to feel that
+we have outgrown those whom we reverence, and that we can look down
+on the height which once seemed to touch the stars--and, if we cut
+ourselves loose from all men's teaching, the isolation is dreary,
+and few of us are strong enough of arm, or clear enough of eye, to
+force or find the path through the tangled jungles of error.
+
+So take this thought, that the highest hope of a disciple is to be
+like the master in wisdom, in its bearing on the relation between us
+and Christ, and look how it then flashes up into blessedness and
+beauty.
+
+Such a teacher as we have in Him has no limitations, and it is safe
+to follow Him absolutely and Him alone. All others have plainly
+borne the impress of their age, or their nation, or their
+idiosyncrasy, in some way or another; Christ Jesus is the only
+teacher that the world has ever heard of, in whose teaching there is
+no mark of the age or generation or set of circumstances in which it
+originated. This water does not taste of any soil through which it
+has passed, it has come straight down from Heaven, and is pure and
+uncontaminated as the Heaven from which it has come. This teacher is
+safe to listen to absolutely: there are no limitations there; you
+never hear Him arguing; there is no sign about His words as if He
+had ever dug out for Himself the wisdom that He is proclaiming, or
+had ever seen it less distinctly than He sees it at the moment. The
+great peculiarity of His teaching is that He does not reason, but
+declares that His 'Verily! Verily!' is the confirmation of all His
+message. His teaching is Himself; other men bring lessons about truth;
+He says, 'I am the Truth.' Other teachers keep their personality in
+the background; He clashes His down in the foreground. Other men say,
+'Listen to what I tell you, never mind about me.' He says, 'This is
+life eternal, that ye should believe on Me.' This Teacher has His
+message level to all minds, high and low, wise and foolish, cultivated
+and rude. This Teacher does not only impart wisdom by words as from
+without, though He does that too, but He comes into men's spirits, and
+communicates Himself, and so makes them wise. Other teachers fumble at
+the outside, but 'in the hidden parts He makes me to know wisdom.' So
+it is safe to take this Teacher absolutely, and to say, 'Thou art my
+Master, Thy word is truth, and the opening of Thy lips to me is wisdom.'
+
+In following Christ as our absolute Teacher, there is no sacrifice
+of independence or freedom of mind, but listening to Him is the way
+to secure these in their highest degree. We are set free from men,
+we are growingly delivered from errors and misconceptions, in the
+measure in which we keep close to Christ as our Master. The Lord is
+that Teacher, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there, and there
+only, is liberty; freedom from self, from the dominion of popular
+opinion, from the coterie-speech of schools, from the imposing
+authority of individuals, and from all that makes cowardly men say
+as other people say, and fall in with the majority; and freedom from
+our own prejudices and our own errors, which are cleared away when
+we take Christ for our Master and cleave to Him.
+
+His teaching can never cease until it has accomplished its purpose,
+and not until we have gathered into our consciousness all the truth
+that He has to give, and have received all the wisdom that He can
+impart unto us as to God and Himself, does His teaching cease. Here
+we may grow indefinitely in the knowledge of Christ, and in the
+future we shall know even as we are known. His merciful teaching
+will not come to a close till we have drunk in all His wisdom, and
+till He has declared to us all which He has heard of the Father. He
+will pass us from one form to another of His school, but in Heaven
+we shall still be His scholars; 'Every one shall sit at Thy feet,
+every one shall receive of Thy words.'
+
+So, then, let us turn away from men, from rabbis and Sanhedrins,
+from authorities and schools, from doctors and churches. Why resort
+to cisterns when we may draw from the spring? Why listen to men when
+we may hear Christ? He is, as Dante called the great Greek thinker,
+'the Master of those who know.' Why should we look to the planets
+when we can see the sun? 'Call no man master upon earth, for One is
+your Master, and all ye are brethren.' And His merciful teaching
+will never cease until 'everyone that is perfected shall be as his
+Master.'
+
+II. Now, turn to the second application of this principle. Likeness
+to the Master in life is the law of a disciple's conduct.
+
+That pathetic and wonderful story about the foot-washing in John's
+Gospel is meant for a symbol. It is the presenting, in a picturesque
+form, of the very heart and essence of Christ's Incarnation in its
+motive and purpose. The solemn prelude with which the evangelist
+introduces it lays bare our Lord's heart and His reason for His
+action. 'Having loved His own, which were in the world, He loved
+them to the end.' His motive, then, was love. Again, the exalted
+consciousness which accompanied His self-abasement is made prominent
+in the words, 'Knowing that the Father had given all things into His
+hand, and that He was come from God and went to God.' And the
+majestic deliberation and patient continuance in resolved humility
+with which He goes down the successive steps of the descent, are
+wonderfully given in the evangelist's record of how He 'riseth from
+supper, and laid aside His garments and girded Himself, and poured
+water into the basin.' It is a parable. Thus, in the consciousness
+of His divine authority and dignity, and moved by His love to the
+whole world, He laid aside the garments of His glory, and vested
+Himself with the towel of His humanity, the servant's garb, and took
+the water of His cleansing power, and came to wash the feet of all
+who will let Him cleanse them from their soil. And then, having
+reassumed His garments, He speaks from His throne to those who have
+been cleansed by His humiliation and His sacrifice, 'Know ye what I
+have done to you? The servant is not greater than his lord.'
+
+That is to say, dear brethren, in this one incident, which is the
+condensation, so to speak, of the whole spirit of His life, is the
+law for our lives as well. We, too, are bound to that same love as
+the main motive of all our actions; we, too, are bound to that same
+stripping off of dignity and lowly equalising of ourselves with
+those below us whom we would help, and we, too, are bound to make it
+our main object, in our intercourse with men, not merely that we
+should please nor enlighten them, nor succour their lower temporal
+needs, but that we should cleanse them and make them pure with the
+purity that Christ gives.
+
+A Christian life all moved and animated by self-denuding love, and
+which came amongst men to make them better and purer, and all the
+influence of which tended in the direction of helping poor foul
+hearts to get rid of their filth, how different it would be from our
+lives! What a grim contrast much of our lives is to the Master's
+example and command! Did you ever strip yourself of anything, my
+brother, in order to make some poor, wretched creature a little
+purer and liker the Saviour? Did you ever drop your dignity and go
+down to the low levels in order to lift up the people that were
+there? Do men see anything of that example, as reproduced in your
+lives, of the Master that lays aside the garments of Heaven for the
+vesture of earth, and dies upon the Cross in order that He might
+make our poor hearts purer and liker His own?
+
+But, hard as such imitation is, it is only one case of a general
+principle. Discipleship is likeness to Jesus Christ in conduct.
+There is no discipleship worth naming which does not, at least,
+attempt that likeness. What is the use of a man saying that he is
+the disciple of Incarnate Love if his whole life is incarnate
+selfishness? What is the use of your calling yourselves Christians,
+and saying that you are followers of Jesus Christ, when He came to
+do God's will and delighted in it, and you come to do your own, and
+never do God's will at all, or scarcely at all, and then reluctantly
+and with many a murmur? What kind of a disciple is he, the habitual
+tenor of whose life contradicts the life of his Master and disobeys
+His commandments? And I am bound to say that that is the life of an
+enormously large proportion of the professing disciples in this age
+of conventional Christianity.
+
+'The disciple shall be as his master.' Do you make it your effort to
+be like Him? If so, then the saying is not only a law, but a
+promise, for it assures us that our effort shall not fail but
+progressively succeed, and lead on at last to our becoming what we
+behold, and being conformed to Him whom we love, and like the Master
+to whose wisdom we profess to listen. They whose earthly life is a
+following of Christ, with faltering steps and afar off, shall have
+for their heavenly blessedness, that they shall 'follow the Lamb
+whithersoever He goeth.'
+
+III. And now, lastly, likeness to the Master in relation to the
+world is the fate that the disciple must put up with.
+
+'If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much
+more shall they call them of his household?' 'The disciple is not
+above his master, nor the servant above his lord.' Our Lord
+reiterated the statement in another place in John's Gospel,
+reminding them that He had said it before.
+
+If we are like Jesus Christ in conduct, and if we have received His
+Word as the truth upon which we repose, depend upon it, in our
+measure and in varying fashions, we shall have to bear the same kind
+of treatment that He received from the world. The days of so-called
+persecution are over in so-called Christian countries, but if you
+are a disciple in the sense of believing all that Jesus Christ says,
+and taking Him for your Teacher, the public opinion of this day will
+have a great many things to say about you that will not be very
+pleasant. You will be considered to be 'old-fashioned,' 'narrow,'
+'behind the times,' etc. etc. etc. Look at the bitter spirit of
+antagonism to an earnest and simple Christianity and adoption of
+Christ as our authoritative Teacher which goes through much of our
+high-class literature to-day. It is a very small matter as measured
+with what Christian men used to have to bear; but it indicates the
+set of things. We may make up our minds that if we are not contented
+with the pared-down Christianity which the world allows to pass at
+present, but insist upon coming to the New Testament for our beliefs
+and practices, and avow--'I believe all that Jesus Christ says, and
+I believe it because He says it, and I take Him as my model'; we
+shall find out that the disciple has to be 'as his Master,' and that
+the Pharisees and the Scribes of to-day stand in the same relation
+to the followers as their predecessors did to the Leader. If you are
+like your Master in conduct, you will be no more popular with the
+world than He was. As long as Christianity will be quiet, and let
+the world go its own gait, the world is very well contented to let
+it alone, or even to say polite things to it. Why should the world
+take the trouble of persecuting the kind of Christianity that so
+many of us display? What is the difference between our Christianity
+and their worldliness? The world is quite willing to come to church
+on Sundays, and to call itself a Christian world, if only it may
+live as it likes. And many professing Christians have precisely the
+same idea. They attend to the externals of Christianity, and call
+themselves Christians, but they bargain for its having very little
+power over their lives. Why, then, should two sets of people who
+have the same ideas and practices dislike each other? No reason at
+all! But let Christian men live up to their profession, and above
+all let them become aggressive, and try to attack the world's evil,
+as they are bound to do; let them fight drunkenness, let them go
+against the lust of great cities, let them preach peace in the face
+of a nation howling for war, let them apply the golden rules of
+Christianity to commerce and social relationships and the like, and
+you will very soon hear a pretty shout that will tell you that the
+disciple who is a disciple has to share the fate of the Master,
+notwithstanding nineteen centuries of Christian teaching.
+
+If you do not know what it is to find yourselves out of harmony with
+the world, I am afraid it is because you have less of the Master's
+spirit than you have of the world's. The world loves its own. If you
+are not 'of the world, the world will hate you.' If it does not, it
+must be because, in spite of your name, you belong to it.
+
+But if we are like Him in our relation to the world, because we are
+like Him in character, our very share in 'His reproach,' and our
+sense of being 'aliens' here, bear the promise that we shall be like
+Him in all worlds. His fortune is ours. 'The disciple shall be as
+his master.' If we suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him. No
+cross, no crown;--if cross, then crown! The end of discipleship is
+not reached until the Master's image and the Master's lot are
+repeated in the scholar.
+
+Take Christ for your sacrifice, trust to His blood, listen to His
+teaching, walk in His footsteps, and you shall share His sovereignty
+and sit on His throne. 'It is enough,'--ay! more than enough, and
+nothing less than that is enough,--'for the disciple that he be
+_as_'--and _with_--'his master.' 'I shall be satisfied when I awake in
+Thy likeness.'
+
+
+
+
+
+THE KING'S CHARGE TO HIS AMBASSADORS
+
+
+    'Whosoever therefore shall confess Me before men, him
+    will I confess also before My Father which is in heaven.
+    33. But whosoever shall deny Me before men, him will I
+    also deny before My Father which is in heaven. 34. Think
+    not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to
+    send peace, but a sword. 35. For I am come to set a man
+    at variance against his father, and the daughter against
+    her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother
+    in law. 36. And man's foes shall be they of his own
+    household. 37. He that loveth father or mother more than
+    Me is not worthy of Me: and he that loveth son or
+    daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. 38. And he
+    that taketh not his cross, and followeth after Me, is
+    not worthy of Me. 39. He that findeth his life shall
+    lose it: and he that loseth his life for My sake shall
+    find it 40. He that receiveth you receiveth Me, and he
+    that receiveth Me receiveth Him that sent Me. 41. He
+    that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall
+    receive a prophet's reward; and he that receiveth a
+    righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall
+    receive a righteous man's reward. 42. And whosoever
+    shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup
+    of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I
+    say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward.'
+    --MATT. x. 32-42.
+
+The first mission of the apostles, important as it was, was but a
+short flight to try the young birds' wings. The larger portion of
+this charge to them passes far beyond the immediate occasion, and
+deals with the permanent relations of Christ's servants to the world
+in which they live, for the purpose of bringing it into subjection
+to its true King. These solemn closing words, which make our present
+subject, contain the duty and blessedness of confessing Him, the vision
+of the antagonisms which He excites, His demand for all-surrendering
+following, and the rewards of those who receive Christ's messengers,
+and therein receive Himself and His Father.
+
+I. The duty and blessedness of confessing Him (vs. 32, 33). The
+'therefore' is significant. It attaches the promise which follows to
+the immediately preceding thoughts of a watchful, fatherly care,
+extending like a great invisible hand over the true disciple.
+Because each is thus guarded, each shall be preserved to receive the
+honour of being confessed by Christ. No matter what may befall His
+witnesses, the extremest disaster shall not rob them of their reward.
+They may be flung down from the house-tops where they lift up their
+bold voices, but He who does not let a sparrow fall to the ground
+uncared for, will give His angels charge concerning them who are so
+much more precious, and they shall be borne up on outstretched wings,
+lest they be dashed on the pavement below. Thus preserved, they shall
+all attain at last to their guerdon. Nothing can come between Christ's
+servant and his crown. The tender providence of the Father, whose
+mercy is over all His works, makes sure of that. The river of the
+confessor's life may plunge underground, and be lost amid persecutions,
+but it will emerge again into the brighter sunshine on the other side
+of the mountains.
+
+The confession which is to be thus rewarded, like the denial opposed
+to it, is, of course, not merely a single utterance of the lip. So
+far Judas Iscariot confessed Christ, and Peter denied Him. But it is
+the habitual acknowledgment by lip and life, unwithdrawn to the end.
+The context implies that the confession is maintained in the face of
+opposition, and that the denial is a cowardly attempt to save one's
+skin at the cost of treason to Jesus. The temptation does not come
+in that sharpest form to us. Perhaps some cowards would be made
+brave if it did. It is perhaps easier to face the gibbet and the
+fire, and screw oneself up for once to a brief endurance, than to
+resist the more specious blandishments of the world, especially when
+it has been christened, and calls itself religious. The light laugh
+of scorn, the silent pressure of the low average of Christian
+character, the close associations in trade, literature, public and
+domestic life which Christians have with non-Christians, make many a
+man's tongue lie silent, to the sore detriment of his own religious
+life. 'Ye have not yet resisted unto blood,' and find it hard to
+fulfil the easier conflict to which you are called. The sun has more
+power than the tempest to make the pilgrim drop his garment. But the
+duty remains the same for all ages. Every man is bound to make the
+deepest springs of his life visible, and to stand to his
+convictions, whatever they be. If he do not, his convictions will
+disappear like a piece of ice hid in a hot hand, which will melt and
+trickle away. This obligation lies with infinitely increased weight
+on Christ's servants; and the consequences of failing to discharge
+it are more tragic in their cases, in the exact proportion of the
+greater preciousness of their faith. Corn hoarded is sure to be
+spoiled by weevils and rust. The bread of life hidden in our sacks
+will certainly go mouldy.
+
+The reward and punishment of confession and denial come to them not
+as separate acts, but as each being the revelation of the spiritual
+condition of the doers. Christ implies that a true disciple cannot
+but be a confessor, and that therefore the denier must certainly be
+one whom He has never known. Because, therefore, each act is
+symptomatic of the doer, each receives the congruous and
+correspondent reward. The confessor is confessed; the denier is
+denied. What calm and assured consciousness of His place as Judge
+underlies these words! His recognition is God's acceptance; His
+denial is darkness and misery. The correspondence between the work
+and the reward is beautifully brought out by the use of the same
+word to express each. And yet what a difference between our
+confession of Him and His of us! And what a hope is here for all who
+have tremblingly, and in the consciousness of much unworthiness,
+ventured to say that they were Christ's subjects, and He their King,
+brother, and all! Their poor, feeble confession will be endorsed by
+His. He will say, 'Yes, this man is mine, and I am his.' That will
+be glory, honour, blessedness, life, heaven.
+
+II. The vision of the discord which follows the coming of the King
+of peace. It is not enough to interpret these words as meaning that
+our Lord's purpose indeed was to bring peace, but that the result of
+His coming was strife. The ultimate purpose is peace; but an
+immediate purpose is conflict, as the only road to the peace. He is
+first King of righteousness, and after that also King of peace. But,
+if His kingdom be righteousness, purity, love, then unrighteousness,
+filthiness, and selfishness will fight against it for their lives.
+The ultimate purpose of Christ's coming is to transform the world
+into the likeness of heaven; and all in the world which hates such
+likeness is embattled against Him. He saw realities, and knew men's
+hearts, and was under no illusion, such as many an ardent reformer
+has cherished, that the fair form of truth need only be shown to
+men, and they will take her to their hearts. Incessant struggle is
+the law for the individual and for society till Christ's purpose for
+both is realised.
+
+That conflict ranges the dearest in opposite ranks. The gospel is
+the great solvent. As when a substance is brought into contact with
+some chemical compound, which has greater affinity for one of its
+elements than the other element has, the old combination is
+dissolved, and a new and more stable one is formed, so Christianity
+analyses and destroys in order to synthesis and construction. In
+verse 21 our Lord had foretold that brother should deliver up
+brother to death. Here the severance is considered from the opposite
+side. The persons who are 'set at variance' with their kindred are
+here Christians. Perhaps it is fanciful to observe that they are all
+junior members of families, as if the young would be more likely to
+flock to the new light. But however that may be, the separation is
+mutual, but the hate is all on one side. The 'man's foes' are of his
+own household; but he is not their foe, though he be parted from
+them.
+
+III. Earthly love may be a worse foe to a true Christian than even
+the enmity of the dearest; and that enmity may often be excited by
+the Christian subordination of earthly to heavenly love. So our Lord
+passes from the warnings of discord and hate to the danger of the
+opposite--undue love.
+
+He claims absolute supremacy in our hearts. He goes still farther,
+and claims the surrender, not only of affections, but of self and
+life to Him. What a strange claim this is! A Jewish peasant, dead
+nineteen hundred years since, fronts the whole race of man, and
+asserts His right to their love, which is strange, and to their
+supreme love, which is stranger still. Why should we love Him at
+all, if He were only a man, however pure and benevolent? We may
+admire, as we do many another fair nature in the past; but is there
+any possibility of evoking anything as warm as love to an unseen
+person, who can have had no knowledge of or love to us? And why
+should we love Him more than our dearest, from whom we have drawn,
+or to whom we have given, life? What explanation or justification
+does He give of this unexampled demand? Absolutely none. He seems to
+think that its reasonableness needs no elucidation. Surely never did
+teacher professing wisdom, modesty, and, still more, religion, put
+forward such a claim of right; and surely never besides did any
+succeed in persuading generations unborn to yield His demand, when
+they heard it. The strangest thing in the world's history is that
+to-day there are millions who do love Jesus Christ more than all
+besides, and whose chief self-accusation is that they do not love
+Him more. The strange, audacious claim is most reasonable, if we
+believe that Jesus is the Son of God, who died for each of us, and
+that each man and woman to the last of the generations had a
+separate place in His divine human love when He died. It is meet to
+love Him, if that be true; it is not, unless it be. The requirement
+is as stringent as strange. If the two ever seem to conflict, the
+earthly must give way. If the earthly be withdrawn, there must be
+found sufficiency for comfort and peace in the heavenly. The lower
+must not be permitted to hinder the flight of the heavenly to its
+home. 'More than Me' is a rebuke to most of us. What a contrast
+between the warmth of our earthly and the tepidity or coldness of
+our heavenly love! How spontaneously our thoughts, when left free,
+turn to the one; how hard we find it to keep them fixed on the
+other! How sweet service is to the dear ones here; how reluctantly
+it is given to Christ! How we long, when parted, to rejoin them; how
+little we are drawn to the place where He is! We have all to confess
+that we are 'not worthy of' Him; that we requite His love with
+inadequate returns, and live lives which tax His love for its
+highest exercise, the free forgiveness of sins against itself.
+Compliance with that stringent law, and subordinating all earthly
+love to His, is the true elevating and ennobling of the earthly. It
+is promoted, not degraded, when it is made second, and is infinitely
+sweeter and deeper then than when it was set in the place of
+supremacy, where it had no right to be.
+
+But Christ's demand is not only for the surrender of the heart, but
+for the giving up of self, and, in a very profound sense, for the
+surrender of life. How enigmatical that saying about taking up the
+cross must have sounded to the disciples! They knew little about the
+cross, as a punishment; they had not yet associated it in any way
+with their Lord. This seems to have been the first occasion of His
+mentioning it, and the allusion is so veiled as to be but partially
+intelligible. But what was intelligible was bewildering. A strange
+royal procession that, of the King with a cross on His shoulder, and
+all His subjects behind Him with similar burdens! Through the ages
+that procession has marched, and it marches still. Self-denial for
+Christ's sake is 'the badge of all our tribe.' Observe that word
+'take.' The cross must be willingly and by ourselves assumed. No
+other can lay it on our shoulders. Observe that other word 'his.'
+Each man has his own special form in which self-denial is needful
+for him. We require pure eyes, and hearts kept in very close
+communion with Jesus, to ascertain what our particular cross is. He
+has them of many patterns, shapes, sizes, and materials. We can
+always make sure of strength to carry the one which He means us to
+carry, but not of strength to bear what is not ours.
+
+IV. We have the rewards of those who receive Christ's messengers,
+and therein receive Him and His Father. Our Lord first identifies
+these twelve with Himself in a manner which must have sounded
+strange to them then, but have heartened them for their work by the
+consciousness of His mysterious oneness with them. The whole
+doctrine of Christ's unity with His people lay in germ in these
+words, though much more was needed, both of teaching and of
+experience, before their depth of blessing and strengthening could
+be apprehended. _We_ know that He dwells in His true subjects
+by His Spirit, and that a most real union subsists between the head
+and the members, of which the closest unions of earth are but faint
+shadows, so as that not only those who receive His followers receive
+Him, but, more wonderful still, His followers are received at the
+last by God Himself as joined to Him, and portions of His very self,
+and therefore 'accepted in the Beloved.' Our Lord adds to these
+words the thought that, in like manner, to receive Him is to receive
+the Father, and so implies that our relation to Him is in certain
+real respects parallel with His relation to the Father. We too are
+sent. He who sends abides with us, as the Son ever abode in God, and
+God in Him. We are sent to be the brightness of Christ's glory, and
+to manifest Him to men, as He was sent to reveal the Father.
+
+
+
+
+A LIFE LOST AND FOUND
+[Footnote: Preached after the funeral of Mr. F. W. Crossley.]
+
+
+    'He that loseth his life for My sake shall find it.'
+    --MATT. x. 39.
+
+My heart impels me to break this morning my usual rule of avoiding
+personal references in the pulpit. Death has been busy in our own
+congregation this last week, and yesterday we laid in the grave all
+that was mortal of a man to whom Manchester owes more than it knows.
+Mr. Crossley has been for thirty years my close and dear friend. He
+was long a member of this church and congregation. I need not speak
+of his utter unselfishness, of his lifelong consecration, of his
+lavish generosity, of his unstinted work for God and man; but
+thinking of him and of it, I have felt as if the words of my text
+were the secret of his life, and as if he now understood the fulness
+of the promise they contain: 'He that loseth his life for My sake
+shall find it.' Now, looking at these words in the light of the
+example so tenderly beloved by some of us, so sharply criticised by
+many, but now so fully recognised as saintly by all, I ask you to
+consider--
+
+I. The stringent requirement for the Christian life that is here
+made.
+
+Now we shall very much impoverish the meaning and narrow the sweep
+of these great and penetrating words, if we understand by 'losing
+one's life' only the actual surrender of physical existence. It is
+not only the martyr on whose bleeding brows the crown of life is
+gently placed; it is not only the temples that have been torn by the
+crown of thorns, that are soothed by that unfading wreath; but there
+is a daily dying, which is continually required from all Christian
+people, and is, perhaps, as hard as, or harder than, the brief and
+bloody passage of martyrdom by which some enter into rest. For the
+true losing of life is the slaying of self, and that has to be done
+day by day, and not once for all, in some supreme act of surrender
+at the end, or in some initial act of submission and yielding at the
+beginning, of the Christian life. We ourselves have to take the
+knife into our own hands and strike, and that not once, but ever,
+right on through our whole career. For, by natural disposition, we
+are all inclined to make our own selves to be our own centres, our
+own aims, the objects of our trust, our own law; and if we do so, we
+are dead whilst we live, and the death that brings life is when, day
+by day, we 'crucify the old man with his affections and lusts.'
+Crucifixion was no sudden death; it was an exquisitely painful one,
+which made every nerve quiver and the whole frame thrill with
+anguish; and that slow agony, in all its terribleness and
+protractedness, is the image that is set before us as the true ideal
+of every life that would not be a living death. The world is to be
+crucified to me, and I to the world.
+
+We have our centre in ourselves, and we need the centre to be
+shifted, or we live in sin. If I might venture upon so violent an
+image, the comets that career about the heavens need to be caught
+and tamed, and bound to peaceful revolution round some central sun,
+or else they are 'wandering stars to whom is reserved the blackness
+of darkness for ever.' So, brethren, the slaying of self by a
+painful, protracted process, is the requirement of Christ.
+
+But do not let us confine ourselves to generalities. What is meant?
+This is meant--the absolute submission of the will to commandments
+and providences, the making of that obstinate part of our nature
+meek and obedient and plastic as the clay in the potter's hands. The
+tanner takes a stiff hide, and soaks it in bitter waters, and
+dresses it with sharp tools, and lubricates it with unguents, and
+his work is not done till all the stiffness is out of it and it is
+flexible. And we do not lose our lives in the lofty, noble sense,
+until we can say--and verify the speech by our actions--'Not my will
+but Thine be done.' They who thus submit, they who thus welcome into
+their hearts, and enthrone upon the sovereign seat in their wills,
+Christ and His will--these are they who have lost their lives. When
+we can say, 'I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me,' then, and
+only then, have we in the deepest sense of the words 'lost our
+lives.'
+
+The phrase means the suppression, and sometimes the excision, of
+appetites, passions, desires, inclinations. It means the hallowing
+of all aims; it means the devotion and the consecration of all
+activities. It means the surrender and the stewardship of all
+possessions. And only then, when we have done these things, shall we
+have come to practical obedience to the initial requirement that
+Christ makes from us all--to lose our lives for His sake.
+
+I need not diverge here to point to that life from which my thoughts
+have taken their start in this sermon. Surely if there was any one
+characteristic in it more distinct and lovely than another, it was
+that self was dead and that Christ lived. There may be sometimes a
+call for the actual--which is the lesser--surrender of the bodily
+life, in obedience to the call of duty. There have been Christian
+men who have wrought themselves to death in the Master's service.
+Perhaps he of whom I have been speaking was one of these. It may be
+that, if he had done like so many of our wealthy men--had flung
+himself into business and then collapsed into repose--he would have
+been here to-day. Perhaps it would have been better if there had
+been a less entire throwing of himself into arduous and clamant
+duties. I am not going to enter on the ethics of that question. I do
+not think there are many of this generation of Christians who are
+likely to work themselves to death in Christ's cause; and perhaps,
+after all, the old saying is a true one, 'Better to wear out than to
+rust out.' But only this I will say: we honour the martyrs of
+Science, of Commerce, of Empire, why should not we honour the
+martyrs of Faith? And why should they be branded as imprudent
+enthusiasts, if they make the same sacrifice which, when an explorer
+or a soldier makes, his memory is honoured as heroic, and his cold
+brows are crowned with laurels? Surely it is as wise to die for
+Christ as for England. But be that as it may; the requirement, the
+stringent requirement, of my text is not addressed to any spiritual
+aristocracy, but is laid upon the consciences of all professing
+Christians.
+
+II. Observe the grounds of this requirement.
+
+Did you ever think--or has the fact become so familiar to you that
+it ceases to attract notice?--did you ever think what an
+extraordinary position it is for the son of a carpenter in Nazareth
+to plant Himself before the human race and say, 'You will be wise if
+you die for My sake, and you will be doing nothing more than your
+plain duty'? What business has He to assume such a position as that?
+What warrants that autocratic and all-demanding tone from His lips?
+'Who art Thou'--we may fancy people saying--'that Thou shouldst put
+out a masterful hand and claim to take as Thine the life of my
+heart?' Ah! brethren, there is but one answer: 'Who loved me, and
+gave Himself for me.' The foolish, loving, impulsive apostle that
+blurted out, before his time had come, 'I will lay down my life for
+Thy sake,' was only premature; he was not mistaken. There needed
+that His Lord should lay down His life for Peter's sake; and then He
+had a right to turn to the apostle and say, 'Thou shalt follow Me
+afterwards,' and 'lay down thy life for My sake.' The ground of
+Christ's unique claim is Christ's solitary sacrifice. He who has
+died for men, and He only, has the right to require the unconditional,
+the absolute surrender of themselves, not only in the sacrifice of a
+life that is submitted, but, if circumstances demand, in the sacrifice
+of a death. The ground of the requirement is laid, first in the fact
+of our Lord's divine nature, and second, in the fact that He who asks
+my life has first of all given His.
+
+But that same phrase, 'for My sake,' suggests--
+
+III. The all-sufficient motive which makes such a loss of life
+possible.
+
+I suppose that there is nothing else that will wholly dethrone self
+but the enthroning of Jesus Christ. That dominion is too deeply
+rooted to be abolished by any enthusiasms, however noble they may
+be, except the one that kindles its undying torch at the flame of
+Christ's own love. God forbid that I should deny that wonderful and
+lovely instances of self-oblivion may be found in hearts untouched
+by the supreme love of Christ! But whilst I recognise all the beauty
+of such, I, for my part, humbly venture to believe and assert that,
+for the entire deliverance of a man from self-regard, the one
+sufficient motive power is the reception into his opening heart of
+the love of Jesus Christ.
+
+Ah! brethren, you and I know how hard it is to escape from the
+tyrannous dominion of self, and how the evil spirits that have taken
+possession of us mock at all lesser charms than the name which
+'devils fear and fly'; 'the Name that is above every name.' We have
+tried other motives. We have sought to reprove our selfishness by
+other considerations. Human love--which  itself is sometimes only
+the love of self, seeking satisfaction from another--human love does
+conquer it, but yet conquers it partially. The demons turn round
+upon all other would-be exorcists, and say, 'Jesus we know ... but
+who are ye?' It is only when the Ark is carried into the Temple that
+Dagon falls prone before it. If you would drive self out of your
+hearts--and if you do not it will slay you--if you would drive self
+out, let Christ's love and sacrifice come in. And then, what no
+brooms and brushes, no spades nor wheelbarrows, will ever do--namely,
+cleanse out the filth that lodges there--the turning of the river in
+will do, and float it all away. The one possibility for complete,
+conclusive deliverance from the dominion and tyranny of Self is to
+be found in the words 'For My sake.' Ah! brethren, I suppose there
+are none of us so poor in earthly love, possessed or remembered, but
+that we know the omnipotence of these words when whispered by beloved
+lips, 'For My sake'; and Jesus Christ is saying them to us all.
+
+IV. Lastly, notice the recompense of the stringent requirement.
+
+'Shall find it,' and that finding, like the losing, has a twofold
+reference and accomplishment: here and now, yonder and then.
+
+Here and now, no man possesses himself till he has given himself to
+Jesus Christ. Only then, when we put the reins into His hands, can we
+coerce and guide the fiery steeds of passion and of impulse, And so
+Scripture, in more than one place, uses a remarkable expression, when
+it speaks of those that believe to the 'acquiring of their souls.'
+You are not your own masters until you are Christ's servants; and
+when you fancy yourselves to be most entirely your own masters, you
+have promised yourselves liberty and have become the slave of
+corruption. So if you would own yourselves, give yourselves away. And
+such an one 'shall find' his life, here and now, in that all earthly
+things will be sweeter and better. The altar sanctifies the gift.
+When some pebble is plunged into a sunlit stream, the water brings
+out the veined colourings of the stone that looked all dull and dim
+when it was lying upon the bank. Fling your whole being, your wealth,
+your activities, and everything, into that stream, and they will
+flash in splendour else unknown. Did not my friend, of whom I have
+been speaking, enjoy his wealth far more, when he poured it out like
+water upon good causes, than if he had spent it in luxury and
+self-indulgence? And shall we not find that everything is sweeter,
+nobler, better, fuller of capacity to delight, if we give it all to
+our Master? The stringent requirement of Christ is the perfection of
+prudence. 'Who pleasure follows pleasure slays,' and who slays
+pleasure finds a deeper and a holier delight. The keenest
+epicureanism could devise no better means for sucking the last drop
+of sweetness out of the clustering grapes of the gladnesses of
+earth than to obey this stringent requirement, and so realise the
+blessed promise, 'Whoso loseth his life for My sake shall find it.'
+The selfish man is a roundabout fool. The self-devoted man, the
+Christ-enthroning man, is the wise man.
+
+And there will be the further finding hereafter, about which we
+cannot speak. Only remember, how in a passage parallel with this of
+my text, spoken when almost within sight of Calvary, our Lord laid
+down not only the principle of His own life but the principle for
+all His servants, when He said, 'Except a corn of wheat fall into
+the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth
+forth much fruit.' The solitary grain dropped into the furrow brings
+forth a waving harvest. We may not, we need not, particularise, but
+the life that is found at last is as the fruit an hundredfold of the
+life that men called 'lost' and God called 'sown.'
+
+'Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord; they rest from their
+labours, and their works do follow them.'
+
+
+
+
+THE GREATEST IN THE KINGDOM, AND THEIR REWARD
+
+
+    'He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet
+    shall receive a prophet's reward; and he that receiveth
+    a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall
+    receive a righteous man's reward. 42. And whosoever
+    shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup
+    of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I
+    say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward.'
+    --MATT. x. 41, 42.
+
+ There is nothing in these words to show whether they refer to the
+present or to the future. We shall probably not go wrong if we
+regard them as having reference to both. For all godliness has
+'promise of the life that now is, as well as of that which is to
+come,' and '_in_ keeping God's commandments,' as well as _for_
+keeping them, 'there is great reward,' a reward realised in the
+present, even although Death holds the keys of the treasure-house
+in which the richest rewards are stored. No act of holy obedience
+is here left without foretastes of joy, which, though they be but
+'brooks by the way,' contain the same water of life which hereafter
+swells to an ocean.
+
+Some people tell us that it is defective morality in Christianity to
+bribe men to be good by promising them Heaven, and that he who is
+actuated by such a motive is selfish. Now that fantastic and
+overstrained objection may be very simply answered by two
+considerations: self-regard is not selfishness, and Christianity
+does not propose the future reward as the motive for goodness. The
+motive for goodness is love to Jesus Christ; and if ever there was a
+man who did acts of Christian goodness only for the sake of what he
+would get by them, the acts were not Christian goodness, because the
+motive was wrong. But it is a piece of fastidiousness to forbid us
+to reinforce the great Christian motive, which is love to Jesus
+Christ, by the thought of the recompense of reward. It is a stimulus
+and an encouragement of, not the motive for, goodness. This text
+shows us that it is a subordinate motive, for it says that the
+reception of a prophet, or of a righteous man, or of 'one of these
+little ones,' which is rewardable, is the reception 'in the name of'
+a prophet, a disciple, and so on, or, in other words, is the
+recognising of the prophet, or the righteous man, or the disciple
+for what he is, and because he is that, and not because of the
+reward, receiving him with sympathy and solace and help.
+
+So, with that explanation, let us look at these very remarkable
+words of our text.
+
+I. The first thing which I wish to observe in them is the three
+classes of character which are dealt with--'prophet,' 'righteous
+man,' 'these little ones.'
+
+Now the question that I would suggest is this: Is there any meaning
+in the order in which these are arranged? If so, what is it? Do we
+begin at the bottom, or at the top? Have we to do with an ascending
+or with a descending scale? Is the prophet thought to be greater
+than the righteous man, or less? Is the righteous man thought to be
+higher than the little one, or to be lower? The question is an
+important one, and worth considering.
+
+Now, at first sight, it certainly does look as if we had here to do
+with a descending scale, as if we began at the top and went
+downwards. A prophet, a man honoured with a distinct commission from
+God to declare His will, is, in certain very obvious respects,
+loftier than a man who is not so honoured, however pure and
+righteous he may be. The dim and venerable figures, for instance, of
+Isaiah and Jeremiah, tower high above all their contemporaries; and
+godly men who hung upon their lips, like Baruch on Jeremiah's, felt
+themselves to be, and were, inferior to them. And, in like manner,
+the little child who believes in Christ may seem to be insignificant
+in comparison with the prophet with his God-touched lips, or the
+righteous man of the old dispensation with his austere purity; as a
+humble violet may seem by the side of a rose with its heart of fire,
+or a white lily regal and tall. But one remembers that Jesus Christ
+Himself declared that 'the least of the little ones' was greater
+than the greatest who had gone before; and it is not at all likely
+that He who has just been saying that whosoever received His
+followers received Himself, should classify these followers beneath
+the righteous men of old. The Christian type of character is
+distinctly higher than the Old Testament type; and the humblest
+believer is blessed above prophets and righteous men because his
+eyes behold and his heart welcomes the Christ.
+
+Therefore I am inclined to believe that we have here an ascending
+series--that we begin at the bottom and not at the top; that the
+prophet is less than the righteous man, and the righteous man less
+than the little one who believes in Christ. For, suppose there were
+a prophet who was not righteous, and a righteous man who was not a
+prophet. Suppose the separation between the two characters were
+complete, which of them would be the greater? Balaam was a prophet;
+Balaam was not a righteous man; Balaam was immeasurably inferior to
+the righteous whose lives he did not emulate, though he could not
+but envy their deaths. In like manner the humblest believer in Jesus
+Christ has something that a prophet, if he is not a disciple, does
+not possess; and that which he has, and the prophet has not, is
+higher than the endowment that is peculiar to the prophet alone.
+
+May we say the same thing about the difference between the righteous
+man and the disciple? Can there be a righteous man that is not a
+disciple? Can there be a disciple that is not a righteous man? Can
+the separation between these two classes be perfect and complete?
+No! in the profoundest sense, certainly not. But then at the time
+when Christ spoke there were some men standing round Him, who, 'as
+touching the righteousness which is of the law,' were 'blameless.'
+And there are many men to-day, with much that is noble and admirable
+in their characters, who stand apart from the faith that is in Jesus
+Christ; and if the separation be so complete as that, then it is to
+be emphatically and decisively pronounced that, if we have regard to
+all that a man ought to be, and if we estimate men in the measure in
+which they approximate to that ideal in their lives and conduct,
+'the Christian is the highest style of man.' The disciple is above
+the righteous men adorned with many graces of character, who, if
+they are not Christians, have a worm at the root of all their
+goodness, because it lacks the supreme refinement and consecration
+of faith; and above the fiery-tongued prophet, if he is not a
+disciple.
+
+Now, brethren, this thought is full of very important practical
+inferences. Faith is better than genius. Faith is better than
+brilliant gifts. Faith is better than large acquirements. The poet's
+imagination, the philosopher's calm reasoning, the orator's tongue
+of fire, even the inspiration of men that may have their lips
+touched to proclaim God to their brethren, are all less than the
+bond of living trust that knits a soul to Jesus Christ, and makes it
+thereby partaker of that indwelling Saviour. And, in like manner, if
+there be men, as there are, and no doubt some of them among my
+hearers, adorned with virtues and graces of character, but who have
+not rested their souls on Jesus Christ, then high above these, too,
+stands the lowliest person who has set his faith and love on that
+Saviour. Neither intellectual endowments nor moral character are the
+highest, but faith in Jesus Christ. A man may be endowed with all
+brilliancy of intellect and fair with many beauties of character,
+and he may be lost; and on the other hand simple faith, rudimentary
+and germlike as it often is, carries in itself the prophecy of all
+goodness, and knits a man to the source of all blessedness. 'Whether
+there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it
+shall vanish away. Now abideth these three, faith, hope, charity.'
+'Rejoice not that the spirits are subject unto you, but rather
+rejoice because your names are written in Heaven.'
+
+Ah! brethren, if we believed in Christ's classification of men, and
+in the order of importance and dignity in which He arranges them, it
+would make a wonderful practical difference to the lives, to the
+desires, and to the efforts of a great many of us. Some of you
+students, young men and women that are working at college or your
+classes, if you believed that it was better to trust in Jesus Christ
+than to be wise, and gave one-tenth, ay! one-hundredth part of the
+attention and the effort to secure the one which you do to secure
+the other, would be different people. 'Not many wise men after the
+flesh,' but humble trusters in Jesus Christ, are the victors in the
+world. Believe you that, and order your lives accordingly.
+
+Oh! what a reversal of this world's estimates is coming one day,
+when the names that stand high in the roll of fame shall pale, like
+photographs that have been shut up in a portfolio, and when you take
+them out have faded off the paper. 'The world knows nothing of its
+greatest men,' but there is a time coming when the spurious mushroom
+aristocracy that the world has worshipped will be forgotten, like
+the nobility of some conquered land, who are brushed aside and
+relegated to private life by the new nobility of the conquerors, and
+when the true nobles, God's aristocrats, the righteous, who are
+righteous because they have trusted in Christ, shall shine forth
+like the sun 'in the Kingdom of My Father.'
+
+Here is the climax: gifts and endowments at the bottom, character
+and morality in the middle, and at the top faith in Jesus Christ.
+
+II. Now notice briefly in the second place the variety of the reward
+according to the character.
+
+The prophet has his, the righteous man has his, the little one has
+his. That is to say, each level of spiritual or moral stature
+receives its own prize. There is no difficulty in seeing that this
+is so in regard to the rewards of this life. Every faithful message
+delivered by a prophet increases that prophet's own blessedness, and
+has joys in the receiving of it from God, in the speaking of it to
+men, in the marking of its effects as it spreads through the world,
+which belong to him alone. In all these, and in many other ways, the
+'prophet' has rewards that no stranger can intermeddle with. All
+courses of obedient conduct have their own appropriate consequences
+and satisfaction. Every character is adapted to receive, and does
+receive, in the measure of its goodness, certain blessings and joys,
+here and now. 'Surely the righteous shall be recompensed in the
+earth.'
+
+And the same principle, of course, applies if we think of the reward
+as altogether future. It must be remembered, however, that
+Christianity does not teach, as I believe, that if there be a
+prophet or a righteous man who is not a disciple, that prophet or
+righteous man will get rewards in the future life. It must be
+remembered, too, that every disciple is righteous in the measure of
+his faith. Discipleship being presupposed, then the disciple who is
+a prophet will have one reward, and the disciple who is a righteous
+man shall have another; and where all three characteristics
+coincide, there shall be a triple crown of glory upon his head.
+
+That is all plain and obvious enough, if only we get rid of the
+prejudice that the rewards of a future life are merely bestowed upon
+men by God's arbitrary good pleasure. What is the reward of Heaven?
+'Eternal life,' people say. Yes! 'Blessedness.' Yes! But where does
+the life come from, and where does the blessedness come from? They
+are both derived, they come from God in Christ; and in the deepest
+sense, and in the only true sense, God is Heaven, and God is the
+reward of Heaven. 'I am thy shield,' so long as dangers need to be
+guarded against, and then, thereafter, 'I am thine exceeding great
+Reward.' It is the possession of God that makes all the Heaven of
+Heaven, the immortal life which His children receive, and the
+blessedness with which they are enraptured. We are heirs of
+immortality, we are heirs of life, we are heirs of blessedness,
+because, and in the measure in which, we become heirs of God.
+
+And if that be so, then there is no difficulty in seeing that in
+Heaven, as on earth, men will get just as much of God as they can
+hold; and that in Heaven, as on earth, capacity for receiving God is
+determined by character. The gift is one, the reward is one, and yet
+the reward is infinitely various. It is the same light which glows
+in all the stars, but 'star differeth from star in glory.' It is the
+same wine, the new wine of the Kingdom, that is poured into all the
+vessels, but the vessels are of divers magnitudes, though each be
+full to the brim.
+
+And so in those two sister parables of our Master's, which are so
+remarkably discriminated and so remarkably alike, we have both these
+aspects of the Heavenly reward set forth--both that which declares
+its identity in all cases, and the other which declares its variety
+according to the recipient's character. All the servants receive the
+same welcome, the same prize, the same entrance into the same joy;
+although one of them had ten talents, and another five, and another
+two. But the servants who were each sent out to trade with one poor
+pound in their hands, and by their varying diligence reaped varying
+profits, were rewarded according to the returns that they had
+brought; and one received ten, and the other five, and the other
+two, cities over which to have authority and rule. So the reward is
+one, and yet infinitely diverse. It is not the same thing whether a
+man or a woman, being a Christian, is an earnest, and devoted, and
+growing Christian here on earth, or a selfish, and an idle, and a
+stagnant one. It is not the same thing whether you content
+yourselves with simply laying hold on Christ, and keeping a
+tremulous and feeble hold of Him for the rest of your lives, or
+whether you grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour.
+There is such a fate as being saved, yet so as by fire, and going
+into the brightness with the smell of the fire on your garments.
+There is such a fate as having just, as it were, squeezed into
+Heaven, and got there by the skin of your teeth. And there is such a
+thing as having an abundant entrance ministered, when its portals
+are thrown wide open. Some imperfect Christians die with but little
+capacity for possessing God, and therefore their heaven will not be
+as bright, nor studded with as majestic constellations, as that of
+others. The starry vault that bends above us so far away, is the
+same in the number of its stars when gazed on by the savage with his
+unaided eye, and by the astronomer with the strongest telescope; and
+the Infinite God, who arches above us, but comes near to us,
+discloses galaxies of beauty and oceans of abysmal light in Himself,
+according to the strength and clearness of the eye that looks upon
+Him. So, brethren, remember that the one glory has infinite degrees;
+and faith, and conduct, and character here determine the capacity
+for God which we shall have when we go to receive our reward.
+
+III. The last point that is here is the substantial identity of the
+reward to all that stand on the same level, however different may be
+the form of their lives.
+
+'He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive
+a prophet's reward.' And so in the case of the others. The active
+prophet, righteous man, or disciple, and the passive recogniser of
+each in that character, who receives each as a prophet, or righteous
+man, or disciple, stand practically and substantially on the same
+level, though the one of them may have his lips glowing with the
+divine inspiration and the other may never have opened his mouth for
+God.
+
+That is beautiful and deep. The power of sympathising with any
+character is the partial possession of that character for ourselves.
+A man who is capable of having his soul bowed by the stormy thunder
+of Beethoven, or lifted to Heaven by the ethereal melody of
+Mendelssohn, is a musician, though he never composed a bar. The man
+who recognises and feels the grandeur of the organ music of
+'Paradise Lost' has some fibre of a poet in him, though he be but 'a
+mute, inglorious Milton.'
+
+All sympathy and recognition of character involve some likeness to
+that character. The poor woman who brought the sticks and prepared
+food for the prophet entered into the prophet's mission and shared
+in the prophet's work and reward, though his task was to beard Ahab,
+and hers was only to bake Elijah's bread. The old knight that
+clapped Luther on the back when he went into the Diet of Worms, and
+said to him, 'Well done, little monk!' shared in Luther's victory
+and in Luther's crown. He that helps a prophet because he is a
+prophet, has the making of a prophet in himself.
+
+As all work done from the same motive is the same in God's eyes,
+whatever be the outward shape of it, so the work that involves the
+same type of spiritual character will involve the same reward. You
+find the Egyptian medal on the breasts of the soldiers that kept the
+base of communication as well as on the breasts of the men that
+stormed the works at Tel-el-Kebir. It was a law in Israel, and it is
+a law in Heaven: 'As his part is that goeth down into the battle, so
+shall his part be that tarrieth by the stuff, they shall part
+alike.' 'I am going down into the pit, you hold the ropes,' said
+Carey, the pioneer missionary. They that hold the ropes, and the
+daring miner that swings away down in the blackness, are one in the
+work, may be one in the motive, and, if they are, shall be one in
+the reward. So, brethren, though no coal of fire may be laid upon
+your lips, if you sympathise with the workers that are trying to
+serve God, and do what you can to help them, and identify yourself
+with them, and so hold the ropes, my text will be true about you.
+'He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive
+a prophet's reward.' They who by reason of circumstances, by
+deficiency of power, or by the weight of other tasks and duties, can
+only give silent sympathy, and prayer, and help, are one with the
+men whom they help.
+
+Dear brethren! remember that this awful, mystical life of ours is
+full everywhere of consequences that cannot be escaped. What we sow
+we reap, and we grind it, and we bake it, and we live upon it. We
+have to drink as we have brewed; we have to lie on the beds that we
+have made. 'Be not deceived: God is not mocked.' The doctrine of
+reward has two sides to it. 'Nothing human ever dies.' All our deeds
+drag after them inevitable consequences; but if you will put your
+trust in Jesus Christ, He will not deal with you according to your
+sins, nor reward you according to your iniquities; and the darkest
+features of the recompense of your evil will all be taken away by
+the forgiveness which we have in His blood. If you will trust
+yourselves to Him you will have that eternal life, which is not
+wages, but a gift; which is not reward, but a free bestowment of
+God's love. And then, if we build upon that Foundation on which
+alone men can build their hopes, their thoughts, their characters,
+their lives, however feeble may be our efforts, however narrow may
+be our sphere,--though we be neither prophets nor sons of prophets,
+and though our righteousness may be all stained and imperfect, yet,
+to our own amazement and to God's glory, we shall find, when the
+fire is kindled which reveals and tests our works, that, by the
+might of humble faith in Christ, we have built upon that Foundation,
+gold and silver and precious stones; and shall receive the reward
+given to every man whose work abides that trial by fire.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN'S DOUBTS OF JESUS, AND JESUS' PRAISE OF JOHN
+
+
+    'Now when John had heard in the prison the works of
+    Christ, he sent two of his disciples, 3. And said unto
+    Him, Art Thou He that should come, or do we look for
+    another? 4. Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and
+    shew John again those things which ye do hear and see:
+    5. The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk,
+    the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead
+    are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached
+    to them. 6. And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be
+    offended in Me. 7. And as they departed, Jesus began
+    to say unto the multitudes concerning John, What went
+    ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with
+    the wind? 8. But what went ye out for to see? A man
+    clothed in soft raiment? behold, they that wear soft
+    clothing are in kings' houses. 9. But what went ye out
+    for to see? A prophet? yea, I say unto you, and more
+    than a prophet. 10. For this is he, of whom it is
+    written. Behold, I send My messenger before Thy face,
+    which shall prepare Thy way before Thee. 11. Verily I
+    say unto you, Among them that are born of women there
+    hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist:
+    notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of
+    heaven is greater than he. 12. And from the days of
+    John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven
+    suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.
+    13. For all the prophets and the law prophesied until
+    John--And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which
+    was for to come. 16. He that hath ears to hear, let
+    him hear.'--MATT. xi. 2-15.
+
+This text falls into two parts: the first, from verses 2-6
+inclusive, giving us the faltering faith of the great witness, and
+Christ's gentle treatment of the waverer; the second, from verse 7
+to the end, giving the witness of Christ to John, exuberant in
+recognition, notwithstanding his momentary hesitation.
+
+I. We do not believe that this message of John's was sent for the sake
+of strengthening his disciples' faith in Jesus as Messiah, nor that it
+was merely meant as a hint to Jesus to declare Himself. The question
+is John's. The answer is sent to him: it is he who is to ponder the
+things which the messengers saw, and to answer his own question
+thereby. The note which the evangelist prefixes to his account
+gives the key to the incident. John was 'in prison,' in that gloomy
+fortress of Machaerus which Herod had rebuilt at once for 'a sinful
+pleasure-house' and for an impregnable refuge, among the savage cliffs
+of Moab. The halls of luxurious vice and the walls of defence are gone;
+but the dungeons are there still, with the holes in the masonry into
+which the bars were fixed to which the prisoners--John, perhaps, one of
+them--were chained. No wonder that in the foul atmosphere of a dark
+dungeon the spirit which had been so undaunted in the free air of the
+desert began to flag; nor that even he who had seen the fluttering dove
+descend on Christ's head, and had pointed to Him as the Lamb of God,
+felt that 'all his mind was clouded with a doubt.' It would have been
+wiser if commentators, instead of trying to save John's credit at the
+cost of straining the narrative, had recognised the psychological truth
+of the plain story of his wavering conviction and had learned its
+lessons of self-distrust. There is only one Man with whom it was always
+high-water; all others have ebbs and flows in their religious life, and
+variations in their grasp of truth.
+
+The narrative further gives the motive for John's embassy, in the
+report which had reached him of 'the works of Christ.' We need only
+recall John's earlier testimony to understand how these works would
+not seem to him to fill up the role which he had anticipated for
+Messiah. Where is the axe that was to be laid at the root of the
+trees, or the fan that was to winnow out the chaff? Where is the
+fiery spirit which he had foretold? This gentle Healer is not the
+theocratic judge of his warning prophecies. He is tending and
+nurturing, rather than felling, the barren trees. A nimbus of
+merciful deeds, not of flashing 'wrath to come,' surrounds His head.
+So John began to wonder if, after all, he had been premature in his
+recognition. Perhaps this Jesus was but a precursor, as he himself
+was, of the Messiah. Evidently he continues firm in the conviction
+of Christ's being sent from God, and is ready to accept His answer
+as conclusive; but, as evidently, he is puzzled by the contrariety
+between Jesus' deeds and his own expectations. He asks, 'Art Thou
+_He that cometh_'--a well-known name for Messiah--'or are we to
+expect another?' where it should be noted that the word for
+'another' means not merely a second, but a different kind of,
+person, who should present the aspects of the Messiah as revealed in
+prophecy, and as embodied in John's own preaching, which Jesus had
+left unfulfilled.
+
+We may well take to heart the lesson of the fluctuations possible to
+the firmest faith, and pray to be enabled to hold fast that we have.
+We may learn, too, the danger to right conceptions of Christ, of
+separating the two elements of mercy and judgment in His character
+and work. John was right in believing that the Christ must come to
+judge. A Christ without the fan in His hand is a maimed Christ. John
+was wrong in stumbling at the gentleness, just as many to-day, who
+go to the opposite extreme, are wrong in stumbling at the judicial
+side of His work. Both halves are needed to make the full-orbed
+character. We have not to 'look for a different' Christ, but we have
+to look for Him, coming the second time, the same Jesus, but now
+with His axe in His pierced hands, to hew down trees which He has
+patiently tended. Let John's profound sense of the need for a
+judicial aspect in the Christ who is to meet the prophecies written
+in men's hearts, as well as in Scripture, teach us how one-sided and
+superficial are representations of His work which suppress or slur
+over His future coming to judgment.
+
+Our Lord does not answer 'Yes' or 'No.' To do so might have stilled,
+but would not have removed, John's misconception. A more thorough
+cure is needed. So Christ attacks it in its roots by referring him
+back for answer to the very deeds which had excited his doubt. In
+doing so, He points to, or indeed, we may say, quotes, two prophetic
+passages (Isa. xxxv. 5, 6; lxi. 1) which give the prophetic 'notes' of
+Messiah. It is as if He had said, 'Have you forgotten that the very
+prophets whose words have fed your hopes, and now seem to minister to
+your doubts, have said this and this about the Messiah?' Further,
+there is deep wisdom in sending John back again to think over the very
+deeds at which he was stumbling. It is not Christ's work which is
+wanting in conformity to the divine idea; it is John's conceptions of
+that idea that need enlarging. What he wants is not so much to be told
+that Jesus is the Christ, as to grow up to a truer, because more
+comprehensive, notion of what the Christ is to be. A wide principle is
+taught us here. The very points in Christ's work which may occasion
+difficulty, will, when we stand at the right point of view, become
+evidences of His claims. What were stumbling-blocks become
+stepping-stones. Arguments against become proofs of, the truth when we
+look at them with clearer eyes, and from the proper angle. Further, we
+are taught here, that what Christ does is the best answer to the
+question as to who He is. Still He is doing these works among us.
+Darkened eyes are flooded with light by His touch, and see a new
+world, because they gaze with faith on Him. Lame limbs are endowed
+with strength, and can run in the way of His commandments, and walk
+with unfainting perseverance the thorniest paths of duty and
+self-sacrifice. Lepers are cleansed from the rotting leprosy of sin,
+and their flesh comes again, 'as the flesh of a little child.' Deaf
+ears hear the voice of the Son of God, and the dead who hear live.
+Good news is preached to all the poor in spirit, and whosoever knows
+himself to be in need of all things may claim all things as his own in
+Christ. He who through the ages has been working such works, and works
+them still, 'needs not to speak anything' to confirm His claims,
+'neither is there salvation in any other.' We look for no second
+Christ; but we look for that same Jesus to come the second time to be
+the Judge of the world of which He is the Saviour.
+
+The benediction on him who finds none occasion of stumbling in
+Christ, is at once a beatitude and a warning. It rebukes in the
+gentlest fashion John's temper, which found difficulty in even the
+perfect personality of Jesus, and made that which should have been
+the 'sure foundation' of his spirit a stone of stumbling. Our Lord's
+consciousness of absolute perfection of moral character, and of
+absolute perfectness in His office and work, is distinct in the
+words. He knows that 'there is none occasion of stumbling in Him,'
+and that whoever finds any, brings it or makes it. He knows and
+warns us that all blessedness lies for us in recognising Him for
+what He is--God's sure foundation of our hopes, our peace, our
+thoughts, our lives. He knows that all woe and loss are involved in
+stumbling on this stone, against which whosoever falls is broken,
+and by which, when it begins to move, and falls on a man, he is
+ground to powder, like the dust of the threshing-floor. What
+tremendous arrogance of assertion! Who is he who can venture on such
+words without blasphemy against God, and universal ridicule from
+men?
+
+II. The witness of Christ to John. Praise from Jesus is praise
+indeed; and it is poured out here with no stinted hand on the
+languishing prisoner whose doubts had just been brought to Him. Such
+an eulogium at such a time is a wonderful instance of loving
+forbearance with a true-hearted follower's weakness, and of a desire
+which, in a man, we should call magnanimous, to shield John's
+character from depreciation on account of his message. The world
+praises a man to his face, and speaks of his faults behind his back.
+Christ does the opposite. Not till the messengers were departing
+does He begin to speak 'concerning John.' He lays bare the secret of
+the Baptist's power, and allocates his place as greatest in one
+epoch and as less than the least in another, with an authority more
+than human, and on principles which set Himself high above all
+comparison with men, whether the greatest or the least. The King
+places His subjects, and Himself sits enthroned above them all.
+
+First, Christ praises John's great personal character in the
+dramatic and vivid questions which begin this section. He recalls
+the scenes of popular enthusiasm when all Israel streamed out to the
+desert preacher. A small man could not have made such an upheaval.
+What drew the crowds? Just what will draw them; the qualities
+without which, either possessed in reality or in popular estimation,
+no man can be a power religiously. The first essential is heroic
+firmness. It was not reeds swaying in the wind by Jordan's banks,
+nor a poor feeble man like these, that the people flocked to listen
+to. His emblem was not the reed, but 'an iron pillar.' His whole
+career had been marked by decisiveness, constancy, courage. Nothing
+can be done worth doing in the world without a wholesome obstinacy
+and imperturbability, which keep a man true to his convictions and
+his task, whatever winds blow in his teeth. The multitudes will not
+flock to listen to a teacher who does not speak with the accent of
+conviction, nor will truths feebly grasped touch the lips with fire.
+The first requisite for a religious teacher is that he shall be sure
+of his message and of himself. Athanasius has to 'stand against the
+world' before the world accepts his teaching. 'Though there were as
+many devils in Worms as there are tiles on the house-tops, go I
+will,' said Luther. That is the temper for God's instruments.
+
+The next requisite, which John also had, is manifest indifference to
+material ease. Silken courtiers do not haunt the desert. Kings'
+houses, and not either the wilderness or kings' dungeons, are the
+sunny spots where they spread their plumage. If the gaunt ascetic,
+with his girdle of camel's hair and his coarse fare, had been a
+self-indulgent sybarite, his voice would never have shaken a nation.
+The least breath of suspicion that a preacher is such a man ends his
+power, and ought to end it; for self-indulgence and the love of
+fleshly comforts eat the heart out of goodness, and make the eyes
+too heavy to see visions. John was the same man then as they had
+known him to be; therefore it was no impatience of the hardships of
+his prison that had inspired his doubts.
+
+Our Lord next speaks of John's great office. He was a prophet. The
+dim recognition that God spoke in His fiery words had drawn the
+crowds, weary of teachers in whose endless jangle and jargon of
+casuistry was no inspiration. The voice of a man who gets his
+message at first-hand from God has a ring in it which even dull ears
+detect as something genuine. Alas for the bewildering babble of
+echoes and the paucity of voices to-day!
+
+So far Jesus had been appealing to His hearers' knowledge; He now
+goes on to add higher truth concerning John. He declares that he is
+more than a prophet, because he is His messenger before His face;
+that is, immediately preceding Himself. We cannot stay to comment on
+the remarkable variation between the original form of the quotation
+from Malachi and Christ's version of it, which, in its substitution
+of 'thee' for 'me,' bears so forcibly on the divinity of Christ; but
+we may mark the principle on which John's superiority to the whole
+prophetic order is based. It is that nearness to Jesus makes
+greatness. The closer the relation to Him, the higher the honour. In
+that long procession the King comes last; and of 'them that go
+before, crying, Hosanna to Him that cometh,' the order of precedence
+is that the first are last, and that the highest is he who walks in
+front of the Sovereign.
+
+Next, we have the limitations of the forerunner and his relative
+inferiority to the least in the kingdom of heaven. Another standard
+of greatness is here from that of the world, which smiles at the
+contrast between the uncultured preacher of repentance and the
+mighty thinkers, poets, legislators, kingdom-makers, whom it enrols
+among the great. In Christ's eyes greatness is nearness to Him, and
+understanding of Him and His work. Neither natural faculty nor worth
+is in question, but simply relation to the Kingdom and the King. He
+who had only to preach of Him who should come after him, and had but
+a partial apprehension of Christ and His work, stood on a lower
+level than the least who has to look to a Christ who has come, and
+has opened the gates of the kingdom to the humblest believer. The
+truths which were hid from ages, and were but visible as in morning
+twilight to John, are sunlit to us. The scholars in our Sunday-schools
+know familiarly more than prophets and kings ever knew. We 'hold the
+grey barbarian lower than the Christian child'; and not merely he, but
+the wisest of the prophets, and the forerunner himself. The history of
+the world is parted into two by the coming of Jesus Christ, as every
+dictionary of dates tells, and the least of the greater is greater than
+the greatest of the less. What a place, then, does Christ claim! Our
+relation to Him determines greatness. To recognise Him is to be in the
+Kingdom of Heaven. Union to Him brings us to fulfil the ideal of human
+nature; and this is life, to know and trust Him, the King.
+
+Our Lord adds a brief characterisation of the effect of John's
+ministry. It was of mingled good and evil, and there is a tone of
+sadness perceptible in the ambiguous words. John had aroused great
+popular excitement, and had stirred multitudes to seek to enter the
+Kingdom. So far was good. But had all the crowds understood what sort
+of kingdom it was? Had they not too often dragged down the lofty
+conception to their own vulgar level, and, with their dream of an
+outward sovereignty, thought to gain it for their own by violence
+instead of meekness, by arms and worldly force rather than by
+submission? The earnestness was good, but Christ's sad insight saw
+how much strange fire had mingled in the blaze, as if some earth-born
+smoky flame should seek to blend with the pure sunlight. Such seems
+the most natural interpretation of the words, but they are ambiguous,
+and may possibly mean by 'the violent' those who had been roused to
+genuine earnestness by the clarion voice which rang in the ears of
+that slumbering generation.
+
+Then follows the explanation of this new interest in the kingdom.
+'All the prophets and the law prophesied until John.' The whole
+period till his coming was one of preparation, and it all converged
+on the epoch of the forerunner. The eagerness to flock into the
+Kingdom which characterised his time would have been impossible in
+the earlier days. He closes that order of things, standing, as it
+were, on the isthmus between prophecy and fulfilment, belonging
+properly to neither, but having affinities with both, and being the
+transition from the one to the other. Then our Lord closes His words
+concerning John with the distinct statement, which He expects His
+hearers to have difficulty in receiving, probably from the
+contradiction to it which John's present condition seemed to give,
+that in him was fulfilled Malachi's prophecy of the sending of
+'Elijah the prophet before ... day of the Lord.' The fiery Tishbite,
+gaunt and grim, ascetic and solitary, who bearded Ahab, and flamed
+across a corrupt age with a stern message of repentance or
+destruction, was repeated in the lonely ascetic who had his Ahab in
+Herod, and his Jezebel in Herodias, and like his prototype, knew no
+fear, but flashed out the lightnings of his words on every sin. The
+two men were brothers, and their voices answer each other across the
+centuries. Christ crowns His witness to John while thus quoting the
+last swansong of ancient prophecy, and thereby at once sets John on
+a pinnacle of greatness, and advances a claim concerning Himself all
+the more weighty, because He leaves it to be inferred. 'He that hath
+ears to hear, let him hear'--this eulogium on the forerunner needs
+to be reflected on ere all its bearings are seen. If John was Elias,
+the day of the Lord was at hand, and 'the Sun of Righteousness' was
+already above the horizon. Jesus' witness concerning John ends in
+witness concerning Himself.
+
+
+
+
+THE FRIEND OF PUBLICANS AND SINNERS
+
+
+    'The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say,
+    Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of
+    publicans and sinners. But wisdom is justified of her
+    children,'--MATT. xi. 19.
+
+Jesus very seldom took notice of His enemies' slanders. 'When He was
+reviled He reviled not again.' If ever He did, it was for the sake
+of those whom it harmed to distort His beauty. Thus, here He speaks,
+without the slightest trace of irritation, of the capricious
+inconsistency of condemning Himself and John on precisely opposite
+grounds. John will not suit them because he neither eats nor drinks.
+Well, one would think that Jesus would be hailed since He does both.
+But He pleases them just as little. What was at the root of this
+contrary working dislike? It was the dislike for the truths they
+both preached, the rejection of the wisdom of which they were the
+messengers. When men do not like the message, nothing that the
+messengers do, or are, is right. Never mind consistency, but object
+to this form of Christian teaching that it is too harsh, and to
+that, that it is too soft; to this man that he is always thundering
+condemnation, to that, that he is always preaching mercy; to one,
+that he has too much to say about duty, to another, that he dwells
+too much on grace; to this presentation of the gospel, that it is
+too learned and doctrinal, to that, that it is too sentimental and
+emotional, and so on, and so on. The generation of children who
+neither like piping nor lamenting, lives still.
+
+But my purpose now is not to dwell on the conduct with which our
+Lord is dealing, but on this caricature of Him which His own lips
+repeat without a sign of anger. It is the only calumny of
+antagonists reported by Himself. We owe our knowledge of its
+currency to this saying. Like other words of His enemies, this
+saying is a distorted refraction of His glory. The facts it embodies
+are facts; the conclusions it draws are false. If Jesus had not come
+eating and drinking, He could not have been called gluttonous and a
+wine-bibber. If He had not drawn publicans and sinners to Him in a
+conspicuous manner and degree, He could not have been called their
+friend. The charge, like all others, is a tribute. Let us try to see
+what was the blessed truth that it caricatured. We may take the two
+points separately, for though closely connected they are distinct,
+and cover different ground.
+
+I. His enemies' witness to Christ's participation in common life.
+
+(_a_) That participation witnesses to His true manhood.
+
+Significant use of 'Son of Man' in context.
+
+Because He is so, He must pass into all human circumstances.
+
+Looked at in the light of incarnation, the simple fact that He
+shared our common lot in all things assumes proportions of majestic
+condescension.
+
+Extend to all physical necessities, and to simple material
+pleasures.
+
+What a witness this hostile criticism is to Christ's genial
+identification of Himself with homely feasters!
+
+(_b_) It sets forth the highest type of manhood.
+
+John could be ascetic, but the Pattern Man could not.
+
+The true perfecting of humanity is not the extirpation, but the
+control, of the flesh by the spirit. And in accordance with this
+thought, we may see in the eating and drinking Christ, the pattern
+for the religious life. Asceticism is not the noblest form of
+sanctity. There is nothing more striking in Old Testament than the
+way in which its heroes and saints mingle in all ordinary duties.
+They are warriors, statesmen, shepherds, they buy, they sell.
+Asceticism came later, along with formalisms of other sorts. When
+devotion cools, it is crusted with superstition and external marks
+of godliness. Propriety in posturing in worship, casuistry in the
+interpretation of law, and abstinence from common enjoyments, came
+in Pharisaic times. And into such a world Jesus came, eating and
+drinking.
+
+But His bearing in these matters is example for us. They were
+rigidly kept in subordination. They were all done in communion with
+God.
+
+So He has hallowed all by taking part in them.
+
+Christ should be present in all our material enjoyments. If you
+cannot think that He is with you, if you cannot conceive of His
+being there, that is no place for you. If you cannot feel that He
+approves, that is no fit enjoyment for you.
+
+The tendency of this day is to take a wider view of the liberty
+allowed to Christians in regard to partaking in material enjoyment,
+and I dare say that many of you who have thought that I spoke well
+in insisting on all things belonging to the Christian, will think
+that I am dropping back into the old narrow groove in my next
+remark, that all such thoughts need guarding.
+
+One has heard the example of Christ invoked to justify unchristian
+laxity and excess. Therefore I wish to say that the liberty
+permitted to Christians in these matters is to be limited within the
+limits within which Christ's was confined.
+
+The excessive use of innocent things is not justified by His
+example, nor is the use of things innocent in themselves, which are
+mixed up with harmful things.
+
+Christ's example does not warrant the importance attached to luxury,
+the waste on mere eating and drinking. It is sometimes quoted as
+against total abstinence. It has no bearing on the question. But if
+He gave up heaven for His brethren, I think that they who give up an
+indulgence for the sake of theirs are in the line of His action. I
+venture to think that if Jesus Christ lived in England to-day, He
+would be a total abstinence fanatic.
+
+'If thy hand offend thee, cut it off.' Asceticism is not the
+highest, but it is sometimes necessary. If my indulgence in innocent
+things hurts me, or if my abstinence from them would help others, or
+increase my power for good, or if innocent things are intertwisted
+with things not innocent, then it is vain to try to shelter under
+Christ's example, and the only right course for His disciple is to
+abridge his liberty. He came eating and drinking, therefore His
+followers may use all innocent earthly blessings and bodily
+pleasures, subject to this one law: 'Whether ye eat or drink, or
+whatever ye do, do all to the glory of God,' and to this solemn
+warning: 'He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap
+corruption.'
+
+II. His enemies' witness to Jesus as the friend of the outcasts.
+
+The fact was that He drew them to Himself and evidently was glad to
+have them round Him. The inference natural to low natures was
+_noscitur a sociis_ and that the bond between Him and them was
+common evil tendencies and ways. His censors could not conceive of
+any one's seeking the outcasts from pity and for their good.
+
+(_a_) Christ's consorting with these was the revelation of His
+love to them.
+
+It meant no complicity with, nor minimising of, sinfulness.
+
+His sternness is as conspicuous as His love.
+
+He warned, rebuked, tried to win back.
+
+The highest purity is not repellent to sinners.
+
+So in Jesus is the combination of tenderest love and intense moral
+earnestness.
+
+How difficult for anything but actual sight of such a life to have
+painted it! Where did the evangelists get such an embodiment of two
+attitudes so unlike each other, and which we so seldom see united in
+fact? I venture to think that the combination in perfect harmony and
+proportion of these, is a strong presumption in favour of the
+historical truth of the Christ of the gospels.
+
+But remember that if we take His own statement ('He that hath seen
+Me hath seen the Father'), we are to see in this kindly consorting
+with sinners not only the love of a perfectly pure manhood, but a
+revelation of the heart of God. And that adds wonderfulness and awe
+to the fact. This man to whom sinners were drawn by strange
+attraction, in whom they found the highest purity and yet softest
+tenderness, therein revealed God.
+
+(_b_) It witnesses to His boundless hope.
+
+No outcasts were hopeless in His view. To man's eyes there are
+hopeless classes, but He sees deeper. 'Perhaps a spark lies hid.'
+There are dormant possibilities in all souls.
+
+None are so hard as that they cannot be melted by the high
+temperature of love, just as there are no metals that cannot be
+volatilised if exposed to intense heat.
+
+Carry the most thick-ribbed ice into the sun and it will thaw.
+
+So the Christian view of mankind is much more hopeful than that of
+mere educationists or moralists.
+
+None of them paint human nature so black as it does, but none of
+them have such boundless confidence in the possibility of making it
+lustrously white.
+
+Urge, then, that none are beyond the power of Christ's gospel. His
+divine Spirit can change any man. There are no incurables in the
+judgment of the great Physician.
+
+(_c_) It witnesses to the truth that gross sin does not shut
+out from Him so much as does self-complacent ignorance of our own
+need.
+
+'They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.'
+Where should the physician be but at the sick man's bedside?
+
+The one impassable barrier between us and Christ is fancying that we
+are not sinners and do not need Him.
+
+This boundless hopefulness and seeking after the outcasts is the
+unique glory of Christianity. What has been the mainspring of all
+movements for their elevation? What broke the chains of slavery?
+What has sent men to the ends of the earth for the elevation of
+savage races? What is the motive power in the benevolent works of
+this day? Is it philosophical altruism or is it Christian faith? No
+doubt, there are some sporadic movements among people who do not
+accept the gospel. At present, I do not ask how far these are due to
+the underground influence of Christianity filtering to men who stand
+apart from it. But I gravely doubt whether you will ever get any
+large, continuous, self-sacrificing efforts for the outcasts, unless
+they are the direct result of the spirit of Christ moving on men who
+owe their own deliverance to Him. We have not yet seen agnostic
+missionary societies or the like.
+
+This spirit must mark all living Christianity. If ever churches
+forget their obligations to the publicans and sinners, they will
+cease to grow. It will be a sign that they have lost their hold of
+Christ. They will soon die, and no mourners will attend their
+funerals. It is a good sign to-day that all Christian churches are
+waking up to feel more their obligations to the outcasts. Only, we
+must take heed that we go to them as Christ did, making no
+compromise with sin, speaking no false flatteries, and bent on one
+thing, their emancipation from the evil which is slaying them.
+
+Let us all take the blessed thought for ourselves, that Jesus Christ
+is our friend because He is the friend of sinners, and we are
+sinners. Degrees of sinfulness vary, but the fact is invariable. The
+universality of sinfulness makes the universality of Christ's love
+the more wonderful and blessed. If He did not love sinners, there
+would be none for Him to love. We may be His enemies, or may neglect
+all His beseechings; but He is still our friend, wishing us well,
+and desiring to bless us. But He cannot give us His deepest
+friendship unless we are willing to recognise our sin. We must come
+to Him on the footing of transgressors if we are to come to Him at
+all.
+
+He will deliver us from our sins.
+
+Appeal to give hearts to Him.
+
+How has He shown His friendship? 'Greater love hath no man than
+this,' that 'while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.'
+
+To be friends of Christ is the highest honour and blessing.
+
+'Ye are my friends if ye do whatsoever I command you.'
+
+'He was called the friend of God.' Abraham's name in Mohammedan
+lands is still El Khalil, the companion or friend. That is our
+highest title. Christ's friends will not continue sinners.
+
+
+
+
+SODOM, CAPERNAUM, MANCHESTER
+
+
+    'Then began He to upbraid the cities wherein most of
+    His mighty works were done, because they repented not.'
+    --MATT. xi. 20.
+
+These words, and the woes which they introduce, are found in another
+connection in Luke's Gospel. He attaches them to his report of the
+mission of the seventy disciples. Matthew here introduces them in an
+order which seems not to depend upon time, but upon identity of
+subject. It is his method in his Gospel to group together similar
+events, as we have it exemplified, for instance, in the Sermon on
+the Mount, and in the long procession of miracles which immediately
+follows it, as well as in other parts of the Gospel. In this chapter
+it is not difficult to discover the common idea which binds its
+parts into a whole. We have a number of instances strung together,
+illustrating the different effects of Christ's appearance and work
+on different classes of persons. There pass before us, John the
+Baptist with his doubts, the excitable multitude ready to take the
+Kingdom of Heaven by storm, the critics who cavilled with impartial
+inconsistency alike at John's asceticism and at Christ's freedom.
+Then follow the woes pronounced by Him upon the indifference of
+those who knew Him best, and these are succeeded by His rejoicing in
+spirit over the babes who accepted Him; and the whole is crowned by
+great words of invitation which extend equally over those and over
+all other varieties of disposition, and, since all 'labour and are
+heavy laden,' summon all, be they what they may, to come and find
+rest in Him. Obviously, then, the order in this chapter is not that
+of time, but that of subject.
+
+Notice that of all these different classes and types of character
+that pass in review before us, the one that is singled out for the
+solemn denunciation of heavy judgment is that of the people who
+stood in a blaze of light, and simply paid no attention to it. These
+are the worst sort. I wonder how many of them are in my audience
+now?
+
+Let me try, then, to bring before you the thoughts naturally
+suggested by these introductory words, and the solemn, sorrowful
+forebodings of retribution which follow them. I ask you to look at
+three things,--the blaze of light; the neglect of the light; the
+rebuke for the neglected light. 'Jesus began to upbraid the cities
+wherein most of His mighty works were done.'
+
+I. First, then, consider the blaze of light.
+
+According to the words of my text, the larger number of the miracles
+of our Lord were wrought in these three places. 'Cities,' our Bible
+calls them; two of them were little fishing villages, the third a
+somewhat considerable town. Where are these miracles recorded? Not
+in our gospels. As for Chorazin, we never hear its name except in
+this verse, and in the parallel in Luke's Gospel; and all that He
+did there is swallowed up in oblivion. As for Bethsaida, there are a
+couple of miracles, probably, recorded as having been wrought there,
+though there is some obscurity in reference to the locality of at
+least one of them. As for Capernaum, there are several miracles
+recorded as having been performed in that place, and several others
+referred to as having been done there. But there is nothing in the
+four gospels that would suggest the statement of the text.
+
+Now the inference (which has nothing to do with my present subject,
+but which I just note in passing) is,--how extremely fragmentary and
+incomplete these four gospels avowedly are! They harvest for us a
+few ears plucked in the great waving cornfield,--and all the others
+withered and died where they grew. The light falls upon one or two
+groups in the crowd of miserables whom He helped, the rest lie in
+dim shadow. You have to think of dozens, I suppose I should not be
+exaggerating if I were to say hundreds, of miracles unrecorded but
+known, lying behind the specimens that we have in the gospels. 'Many
+other things truly did Jesus, which are not written in this book.'
+
+Our Lord takes these two little fishing villages, and He parallels
+and contrasts them with the two great maritime cities of Tyre and
+Sidon, and says that these insignificant places have far more light
+than those had. Then He isolates Capernaum, a place of more
+importance, and His own usual settled residence; and, in like
+manner, He contrasts it with the long-buried Sodom, and proclaims
+the superiority of the illumination which fell on the more modern
+three. Why were they so superior? Because they had Moses? because
+they had the prophets, the law, the temple, the priesthood? By no
+means. Because they had _Him_. So He sets Himself forth as
+being the highest and clearest of all the revelations that God has
+made to the world, and asserts that in Him, in His character, in His
+deeds, men ought to find motives that should bow them in penitence
+before God; motives sweeter, tenderer, stronger than any that the
+world knows besides. There is no such light of the knowledge of the
+glory of God anywhere else as there is in the face of Jesus Christ.
+And oh! brother; no thoughts of the nobleness of rectitude, and the
+imperfection of one's own life, no thoughts of a divine justice and
+a divine punishment, will bow a man in penitence like having once
+caught a glimpse of the perfect sweetness and perfect beauty of the
+perfect Humanity that is revealed to us in Jesus Christ.
+
+But now, mark;--as Capernaum is to Sodom, so is Manchester to
+Capernaum! I wonder if Jesus Christ were to come amongst us now,
+whether He would not repeat in spirit the same lesson that is in my
+text, and bid us contrast our greater illumination with the morning
+twilight that dawned upon these men, and yet was light enough to
+bring condemnation? Think,--these people of whom our Lord is
+speaking here, and setting them high above Tyre and Sidon and Sodom,
+knew nothing about His cross, death, resurrection, ascension. They
+knew Him only as 'a dubious Name,' as a possible Divine Messenger
+and a Miracle-worker; but all the sweetest and the deepest thoughts
+about Him lay unrevealed. Whilst they stood but in the morning
+twilight, you and I stand in the noonday blaze. _They_ might be
+pardoned for doubting whether the light that shone from Him was
+sunshine or candle, but men of this twentieth century, who have the
+whole story of Christ, which is the gospel for the world, wrought
+out through all the tragedy and pathos of His death, and triumph and
+power of His resurrection, and who have, besides, the history of the
+world and of the Church for nineteen centuries, are more
+unpardonable unless they listen to Him with penitence and faith,
+than were any of His contemporaries.
+
+My brother, we stand in the very focus and fountain, as it were, of
+the heavenly radiance. A whole Christ, a crucified Christ, a risen
+Christ, an ascended Christ, a Christ who is the Lord of the Spirit,
+a Christ who through the centuries is saving and blessing men, a
+Christ who can point to nineteen hundred years and say, 'That is My
+work, in so far as it is good and noble,'--this Christ shines with a
+clearer evidence than the Miracle-worker of Capernaum and Bethsaida.
+And to you the word comes, 'If the mighty works which have been done
+in _thee_, had been done in Bethsaida and Chorazin, they would
+have remained until this day.'
+
+There are many of you here saturated with the knowledge of the
+gospel, who from childhood have heard it and heard it and heard it.
+You have lived in the light all your days. Alas! 'If the light that
+is' round 'thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!'
+
+II. That brings me in the next place to notice the negligent
+indifference to the Light in all its blaze.
+
+The men of these three little fishing towns were not sinners above
+all the Galileans of their day. Their crime was that they did
+nothing. No persecution is recorded as having been raised against
+Him by them; there were no angry antagonisms, no scornful words, no
+violent opposition. They simply stolidly stood like some black rock
+in the sunshine, and let the sunshine pour down upon them, and
+remained grim and black as ever. That was all.
+
+That is to say, the thing that brings down the severest rebuke is not
+the angry antagonism of the men who are contending in half-darkness,
+with a misunderstood and therefore disliked Christ, but the sleek,
+passive apathy that is never touched deeper than its ears by the
+message of God's word. It is not a difficult thing to incur this
+condemnation. You have simply to do what some of you are doing, and
+have been doing all your lives, as to Christianity, and that is--nothing!
+You have simply to acquiesce politely and respectfully, as many of you
+do, and say you are Christians; and there an end. You have simply to
+take my words (as I fear so many of those that listen to them do) as
+matters of course, the proper things to be said on a Sunday, and for me
+to say, which may be very true in some vague, general way, but which
+have no felt application to _you_. That is all you have to do.
+It is quite enough. Negative vices will ruin a man, in mind, body, and
+estate; and the negative sin of simple indifference avails to put a
+barrier between you and Jesus Christ, through which none of His blessing
+can filter. If a sailor does _not_ lash himself to something fixed,
+the next sea that comes across the deck will do the rest. If a sick man
+does _not_ take the medicine, by doing nothing he has committed
+suicide. And simple passivity, that is to say (to translate it out
+of Latin into good, honest English), doing nothing, is all that is
+needed in order to part you from Christ and Christ from you. He
+'upbraided the cities because they repented _not_.'
+
+One can fancy some well-to-do and thoroughly respectable and
+clean-living native of Capernaum saying, 'What! those foul beasts in
+Sodom better off than I? Impossible!' Well, Jesus Christ says so
+upon very intelligible grounds. The measure of light is the measure
+of responsibility. That is one ground. And the not preferring Him is
+the preferring of self and the world, and that is the sin of sins.
+He will 'convince the world of sin because they believe not on Me.'
+
+Now, one more point, viz. this gelatinous kind of indifference, as
+of a disposition not stiff enough to take any impression, is found
+most deeply seated, and hopeless, amongst--shall I venture?--amongst
+people like _you_, who have been listening, listening, listening, until
+your systems have become so habituated to this Christian preaching
+that it does not produce the least effect. It all runs off you like
+rain off waterproof. You have waterproofed your consciences and your
+spiritual susceptibilities by long habit of listening and doing nothing.
+
+And some of you have come to this point, that you positively rather
+like the titillation and excitement, slight though it may be, which
+is produced by coming in contact now and then with a good, wholesome,
+rousing Christian appeal. Not that you ever intend to do anything,
+but it is pleasant to see a man in earnest, and preaching as if he
+believed what he was saying. And so perhaps some of you are feeling
+here to-night.
+
+Ah! my dear friends, it is possible for a man to live by the side of
+Niagara until he cannot hear the cataract; and it is an awful thing
+for men and women to live under the sound of Christian teaching
+until it produces no more effect upon their wills and natures than
+the ringing of the church bells, to which they pay no attention.
+
+You do not know the despair that comes over us preachers time after
+time, as we look down upon the faces of our congregations, and feel,
+'What _shall_ I do to put a sharp enough point upon this truth
+to get it into the heart of some man that has been sitting there as
+long as I have been standing here, and is never a bit the better for
+it?' Our most earnest preaching is like putting a red-hot iron into
+a pond: the cold water puts it out and closes above it, and there is
+no more heard nor seen of it. Our old Puritan forefathers used to
+talk about 'gospel-hardened hearers.' I believe that there are
+people listening to me now who have become so inured to Christian
+preaching that, like artillery horses, they will not move a muscle
+or quiver if a whole battery of cannon is fired off under their
+noses. God knows I despair sometimes, many a time, when I think of
+the hundreds of people to whom I speak, year after year, and how
+there seems next to nothing in the world to come of it all.
+
+III. Now lastly, notice here the rebuke of this negligence of the
+light.
+
+'He began to upbraid the cities.' But oh! we shall misunderstand Him
+and His purpose if we think that that upbraiding was anything but
+the sorrowful expression of His own loving heart, which warned of
+what was coming in order that He might never need to send it.
+'_Woe_ unto you; _woe_ unto you,' and His own lips quivered and His own
+heart felt the woe, as He laid bare the sin and foreannounced the
+retribution.
+
+I do not feel that I dare dwell upon, or that it beseems me to say
+much about, this solemn thought. Only, dear friends, I do desire, if
+I could, to wake some of you to look realities for once in the face,
+and to be sure of this, that retribution is proportioned to light,
+and that the sin of sins is the rejection of Jesus Christ. Beneath
+the broad folds of that 'more tolerable' there lie infinite degrees
+of retribution. The same deed done by a group of men may be
+indefinitely varied in its culpability, according to the motives and
+the clearness of knowledge which accompany or prompt the doing of
+it. And so, just because the life beyond is the accurate outcome and
+issue of the whole character and conduct, estimated according to
+motive and knowledge, therefore there must be differences infinitely
+wide between the fate of the servant that knew his Lord's will, and
+the servant that knew not.
+
+Where do you think we gospel-drenched English men and women will
+stand in that allocation of culpability? I do not presume to say
+more, but I beseech you,--let no present controversies about the
+duration and the possible termination of retribution in another
+state, or the possible prolongation of a probation into another
+state, blind you to the fact that however these questions be
+settled, this is a truth, independent of them, but being forgotten
+amidst the dust of controversy, that the next life is a life of
+retribution, and that there you and I will give account of our
+deeds, and chiefly of our attitude to Jesus.
+
+And now let me say, in one word,--hoisting the danger-signal is the
+work of kindness, and Jesus Christ was never more loving than when
+from His lips there came these words, heavy with His own sorrow, and
+stern with the prophecy of retribution. I know that Christian
+teachers have often spoken of the solemn things beyond, in tones
+much to be deplored, and which weaken the force of their message.
+But surely, surely, if we believe in a judgment to come, and if we
+believe that some of those that listen to us are in peril of it,
+surely, surely, the plainest duty is that with tears in our voice
+and pleading tenderness in our tone, seeing the sword coming, we
+should give warning, and beseech men to flee for refuge to the hope
+of the Gospel. The solemn words that we have been looking at now,
+lead up to, and are intended to make more impressive and gracious,
+the invitation with which this chapter ends: 'Come unto Me, all ye
+that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.'
+
+Dear friends, we stand in the blaze of the light. Our familiarity
+with Jesus Christ may be our ruin. We are tempted to pay no heed to
+His words because we know them so well. Neglect of Christ on your
+part will bring deeper woes on your head than the people of
+Capernaum pulled down upon theirs. The brighter the sunshine, the
+louder the thunder and the fiercer the lightning; the longer the
+summer day, the longer the winter night; the closer the comet comes
+to the sun, the further away it plunges, at the other extremity of
+its orbit, into space and darkness. So I beseech you, listen as if
+you had never heard it before, and listen as if your lives depended
+upon it (as indeed they do) to that merciful invitation, 'Come unto
+Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden,' and then you will get
+rest for your souls here, and at that day when Sodom and Capernaum
+and Manchester--they and we--shall stand before His throne, you may
+lift up your eyes, and be glad to see who it is that sits on the
+tribunal, and that you learned to know and love the face of your
+Saviour, before you saw Him enthroned as your Judge.
+
+
+
+
+CHRIST'S STRANGE THANKSGIVING
+
+
+    'I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth,
+    because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and
+    prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.'
+    --MATT. xi. 25.
+
+When Jesus was about to cure one dumb man, He lifted up His eyes to
+heaven and sighed. Sorrow filled His soul in the act of working
+deliverance. The thought of the depth of the miseries He had come to
+heal, and of the ocean of them which He was then diminishing but by
+one poor drop, saddened Him. When Jesus thought of the woes that had
+fallen on the impenitent Sodom, and of the worse that still remained
+to be revealed at the day of judgment, He rejoiced in spirit.
+Strange! and yet all in harmony with His depth of love. This once,
+and this once only, do we read that His heart filled with joy. Did
+He lift up His solemn thanksgiving to God, for the woes that had
+fallen on Chorazin? Oh no! For the blinding of the wise and prudent?
+Oh no! For the revelation to babes? Yes, and not only for that, but
+for that full and universal offer and possibility of salvation,
+which forms the reason for both the revelation to babes and the
+hiding from the wise. If we attend to the connection of this passage
+we get light on its force. It begins with a clear prophecy of
+endless woe and sorrow upon the rejecters. Then comes my text,
+alleviating the terror of that thought of destruction by showing the
+principles on which the reception and rejection are especially
+based, the sort of people who receive and who reject. Then follows
+the reason why the wise are shut out and the babes let in. That
+reason is not only God's inscrutable decree, but something in the
+very nature of the Gospel. God is hidden from all human sight. There
+is one divine Revealer apart from whom all is darkness. 'Neither
+doth any man know the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the
+Son willeth to reveal Him.' That is the characteristic which shuts
+out the wise and lets in the simple.
+
+Then follows the great call to all to come to Him. The practical
+issue of all these solemn thoughts is that the Gospel is a Gospel
+for all the world, and that the one qualification for coming within
+the terms of its offer is to be 'weary and heavy laden.' Thus all
+ends in the broad universality of the message, in its adaptation to
+all, in its offer to all; and thus it is shown that every apparent
+exclusion of any is but the result of its free offer to all, and
+that to say 'Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent'
+is but to say, 'Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the
+waters.' Well then might joy fill the heart of the Man of Sorrows.
+Well might He lift up His solemn thanksgiving to God and say, 'I
+thank Thee, Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth.'
+
+Consider--
+
+I. The Great Characteristics of the Gospel.
+
+We shall only understand the ground of the revealing and of the
+hiding if we understand what it is which is offered. It is of such a
+nature as necessarily to involve a twofold effect, caused by a
+twofold attitude towards it.
+
+1. The Gospel addresses itself to all men--man as man--not to what
+is sectional or accidental, not to classes, not to schools, not to
+the _élite_. It is broad and universal. It speaks no dialect of
+a province, but the universal language. It is addressed to Man as
+Man. 'We have all of us one human heart.' It appeals to the noble
+and the peasant, to the beggar on the dunghill and to the prince on
+his throne, in precisely the same fashion. It is equal as the
+providence of God, impartial as the light, universal as the air
+which reddens equally the blood that flows in long-descended veins
+and that of the foundling on the streets. In its sublime
+universality there are no distinctions. Death and the Gospel know no
+ranks. In both, 'the rich and the poor meet together, the Lord is
+the Maker of them all.' 'In Christ Jesus there is neither
+circumcision nor uncircumcision.' The blue sky which bends above all
+alike is like that great word.
+
+2. It treats all as utterly helpless.
+
+3. It offers to all Redemption as their most pressing want.
+Consequently, in substance it is the gift not of culture, but
+deliverance, and in form it is not a theory but a fact, not a system
+of _credenda_ but an action, not an _-ology_ but a power.
+
+4. It demands from all submission and trust.
+
+These being the characteristics, consider--
+
+II. The qualifications for reception as necessarily resulting from
+the characteristics.
+
+The persons who receive must be those who consent to take the
+station which the Gospel assigns. They must be babes, by which is
+meant not such as are innocent, but such as are reliant on a higher
+Power, self-distrustful, willing to obey.
+
+These qualifications are all moral. The organ for reception of the
+Gospel is the heart, not the head. To receive it by faith is a
+spiritual, not an intellectual process. Ignorance is no
+qualification nor no disqualification. Ignorance or knowledge is
+immaterial. The one condition is to be willing to accept.
+
+III. The disqualification of the wise as necessarily resulting from
+the qualification.
+
+The organ for the reception is not the head but the heart.
+Therefore, wisdom is a barrier only in this way, that it has nothing
+to do in the matter. Its presence or its absence is quite
+indifferent here as in many other spheres of experience. The joys of
+the affections, the joys of common emotions, the joys of bodily
+life--all these are utterly independent of the culture of the
+understanding.
+
+Hence 'wisdom' becomes a barrier, because its possessors are
+accustomed to think it the master key. Not intellect, but the pride
+of intellect, trusting in it, glorying in wisdom is the
+disqualification.
+
+It is not true that there is any discord between religion and
+cultivated thought. The loftier the soul, the loftier all its
+attributes, the nobler should be, may be, its religion. It is not
+true that there is any natural affinity between ignorance and
+religion, between narrow understandings and deep faith. That is not
+the Bible truth. The religion of Christ is not like owls that love
+the twilight, but like eagles that 'purge their sight at the very
+fountain itself of heavenly radiance.'
+
+Take history: the great names--an Augustine and a Luther, a Dante
+and a Milton, a Bacon and a Pascal--are enough to show that there is
+no antagonism. On the other hand, names enough rise to show that
+there is no alliance. The inference is that the intellect has little
+to do with a man's attitude towards the Revelation of God in Christ,
+but that the moral is all.
+
+Let me close with the repetition of the thought that the apparent
+exclusion is the result of the universality, and that 'Come unto Me'
+is Christ's commentary on my text. Well then may we rejoice when we
+think of a gospel for the world. Whatever you are, it is for you if
+you are a man. However foolish, though you cannot read a letter and
+know nothing, it is for you. If you be enriched with all knowledge,
+you must come on the same terms as that beggar at your side. That is
+a healthy discipline. You are more than a student, than a scholar,
+than a thinker; you are a man, you are a sinful man. There is a
+deeper chamber in your heart than any into which knowledge can
+penetrate. Christ brings a gospel for all. When we think of it, with
+its sublime disregard of all peculiarities, we may well rejoice with
+him who said, 'Ye see your calling, brethren,' and with Him, the
+loftiest, the incarnate, Wisdom who said, 'I thank Thee, Father.'
+For if you rightly grasp the bearing of this text, and mark what
+follows it in our Lord's heart and thoughts, you will see these deep
+eyes of solemn joy turned from the heaven to you, filmy with
+compassion, and those hands, then lifted in rapt devotion, stretched
+out to beckon you and all the world to His breast, and hear the
+voice that rose in that burst of thanksgiving melting into
+tenderness as it woos you, be you wise or ignorant, to come to Him
+and rest.
+
+
+
+
+THE REST GIVER
+
+
+    'Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden,
+    and I will give you rest. 29. Take My yoke upon you,
+    and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and
+    ye shall find rest unto your souls.'--MATT. xi. 28, 29.
+
+One does not know whether tenderness or majesty is predominant in
+these wonderful words. A divine penetration into man's true
+condition, and a divine pity, are expressed in them. Jesus looks
+with clearsighted compassion into the inmost history of all hearts,
+and sees the toil and the sorrow which weigh on every soul. And no
+less remarkable is the divine consciousness of power, to succour and
+to help, which speaks in them. Think of a Jewish peasant of thirty
+years old, opening his arms to embrace the world, and saying to all
+men, 'Come and rest on My breast.' Think of a man supposing himself
+to be possessed of a charm which could soothe all sorrow and lift
+the weight from every heart.
+
+A great sculptor has composed a group where there diverge from the
+central figure on either side, in two long lines, types of all the
+cruel varieties of human pains and pangs; and in the midst stands,
+calm, pure, with the consciousness of power and love in His looks,
+and with outstretched hands, as if beckoning invitation and dropping
+benediction, Christ the Consoler. The artist has but embodied the
+claim which the Master makes for Himself here. No less remarkable is
+His own picture of Himself, as 'meek and lowly in heart.' Did ever
+anybody before say, 'I am humble,' without provoking the comment,
+'He that says he is humble proves that he is not'? But Jesus Christ
+said it, and the world has allowed the claim; and has answered,
+'Though Thou bearest record of Thyself, Thy record is true.'
+
+But my object now is not so much to deal with the revelation of our
+Lord contained in these marvellous words, as to try, as well as I
+can, to re-echo, however faintly, the invitation that sounds in
+them. There is a very striking reduplication running through them
+which is often passed unnoticed. I shall shape my remarks so as to
+bring out that feature of the text, asking you to look first with me
+at the twofold designation of the persons addressed; next at the
+twofold invitation; and last at the twofold promise of rest.
+
+I. Consider then the twofold designation here of the persons
+addressed, 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden.'
+
+The one word expresses effort and toil, the other a burden and
+endurance. The one speaks of the active, the other of the passive,
+side of human misery and evil. Toil is work which is distasteful in
+itself, or which is beyond our faculties. Such toil, sometime or
+other, more or less, sooner or later, is the lot of every man. All
+work becomes labour, and all labour, sometime or other, becomes
+toil. The text is, first of all, and in its most simple and surface
+meaning, an invitation to all the men who know how ceaseless, how
+wearying, how empty the effort and energy of life is, to come to
+this Master and rest.
+
+You remember those bitter words of the Book of Ecclesiastes, where
+the preacher sets forth a circle of labour that only comes back to
+the point where it began, as being the law for nature and the law
+for man. And truly much of our work seems to be no better than that.
+We are like squirrels in a cage, putting forth immense muscular
+effort, and nothing to show for it after all. 'All is vanity, and
+striving after wind.'
+
+Toil is a curse; work is a blessing. But all our work darkens into
+toil; and the invitation, 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour,'
+reaches to the very utmost verge of the world and includes every
+soul.
+
+And then, in like manner, the other side of human experience is set
+forth in that other word. For most men have not only to work, but to
+bear; not only to toil, but to sorrow. There are efforts that need
+to be put forth, which task all our energy, and leave the muscles
+flaccid and feeble. And many of us have, at one and the same moment,
+to work and to weep, to toil whilst our hearts are beating like a
+forge-hammer; to labour whilst memories and thoughts that might
+enfeeble any worker, are busy with us. A burden of sorrow, as well
+as effort and toil, is, sooner or later, the lot of all men.
+
+But that is only surface. The twofold designation here before us
+goes a great deal deeper than that. It points to two relationships
+to God and to God's law of righteousness. Men labour with vague and
+yet with noble effort, sometimes, to do the thing that is right, and
+after all efforts there is left a burden of conscious defect. In the
+purest and the highest lives there come both of these things. And
+Jesus Christ, in this merciful invitation of His, speaks to all the
+men that have tried, and tried in vain, to satisfy their consciences
+and to obey the law of God, and says to them, 'Cease your efforts,
+and no longer carry that burden of failure and of sin upon your
+shoulders. Come unto Me, and I will give you rest.'
+
+I should be sorry to think that I was speaking to any man or woman
+who had not, more or less, tried to do what is right. You have
+laboured at that effort with more or less of consistency, with more
+or less of earnestness. Have you not found that you could not
+achieve it?
+
+I am sure that I am speaking to no man or woman who has not upon his
+or her conscience a great weight of neglected duties, of actual
+transgressions, of mean thoughts, of foul words and passions, of
+deeds that they would be ashamed that any should see; ashamed that
+their dearest should catch a glimpse of. My friend, universal
+sinfulness is no mere black dogma of a narrow Calvinism; it is no
+uncharitable indictment against the race; it is simply putting into
+definite words the consciousness that is in every one of your
+hearts. You know that, whether you like to think about it or not,
+you have broken God's law, and are a sinful man. You carry a burden
+on your back whether you realise the fact or no, a burden that clogs
+all your efforts, and that will sink you deeper into the darkness
+and the mire. 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour,' and with noble,
+but, at bottom, vain, efforts have striven after right and truth.
+'Come unto Me all ye that are burdened,' and bear, sometimes
+forgetting it, but often reminded of its pressure by galled
+shoulders and wearied limbs, the burden of sin on your bent backs.
+
+This invitation includes the whole race. In it, as in a blank form,
+you may each insert your name. Jesus Christ speaks to thee, John,
+Thomas, Mary, Peter, whatever thy name may be, as distinctly as if
+you saw your name written on the pages of your New Testament, when
+He says to you, 'Come unto Me, _all_ ye that labour and are
+heavy laden.' For the 'all' is but the sum of the units; and I, and
+thou, and thou, have our place within the word.
+
+II. Now, secondly, look at the twofold invitation that is here.
+
+'Come unto Me ... Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me.' These two
+things are not the same. 'Coming unto Me,' as is quite plain to the
+most superficial observation, is the first step in the approach to a
+companionship, which companionship is afterwards perfected and kept
+up by obedience and imitation. The 'coming' is an initial act which
+makes a man Christ's companion. And the 'Take My yoke upon you, and
+learn of Me,' is the continuous act by which that companionship is
+manifested and preserved. So that in these words, which come so
+familiarly to most of our memories that they have almost ceased to
+present a sharp meaning, there is not only a merciful summons to the
+initial act, but a description of the continual life of which that
+act is the introduction.
+
+And now, to put that into simpler words, when Jesus Christ says
+'Come unto Me,' He Himself has taught us what is His inmost meaning
+in that invitation, by another word of His: 'He that cometh unto Me
+shall never hunger, and he that believeth on Me shall never thirst';
+where the parallelism of the clauses teaches us that to come to
+Christ is simply to put our trust in Him. There is in faith a true
+movement of the whole soul towards the Master. I think that this
+metaphor teaches us a great deal more about that faith that we are
+always talking about in the pulpit, and which, I am afraid, many of
+our congregations do not very distinctly understand, than many a
+book of theology does. To 'come to Him' implies, distinctly, that
+He, and no mere theological dogma, however precious and clear, is
+the Object on which faith rests.
+
+And, therefore, if Christ, and not merely a doctrinal truth about
+Christ, be the Object of our faith, then it is very clear that
+faith, which grasps a Person, must be something more than the mere
+act of the understanding which assents to a truth. And what more is
+it? How is it possible for one person to lay hold of and to come to
+another? By trust and love, and by these alone. These be the bonds
+that bind men together. Mere intellectual consent may be sufficient
+to fasten a man to a dogma, but there must be will and heart at work
+to bind a man to a person; and if it be Christ and not a theology,
+to which we come by our faith, then it must be with something more
+than our brains that we grasp Him and draw near to Him. That is to
+say, your will is engaged in your confidence. Trust Him as you trust
+one another, only with the difference befitting a trust directed to
+an absolute and perfect object of trust, and not to a poor, variable
+human heart. Trust Him as you trust one another. Then, just as
+husband and wife, parent and child, friend and friend, pass through
+all intervening hindrances and come together when they trust and
+love, so you come closer to Christ as the very soul of your soul by
+an inward real union, than you do even to your dear ones, if you
+grapple Him to your heart with the hoops of steel, which, by simple
+trust in Him, the Divine Redeemer forges for us. 'Come unto Me,'
+being translated out of metaphor into fact, is simply 'Believe on
+the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.'
+
+And still further, we have here, not only the initial act by which
+companionship and union with Jesus Christ is brought about, but the
+continual course by which it is kept up, and by which it is
+manifested. The faith which saves a man's soul is not all which is
+required for a Christian life. 'Take My yoke upon you, and _learn
+of Me_.' The yoke is that which, laid on the broad forehead or
+the thick neck of the ox, has attached to it the cords which are
+bound to the burden that the animal draws. The burden, then, which
+Christ gives to His servants to pull, is a metaphor for the specific
+duties which He enjoins upon them to perform; and the yoke by which
+they are fastened to their burdens, 'obliged' to their duties, is
+His authority, So to 'take His yoke' upon us is to submit our wills
+to His authority. Therefore this further call is addressed to all
+those who have come to Him, feeling their weakness and their need
+and their sinfulness, and have found in Him a Saviour who has made
+them restful and glad; and it bids them live in the deepest
+submission of will to Him, in joyful obedience, in constant service;
+and, above all, in the daily imitation of the Master.
+
+You must put both these commandments together before you get
+Christ's will for His children completely expressed. There are some
+of you who think that Christianity is only a means by which you may
+escape the penalty of your sins; and you are ready enough, or fancy
+yourselves so, to listen when He says, 'Come to Me that you may be
+pardoned,' but you are not so ready to listen to what He says
+afterwards, when He calls upon you to take His yoke upon you, to
+obey Him, to serve Him, and above all to copy Him. And I beseech you
+to remember that if you go and part these two halves from one
+another, as many people do, some of them bearing away the one half
+and some the other, you have got a maimed Gospel; in the one case a
+foundation without a building, and in the other case a building
+without a foundation. The people who say that Christ's call to the
+world is 'Come unto Me,' and whose Christianity and whose Gospel is
+only a proclamation of indulgence and pardon for past sin, have laid
+hold of half of the truth. The people who say that Christ's call is
+'Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me,' and that Christianity is a
+proclamation of the duty of pure living after the pattern of Jesus
+Christ our great Example, have laid hold of the other half of the
+truth. And both halves bleed themselves away and die, being torn
+asunder; put them together, and each has power.
+
+That separation is one reason why so many Christian men and women
+are such poor Christians as they are--having so little real
+religion, and consequently so little real joy. I could lay my
+fingers upon many men, professing Christians--I do not say whether
+in this church or in other churches--whose whole life shows that
+they do not understand that Jesus Christ has a twofold summons to
+His servants; and that it is of no avail once, long ago, to have
+come, or to think that you have come, to Him to get pardon, unless
+day by day you are keeping beside Him, doing His commandments, and
+copying His sweet and blessed example.
+
+III. And now, lastly, look at the twofold promise which is here.
+
+I do not know if there is any importance to be attached to the
+slight diversity of language in the two verses, so as that in the
+one case the promise runs, 'I will _give_ you rest,' and in the
+other, 'Ye shall _find_ rest.' That sounds as if the rest that
+was contingent upon the first of the invitations was in a certain
+and more direct and exclusive fashion Christ's gift than the rest
+which was contingent upon the second. It may be so, but I attach no
+importance to that criticism; only I would have you observe that our
+Lord distinctly separates here between the rest of 'coming,' and the
+rest of wearing His 'yoke.' These two, howsoever they may be like
+each other, are still not the same. The one is the perfecting and
+the prolongation, no doubt, of the other, but has likewise in it
+some other, I say not more blessed, elements. Dear brethren, here
+are two precious things held out and offered to us all. There is
+rest in coming to Christ; the rest of a quiet conscience which gnaws
+no more; the rest of a conscious friendship and union with God, in
+whom alone are our soul's home, harbour, and repose; the rest of
+fears dispelled; the rest of forgiveness received into the heart. Do
+you want that? Go to Christ, and as soon as you go to Him you will
+get that rest.
+
+There is rest in faith. The very act of confidence is repose. Look
+how that little child goes to sleep in its mother's lap, secure from
+harm because it trusts. And, oh! if there steal over our hearts such
+a sweet relaxation of the tension of anxiety when there is some dear
+one on whom we can cast all responsibility, how much more may we be
+delivered from all disquieting fears by the exercise of quiet
+confidence in the infinite love and power of our Brother Redeemer,
+Christ! He will be 'a covert from the storm, and a refuge from the
+tempest'; as 'rivers of water in a dry place, and the shadow of a
+great rock in a weary land.' If we come to Him, the very act of
+coming brings repose.
+
+But, brethren, that is not enough, and, blessed be God! that is not
+all. There is a further, deeper rest in obedience, and emphatically
+and most blessedly there is a rest in Christ-likeness. 'Take My yoke
+upon you.' There is repose in saying 'Thou art my Master, and to
+Thee I bow.' You are delivered from the unrest of self-will, from
+the unrest of contending desires, you get rid of the weight of too
+much liberty. There is peace in submission; peace in abdicating the
+control of my own being; peace in saying, 'Take Thou the reins, and
+do Thou rule and guide me.' There is peace in surrender and in
+taking His yoke upon us.
+
+And most especially the path of rest for men is in treading in
+Christ's footsteps. 'Learn of Me,' it is the secret of tranquillity.
+We have done with passionate hot desires,--and it is these that
+breed all the disquiet in our lives--when we take the meekness and
+the lowliness of the Master for our pattern. The river will no
+longer roll, broken by many a boulder, and chafed into foam over
+many a fall, but will flow with even foot, and broad, smooth bosom,
+to the parent sea.
+
+There is quietness in self-sacrifice, there is tranquillity in
+ceasing from mine own works and growing like the Master.
+
+  'The Cross is strength; the solemn Cross is gain.
+   The Cross is Jesus' breast,
+   Here giveth He the rest,
+   That to His best beloved doth still remain.'
+
+'Take up thy cross daily,' and thou enterest into His rest.
+
+My brother, 'the wicked is like the troubled sea that cannot rest,
+whose waters cast up mire and dirt.' But you, if you come to Christ,
+and if you cleave to Christ, may be like that 'sea of glass, mingled
+with fire,' that lies pure, transparent, waveless before the Throne
+of God, over which no tempests rave, and which, in its deepest
+depths, mirrors the majesty of 'Him that sitteth upon the Throne,
+and of the Lamb.'
+
+
+
+
+THE PHARISEES' SABBATH AND CHRIST'S
+
+
+    'At that time Jesus went on the Sabbath day through the
+    corn; and His disciples were an hungred, and began to
+    pluck the ears of corn, and to eat. 2. But when the
+    Pharisees saw it they said unto Him, Behold, Thy
+    disciples do that which is not lawful to do upon the
+    Sabbath day. 3. But he said unto them, Have ye not read
+    what David did, when he was an hungred, and they that
+    were with him; 4. How he entered into the house of God,
+    and did eat the shewbread, which was not lawful for him
+    to eat, neither for them which were with him, but only
+    for the priests! 5. Or have ye not read in the law, how
+    that on the Sabbath days the priests in the temple
+    profane the Sabbath, and are blameless! 6. But I say
+    unto you, That in this place is one greater than the
+    temple. 7. But if ye had known what this meaneth, I
+    will have mercy, and not sacrifice, ye would not have
+    condemned the guiltless. 8. For the Son of Man is Lord
+    even of the Sabbath day 9. And when he was departed
+    thence, He went into their synagogue: 10. And, behold,
+    there was a man which had his hand withered. And they
+    asked Him, saying, Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath
+    days? that they might accuse Him. 11. And He said unto
+    them, What man shall there be among you, that shall have
+    one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the Sabbath day,
+    will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out? 12. How
+    much then is a man better than a sheep? Wherefore it is
+    lawful to do well on the Sabbath days. 13. Then saith
+    He to the man, Stretch forth thine hand. And he
+    stretched it forth; and it was restored whole, like as
+    the other. 14. Then the Pharisees went out, and held a
+    counsel against Him, how they might destroy Him.'
+    --MATT. xii. 1-14.
+
+We have had frequent occasion to point out that this Gospel is
+constructed, not on chronological, but on logical lines. It groups
+together incidents related in subject, though separated in time.
+Thus we have the collection of Christ's sayings in the Sermon on the
+Mount, followed by the collection of doings in chapters viii. and
+ix., the collected charge to His ambassadors in chapter x., the
+collection of instances illustrative of the relations of different
+classes to the message of the Kingdom and its King in chapter xi.,
+and now in this chapter a series of incidents setting forth the
+growing bitterness of antagonism on the part of the guardians of
+traditional and ceremonial religion. This is followed, in the next
+chapter, with a series of parables.
+
+The present lesson includes two Sabbath incidents, in the first of
+which the disciples are the transgressors of the sabbatic tradition;
+in the second, Christ's own action is brought into question. The
+scene of the first is in the fields, that of the second is in the
+synagogue. In the one, Sabbath observance is set aside at the call
+of personal needs; in the other, at the call of another's calamity.
+So the two correspond to the old Puritan principle that the Sabbath
+law allowed of 'works of necessity and of mercy.'
+
+I. The Sabbath and personal needs. This is a strange sort of King
+who cannot even feed His servants. What a glimpse into the penury of
+their usual condition the quiet statement that the disciples were
+hungry gives us, especially if we remember that it is not likely
+that the Master had fared better than they! Indeed, His reference to
+David and his band of hungry heroes suggests that 'He was an
+hungred' as well as 'they that were with Him.' As they traversed
+some field path through the tall yellowing corn, they gathered a few
+ears, as the merciful provision of the law allowed, and hastily
+began to eat the rubbed-out grains. As soon as they 'began,' the
+eager Pharisees, who seem to have been at their heels, call Him to
+'behold' this dreadful crime, which, they think, requires His
+immediate remonstrance. If they had had as sharp eyes for men's
+necessities as for their faults, they might have given them food
+which it was 'lawful' to eat, and so obviated this frightful
+iniquity. But that is not the way of Pharisees. Moses had not
+forbidden such gleaning, but the casuistry which had spun its
+multitudinous webs over the law, hiding the gold beneath their dirty
+films, had decided that plucking the ears was of the nature of
+reaping, and reaping was work, and work was forbidden, which being
+settled, of course the inferential prohibition became more important
+than the law from which it was deduced. That is always the case with
+human conclusions from revelation; and the more questionable these
+are, the more they are loved by their authors, as the sickly child
+of a family is the dearest.
+
+Our Lord does not question the authority of the tradition, nor ask
+where Moses had forbidden what His disciples were doing. Still less
+does He touch the sanctity of the Jewish Sabbath. He accepts His
+questioners' position, for the time, and gives them a perfect answer
+on their own ground. Perhaps there may be just a hint in the double
+'Have ye not read?' that they could not produce Scripture for their
+prohibition, as He would do for the liberty which He allowed. He
+quotes two instances in which ceremonial obligations gave way before
+higher law. The first, that of David and his followers eating the
+shew-bread, which was tabooed to all but priests, is perhaps chosen
+with some reference to the parallel between Himself, the true King,
+now unrecognised and hunted with His humble followers, and the
+fugitive outlaw with his band. It is but a veiled allusion at most;
+but, if it fell on good soil, it might have led some one to ask, 'If
+this is David, where is Saul, and where is Doeg, watching him to
+accuse him?' This example serves our Lord's purpose of showing that
+even a divine prohibition, if it relates to mere ceremonial matter,
+melts, like wax, before even bodily necessities. What a thrill of
+holy horror would meet the enunciation of the doctrine that such a
+carnal thing as hunger rightfully abrogated a sacred ritual
+proscription! The law of right is rigid; that of external ceremonies
+is flexible. Better that a man should die than that the one should
+be broken; better that the other should be flung to the winds than
+that a hungry man should go unfed. It may reasonably be doubted
+whether all Christian communities have learned the sweep of that
+principle yet, or so judge of the relative importance of keeping up
+their appointed forms of worship, and of feeding their hungry
+brother. The brave Ahimelech, 'the son of Ahitub,' was ahead of a
+good many people of to-day.
+
+The second example comes still closer to the question in hand, and
+supplies the reference to the Sabbath law, which the former had not.
+There was much hard work done in the temple on the Sabbath--sacrifices
+to be slain, fires and lamps to be kindled, and so on. That was not
+Sabbath desecration. Why? Because it was done in the temple, and as a
+part of divine service. The sanctity of the place, and the consequent
+sanctity of the service, exempted it from the operation of the law.
+The question, no doubt, was springing to the lips of some scowling
+Pharisee, 'And what has that to do with our charge against your
+disciples?' when it was answered by the wonderful next words, 'In
+this place'--here among the growing corn, beneath the free heaven, far
+away from Jerusalem--'is one greater than the temple.' Profound words,
+which could only sound as blasphemy or nonsense to the hearers, but
+which touch the deepest truths concerning His person and His relations
+to men, and which involve the destruction of all temples and rituals.
+He is all that the temple symbolised. In Him the Godhead really dwells;
+He is the meeting-place of God and man, the place of the oracle, the
+place of sacrifice. Then, where He stands is holy ground, and all work
+done with reference to Him is worship. These poor followers of His are
+priests; and if, for His sake, they had broken a hundred Sabbath
+regulations, they were guiltless.
+
+So far our Lord has been answering His opponents; now He attacks.
+The quotation from Hosea is often on His lips. Here He uses it to
+unmask the real motives of His assailants. Their murmuring came not
+from more religion, but from less love. If they had had a little
+more milk of human kindness in them, it would have died on their
+lips; if they had grasped the real meaning of the religion they
+professed, they would have learned that its soul was 'mercy'--that
+is, of course, man's gentleness to man--and that sacrifice and
+ceremony were but the body, the help, and sometimes the hindrance,
+of that soul. They would have understood the relative importance of
+disposition and of external worship, as end and means, and not have
+visited a mere breach of external order with a heat of disapprobation
+only warranted by a sin against the former. Their judgment would have
+been liker God's if they had looked at those poor hungry men with
+merciful eyes and with merciful hearts, rather than with eager scrutiny
+that delighted to find them tripping in a triviality of outward
+observance. What mountains of harsh judgment by Christ's own followers
+on each other would have been removed into the sea if the spirit of
+these great words had played upon them!
+
+The 'for' at the beginning of verse 8 seems to connect with the last
+words of the preceding verse, 'I call them guiltless, for,' etc. It
+states more plainly still the claim already put forward in verse 6.
+'The Son of Man,' no doubt, is equivalent to 'Messiah'; but it is
+more, as revealing at once Christ's true manhood and His unique and
+complete manhood, in which the very ideal of man is personally
+realised. It can never be detached from His other name, the 'Son of
+God.' They are the obverse and reverse of the same golden coin. He
+asserts His power over the Sabbath, as enjoined upon Israel. His is
+the authority which imposed it. It is plastic in His hands. The
+whole order of which it is part has its highest purpose in
+witnessing of Him. He brings the true 'rest.'
+
+II. The Sabbath, and works of beneficence. Matthew appears to have
+brought together here two incidents which, according to Luke, were
+separated in time. The scene changes to a synagogue, perhaps that of
+Capernaum. Among the worshippers is a man with 'a withered hand,'
+who seems to have been brought there by the Pharisees as a bait to
+try to draw out Christ's compassion. What a curious state of mind
+that was,--to believe that Christ could work miracles, and to want
+Him to do one, not for pity's sake, nor for confirmation of faith,
+but to have material for accusing Him! And how heartlessly careless
+of the poor sufferer they are, when they use him thus! He for his
+part stands silent. Desire and faith have no part in evoking this
+miracle. Deadly hatred and calculating malignity ask for it, and for
+once they get their wish. Having baited their hook, and set the man
+with his shrunken hand full in view, they get into their corners and
+wait the event. Matthew tells us that they ask our Lord the question
+which Luke represents Him as asking them. Perhaps we may say that He
+gave voice to the question which they were asking in their hearts.
+Their motive is distinctly given here. They wanted material for a
+legal process before a local tribunal. The whole thing was an
+attempt to get Jesus within the meshes of the law. Again, as in the
+former case, it is the traditional, not the written, law, which
+healing would have broken. The question evidently implies that, in
+the judgment of the askers, healing was unlawful. Talmudical
+scholars tell us that in later days the rabbis differed on the
+point, but that the prevalent opinion was, that only sicknesses
+threatening immediate danger to life could lawfully be treated on
+the Sabbath. The more rigid doctrine was obviously held by Christ's
+questioners. It is a significant instance of the absurdity and
+cruelty which are possible when once religion has been made a matter
+of outward observance. Nothing more surely and completely ossifies
+the heart and blinds common sense.
+
+In His former answer Jesus had appealed to Scripture to bear out His
+teaching that Sabbath observance must bend to personal necessities.
+Here He appeals to the natural sense of compassion to confirm the
+principle that it must give way to the duty of relieving others. His
+question is as confident of an answer as the Pharisees' had been.
+But though He takes it for granted that His hearers could only
+answer it in one way, the microscopic and cold-blooded ingenuity of
+the rabbis, since His day, answers it in another. They say, 'Don't
+lift the poor brute out, but throw in a handful of fodder, and
+something for him to lie upon, and let him be till next day.' A
+remarkable way of making 'thine ox and thine ass' keep the Sabbath!
+There is a delicacy of expression in the question; the owner of 'one
+sheep' would be more solicitous about it than if he had a hundred;
+and our Shepherd looks on all the millions of His flock with a heart
+as much touched by their sorrow and needs as if each were His only
+possession. The question waits for no answer; but Christ goes on (as
+if there could be but one reply) to His conclusion, which He binds
+to His first question by another, equally easy to answer. Man's
+superiority to animals makes his claim for help more imperative.
+'You would not do less for one another than for a sheep in a hole,
+surely.' But the form in which our Lord put His conclusive answer to
+the Pharisees gives an unexpected turn to the reply. He does not
+say, 'It is lawful to heal,' but, 'It is lawful to do well,' thus at
+once showing the true justification of healing, namely, that it was
+a beneficent act, and widening the scope of His answer to cover a
+whole class of cases. 'To do well' here means, not to do right, but
+to do good, to benefit men. The principle is a wide one: the
+charitable succour of men's needs, of whatever kind, is congruous
+with the true design of that day of rest. Have the churches laid
+that lesson to heart? On the whole, it is to be observed that our
+Lord here distinctly recognises the obligation of the Sabbath, that
+He claims power over it, that He permits the pressure of one's own
+necessities and of others' need of help, to modify the manner of its
+observance, and that He leaves the application of these principles
+to the spiritual insight of His followers.
+
+The cure which follows is done in a singular fashion. Without a
+whisper of request from the sufferer or any one else, He heals him
+by a word. His command has a promise in it, and He gives the power
+to do what He bids the man do. 'Give what Thou commandest,' says St.
+Augustine, 'and command what Thou wilt.' We get strength to obey in
+the act of obedience. But beyond the possible symbolical
+significance of the mode of cure, and beyond the revelation of
+Christ's power to heal by a word, the manner of healing had a
+special reason in the very cavils of the Pharisees. Not even they
+could accuse Him of breaking any Sabbath law by such a cure. What
+had He done? Told the man to put out his hand. Surely that was not
+unlawful. What had the man done? Stretched it forth. Surely that
+broke no subtle rabbinical precept. So they were foiled at every
+turn, driven off the field of argument, and baffled in their attempt
+to find ground for laying an information against Him. But neither
+His gentle wisdom nor His healing power could reach these hearts,
+made stony by conceit and pedantic formalism; and all that their
+contact with Jesus did was to drive them to intenser hostility, and
+to send them away to plot His death. That is what comes of making
+religion a round of outward observances. The Pharisee is always
+blind as an owl to the light of God and true goodness; keen-sighted
+as a hawk for trivial breaches of his cobweb regulations, and cruel
+as a vulture to tear with beak and claw. The race is not extinct. We
+all carry one inside us, and need God's help to cast him out.
+
+
+
+
+AN ATTEMPT TO ACCOUNT FOR JESUS
+
+
+    'But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, This man
+    doth not cast out demons, but by Beelzebub, the prince
+    of the demons.'--MATT. xii. 24.
+
+Mark's Gospel tells us that this astonishing explanation of Christ
+and His work was due to the ingenious malice of an ecclesiastical
+deputation, sent down from Jerusalem to prevent the simple folk in
+Galilee from being led away by this new Teacher. They must have been
+very hard put to it to explain undeniable but unwelcome facts, when
+they hazarded such a preposterous theory.
+
+Formal religionists never know what to make of a man who is in
+manifest touch with the unseen. These scribes, like Christ's other
+critics, judged themselves in judging Him, and bore witness to the
+very truths that they were eager to deny. For this ridiculous
+explanation admits the miraculous, recognises the impossibility of
+accounting for Christ on any naturalistic hypothesis, and by its
+very outrageous absurdity indicates that the only reasonable
+explanation of the facts is the admission of His divine message and
+authority. So we may learn, even from such words as these, how the
+glory of Jesus Christ shines, though distorted and blurred, through
+the fogs of prejudice and malice.
+
+I. Note, then, first, the unwelcome and undeniable facts that insist
+upon explanation.
+
+I have said that these hostile critics attest the reality of the
+miracles. I know that it is not fashionable at present to attach
+much weight to the fact that none of all the enemies that saw them
+ever had a doubt about the reality of Christ's miracles. I know
+quite well that in an age that believed in the possibility of the
+supernatural, as this age does not, credence would be more easy, and
+that such testimony is less valuable than if it had come from a jury
+of scientific twentieth century sceptics. But I know, on the other
+hand, that for long generations the expectation of the miraculous
+had died out before Christ came; that His predecessor, John the
+Baptist, made no such claims; and that, at first, at all events,
+there was no expectation of Jesus working miracles, to lead to any
+initial ease of acceptance of His claims. And I know that there were
+never sharper and more hostile eyes brought to bear upon any man and
+his work than the eyes of these ecclesiastical 'triers.' It would
+have been so easy and so triumphant a way of ending the whole
+business if they could have shown, what they were anxious to be able
+to show, that the miracle was a trick. And so I venture to think
+that not without some weight is the attestation from the camp of the
+enemy, 'This man casteth out demons.'
+
+But you have to remember that amongst the facts to be explained is
+not only this one of Christ's works having passed muster with His
+enemies, but the other of His own reiterated and solemn claim to
+have the power of working what we call miracles. Now, I wish to
+dwell on that for one moment, because it is fashionable to put one's
+thumb upon it nowadays. It is not unusual to eliminate from the
+Gospel narrative all that side of it, and then to run over in
+eulogiums about the rest. But what we have to deal with is this
+fact, that the Man whom the world admits to be the consummate flower
+of humanity, meek, sane, humble, who has given all generations
+lessons in self-abnegation and devotion, claimed to be able to raise
+the dead, to cast out demons, and to do many wonderful works. And
+though we should be misrepresenting the facts if we said that He did
+what His followers have too often been inclined to do, _i.e._
+rested the stress of evidence upon that side of His work, yet it is
+an equal exaggeration in the other direction to do, as so many are
+inclined to do to-day, _i.e._ disparage the miraculous evidence
+as no evidence at all. 'Go and tell John the things that ye see and
+hear,'--that is His own answer to the question, 'Art Thou He that
+should come?' And though I rejoice to believe that there are far
+loftier and more blessed answers to it than these outward signs and
+tokens, they _are_ signs and tokens; and they are part of the
+whole facts that have to be accounted for.
+
+I would venture to widen the reference of my text for a moment, and
+include not only the actual miracles of our Lord's earthly life, but
+all the beneficent, hallowing, elevating, ennobling, refining
+results which have followed upon the proclamation of His truth in
+the world ever since. I believe, as I think Scripture teaches me to
+believe, that in the world today Christ is working; and that it is a
+mistake to talk about the results of 'Christianity,' meaning thereby
+some abstract system divorced from Him. It is the working of Jesus
+Christ in the world that has brought 'nobler manners, purer laws';
+that has given a new impulse and elevation to art and literature;
+that has lifted the whole tone of society; that has suppressed
+ancient evils; that has barred the doors of old temples of devildom,
+of lust, and cruelty, and vice; and that is still working in the
+world for the elevation and the deifying of humanity. And I claim
+the whole difference between 'B.C. and A.D.'--the whole difference
+between Christendom and Heathendom--as being the measure of the
+continuous power with which Jesus Christ has grappled with and
+throttled the snakes that have fastened on men. That continuous
+operation of His in delivering from the powers of evil has, indeed,
+not yielded such results as might have been expected. But just as on
+earth He was hindered in the exercise of His supernatural power by
+men's unbelief, so that 'He could do no mighty works, save that He
+laid His hands on a few sick folk' here and there, 'and healed
+them,' so He has been thwarted by His Church, and hindered in the
+world, from manifesting the fulness of His power. But yet,
+sorrowfully admitting that, and taking as deserved the scoffs of the
+men that say, 'Your Christianity does not seem to do so very much
+after all,' I still venture to allege that its record is unique; and
+that these are facts which wise men ought to take into account, and
+have some fairly plausible way of explaining.
+
+II. Secondly, note the preposterous explanation.  'This man doth not
+cast out demons, but by Beelzebub, the prince of the demons.' That
+is the last resort of prejudice so deep that it will father an
+absurdity rather than yield to evidence. And Christ has no
+difficulty in putting it aside, as you may remember, by a piece of
+common sense: 'If Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against
+himself, and his kingdom cannot stand.' There is an old play which
+has for its title, _The Devil as an Ass._ He is not such an ass
+as that, to build up with one hand and cast down with the other. As
+the proverb has it, 'Hawks do not pick out hawks' eyes.' But this
+plainly hopeless attempt to account for Christ and His work may be
+turned into a witness for both, and yield not unimportant lessons.
+
+This explanation witnesses to the insufficiency of all explanations
+which omit the supernatural. These men felt that they had to do with
+a Man who was in touch with a whole world of unseen powers; and that
+they had here to deal with something to which ordinary measuring
+lines were palpably inapplicable. And so they fell back upon 'by
+Beelzebub'; and they thereby admitted that humanity without
+something more at the back of it never made such a man as that. And
+I beg you to lay that to heart. It is very easy to solve an
+insoluble problem if you begin by taking all the insoluble elements
+out of it. And that is how a great deal of modern thinking does with
+Christianity. Knock out all the miracles; pooh-pooh all Christ's
+claims; say nothing about Incarnation; declare Resurrection to be
+entirely unhistorical, and you will not have much difficulty in
+accounting for the rest; and it will not be worth the accounting
+for. But here is the thing to be dealt with, that _whole_ life,
+the Christ of the Gospels. And I venture to say that any explanation
+professing to account for Him which leaves out His coming from an
+unseen world, and His possession of powers above this world of sense
+and nature, is ludicrously inadequate. Suppose you had a chain which
+for thousands of years had been winding on to a drum, and link after
+link had been rough iron, and all at once there comes one of pure
+gold, would it be reasonable to say that it had been dug from the
+same mine, and forged in the same fires, as its black and ponderous
+companions? Generation after generation has passed across the earth,
+each begetting sons after its own likeness; and lo! in the midst of
+them starts up one sinless Man. Is it reasonable to say that He is
+the product of the same causes which have produced all the millions,
+and never another like Him? Surely to account for Jesus without the
+supernatural is hopeless.
+
+Further, this explanation may be taken as an instance showing the
+inadequacy of all theories and explanations of Christ and
+Christianity from an unbelieving point of view. It was the first
+attempt of unbelievers to explain where Christ's power came from.
+Like all first attempts, it was crude, and it has been amended and
+refined since. Earlier generations did not hesitate to call the
+Apostles liars, and Christ's contemporaries did not hesitate to call
+Him 'this deceiver.' We have got beyond that; but we still are met
+by explanations of the power of the Gospel and of Christ, its
+subject and Author, which trace these to ignoble elements, and do
+not shrink from asserting that a blunder or a hallucination lies at
+the foundation.
+
+Now, I am not going to enter upon these matters at any length, but I
+would just recall to you our Lord's broad, simple principle: 'A
+corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit, neither doth a good tree
+bring forth evil fruit.' And I would apply that all round. Christian
+teachers have often made great mistakes, as it seems to me, by
+tracing the prevalence of the power of some heathen religions to
+their vices and lies. No system has ever had great moral power in
+this world but by reason of its excellences and truths. Mohammedanism,
+for instance, swept away, and rightly, a mere formal superstition which
+called itself Christianity, because it grasped the one truth: 'There is
+no God but God'; and it had faith of a sort. Monasticism held the
+field in Europe, with all its faults, for centuries, because it enshrined
+the great Christian truth of self-sacrifice and absolute obedience.
+And you may take it as a fixed rule, that howsoever some 'mixture of
+falsehood doth ever please,' as Bacon says, in his cynical way, the
+reason for the power of any great movement has been the truth that was
+in it and not the lie; and the reason why great men have exercised
+influence has been their greatness and their goodness, and not their
+smallnesses and their vices.
+
+I apply that all round, and I ask you to apply it to Christianity;
+and in the light of such plain principles to answer the question:
+'Where did this Man, so fair, so radiant, so human and yet so
+superhuman, so universal and yet so individual--where did He come
+from? and where did the Gospel, which flows from Him, and which has
+done such things in the world as it has done--where did it come
+from? 'Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?' If it
+is true that Jesus Christ is either mistakenly represented in the
+Gospels, or that He made enthusiastic claims which cannot be
+verified; and if it is true that the faith in a Resurrection on
+which Christianity is suspended, and which has produced such fruits
+as we know have been produced, is a delusion; then all I can say is
+that the noblest lives that ever were lived in the world have found
+their impulse in a falsehood or a dream; and that the richest
+clusters that ever have yielded wine for the cup have grown upon a
+thorn. If like produces like, you cannot account for Christ and
+Christianity by anything short of the belief in His Divine mission.
+Serpents' eggs do not hatch out into doves. This Man, when He
+claimed to be God's Son and the world's Saviour, was no brain-sick
+enthusiast; and the results show that the Gospel which His followers
+proclaim rests upon no lie.
+
+Again, this explanation is an instance of the credulity of unbelief.
+Think of the mental condition which could swallow such an
+explanation of such a Worker and such work. It is more difficult to
+believe the explanation than the alternative which it is framed to
+escape. So it is always. The difficulties of faith are small by
+comparison with those of unbelief, gnats beside camels, and that
+that is so is plain from the short duration of each unbelieving
+explanation of Jesus. One can remember in the compass of one's own
+life more than one assailant taking the field with much trumpeting
+and flag-waving, whose attack failed and is forgotten. The child's
+story tells of a giant who determined to slay his enemy, and
+belaboured an empty bed with his club all night, and found his foe
+untouched and fresh in the morning. The Gospel is here; what has
+become of its assailants? They are gone, and the limbo into which
+the scribes' theory has passed will receive all the others. So we
+may be quite patient, and sure that the sieve of time, which is
+slowly and constantly working, will riddle out all the rubbish, and
+cast it on the dunghill where so many exploded theories rot
+forgotten.
+
+III. And now, one word about the last point; and that is--the true
+explanation.
+
+Now, at this stage of my sermon, I must not be tempted to say a word
+about the light which our Lord throws, in these declarations in the
+context, into that dim unseen world. His words seem to me to be too
+solemn and didactic to be taken as accommodations to popular
+prejudice, and a great deal too grave to be taken as mere metaphor.
+And I, for my part, am not so sure that, apart from Him, I know all
+things in heaven and earth, as to venture to put aside these solemn
+words of His--which lift a corner of the veil which hides the
+unseen--and to dismiss them as unworthy of notice. Is it not a
+strange thing that a world which is so ready to believe in spiritual
+communications when they are vouched for by a newspaper editor, is
+so unwilling to believe them when they are in the Bible? And is it
+not a strange thing that scientists, who are always taunting
+Christians with the importance they attach to man in the plan of the
+universe, and ask if all these starry orbs were built for him,
+should be so incredulous of teachings which fill the waste places
+with loftier beings? But that is by the way.
+
+What does Christ say in the context? He tells the secret of His power.
+'I, by the Spirit of God, cast out demons.' And then He goes on to
+speak about a conflict that He wages with a strong man; and about His
+binding the strong man, and spoiling his house. All which, being
+turned into modern language, is just this, that the Lord, by His
+incarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and government at
+the right hand of God, has broken the powers of evil in their central
+hold. He has crushed the serpent's head; and though He may still, as
+Milton puts it, 'swinge the scaly horror of his folded tail,' it is
+but the flurries of the dying brute. The conquering heel is firm on
+his head. So, brethren, evil is conquered, and Christ is the Conqueror;
+and by His work in life and death He has delivered them that were held
+captive of the devil. And you and I may, if we will, pass into 'the
+liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.'
+
+That is the only explanation of Him--in His person, in His character,
+in His work, and in the effects of that work in the world--that
+covers all the facts, and will hold water. All others fail, and they
+mostly fail by boldly eliminating the very facts that need to be
+accounted for. Let us rather look to Him, thankful that our Brother
+has conquered; and let us put our trust in that Saviour. For, if His
+explanation is true, then a very solemn personal consideration arises
+for each of us, 'If I, by the Spirit of God, cast out demons, then
+the Kingdom of God is come unto you,' it stands beside us; it calls
+for our obedience. Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ alone, can cast the
+evils out of our natures. It is the Incarnate Christ, the Divine
+Christ, the crucified Christ, the ascended Christ, the indwelling
+Christ, who will so fill our hearts that there shall be no aching
+voids there to invite the return of the expelled tyrants. If any
+other reformation pass upon us than the thorough one of receiving Him
+by faith into our hearts, then, though they may be swept and garnished,
+they will be empty; and the demons will come back. With Jesus
+inside--they will be outside.
+
+
+
+
+'MAKE THE TREE GOOD'
+
+
+    '... Make the tree good, and his fruit good....'
+    --MATT. xii. 33.
+
+In this Gospel we find that our Lord twice uses this image of a tree
+and its fruit. In the Sermon on the Mount He applies it as a test to
+false teachers, who hide, beneath the wool of the sheep's clothing,
+the fangs and paws of ravening wolves. He says, 'By their deeds ye
+shall know them; for as is the tree so is its fruit.' That is a
+rough and ready test, which applies rather to the teacher than to
+his doctrine, but it applies, to some extent, to the doctrine too,
+on the hypothesis that the teacher's life fairly represents it. Of
+course, it is not the only thing that we have to take into account;
+but it may prick many a bladder, and unmask many an error, and it is
+the way by which the masses generally judge of systems and of their
+apostles. A saintly life has more power than dusty volumes of
+controversy.
+
+But in our text Christ applies the same thoughts in rather a deeper
+fashion. Here the lesson that He would have us draw is of the
+connection between character and conduct; how what we do is
+determined by what we are, and how, not of course with the same
+absolute regularity and constancy, but still somewhat in the same
+fashion as the fruit is true to the tree, so, after all allowance
+made for ups and downs, for the irregular play of will and
+conscience, for the strife that is waged within a man, for the
+temptations of external circumstances, and the like--still, in
+general, as is the inner man, so is the outward manifestation. The
+facts of a life are important mainly as registering and making
+visible the inner condition of the doer. Now, that seems very
+elementary. Everybody believes that 'out of the heart are the issues
+of life,' as a wise man said long ago, but it is one of the truths
+that, if grasped and worked into our consciousness, and out in our
+lives, would do much to revolutionise them. And so, though it is a
+very old story, and though we all admit it, I wish now to come face
+to face with the consequences of this thought, that behind action
+lies character, and that Doing is the second step, and Being is the
+first.
+
+I. I would ask you to notice how here we are confronted with the
+great problem for every man.
+
+'Make the tree good.' It takes a good man to do good things. So how
+shallow is all that talk, 'do, do, do,' this, that, and the other
+thing. All right, but _be_; that is the first thing; or, as
+Christ said, 'Make the tree good, and the fruit' will take care of
+itself. So do you not see how, if that is true about us, we are each
+brought full front up to this, 'Am I trying to make my tree good?
+And what kind of success am I having in the attempt?' The water that
+rises from some spring will bring up with it, in solution, a trace
+of a bed of salt through which it has come, and of all the minerals
+in the soil through which it has passed. And as its sparkling waters
+come out into the light, if one could analyse them completely, one
+might register a geological section of the strata through which it
+has risen. So, our acts bear in them a revelation of all the hidden
+beds through which they have risen; and sometimes they are bitter
+and salt, but they are always true to the self whose apocalypse they
+are to the world, or at all events to God.
+
+Therefore, brethren, I have to urge this, that we shall not be doing
+our true work as men and women, if we are simply trying to better our
+actions, important as these are. By this saying the centre of gravity
+is shifted, and in one aspect, the deeds are made less important. The
+condition of the hidden man of the heart is the all-important thing.
+Christ's word comes to each of us as the briefest statement of all
+that it is our highest duty and truest wisdom to aim at in life--'Make
+the tree good.'
+
+If you have ever tried it honestly, and have not been contented with
+the superficial cleaning up of outsides, which consists in shifting
+the dirt into another place only, not in getting rid of it, I know
+what met you almost as soon as you began, like some great black rock
+that rises in a mountain-pass, and forbids all farther advance--the
+consciousness that you were _not_ good met you. I am not going
+to talk theological technicalities. Never mind about phrases--they
+have been the ruin of a great deal of earnest preaching--call it what
+you like, here is a fact, that whenever a man sets himself, with
+anything like resolute determination and rigid self-examination, to
+the task of getting himself right, he finds that he is wrong. That
+being the case, each of us has to deal with a tremendous problem; and
+the more earnestly and honestly we try to deal with it, the more we
+shall feel how grave it is. You can cure a great deal, I know. God
+forbid that I should say one word that seems to deny a man's power to
+do much in the direction of self-improvement, but after all that is
+done, again you are brought short up on this fact, the testimony of
+conscience. And so I see men labouring at a task as vain as that of
+those who would twist the sands into ropes, according to the old
+fable. I see men seeking after higher perfection of purity than they
+will ever attain. That is the condition of us all, of course, for our
+ideal must always outrun our realisation, else we may as well lie down
+and die. But there is a difference between the imperfect approximation,
+which we feel to be imperfect, and yet feel to be approximation, and
+the despairing consciousness, that I am sure a great many of my
+audience have had, more or less, that I have a task set for me that is
+far beyond my strength. 'Talk about making the tree good! I cannot do
+it.' So men fold their hands, and the foiled endeavour begets despair.
+Or, as is the case with some of you, it begets indifference, and you
+do not care to try any more, because you have tried so often, and have
+made nothing of it.
+
+There is the problem, how 'make the tree good,' the tree being bad,
+or, at all events, if you do not like that broad statement, the tree
+having an element of badness, if I may so say, in and amongst any
+goodness that it has. I do not care which of the two forms of
+statement you take, the fact remains the same.
+
+II. Note the universal failure to solve the problem.
+
+'Make the tree good.'
+
+Yes. And there are a whole set of would-be arboriculturists who tell
+you they will do it if you will trust to them. Let us look at them.
+First comes one venerable personage. He says, 'I am Law, and I
+prescribe this, and I forbid that, and I show reward and punishment,
+and I tell you--be a good man.' Well! what then? It is not for want of
+telling that men are bad. The worst man in the world knows his duty a
+great deal more than the best man in the world does it. And whether it
+is the law of the land, or whether it is the law of society, or the
+law written in Scripture, or the law written in a man's own heart,
+they all come under the same fatal disability. They tell us what to
+do, and they do not put out a finger to help us to do it. A lame man
+does not get to the city because he sees a guide-post at the turning
+which tells him which road to take. The people who do not believe in
+certain modern agitations about the restrictions of the liquor traffic
+say, 'You cannot make people sober by Act of Parliament,' which is
+absolutely true, although it does not bear, I think, the inference that
+they would draw from it, and it just puts into a rough form the fatal
+weakness of this would-be gardener and improver of the nature of the
+trees. He tells us our duty, and there an end.
+
+Do you remember how the Apostle put the weakness of law in words,
+the antique theological terminology of which should not prevent us
+from seeing the large truth in them? 'If there had been a law given
+which could have given life, then righteousness should have been by
+the law,' which being translated into modern English is just this,
+If Law could impart a power to obey its behests, then it is all that
+we want to make us right. But until it can do that it fails in two
+points. It deals with conduct, and we need to have character dealt
+with; and it does not lift the burden that it lays on me with one of
+its fingers. So we may rule Law out of court.
+
+And then comes another, and he says, 'I am Culture, and intellectual
+acquirement; or my name is Education, and I am going to make the
+tree good in the most scientific fashion, because what makes men bad
+is that they do not know, and if they only knew they would do the
+right.' Now, I thoroughly believe that education diminishes crime. I
+believe it weans from certain forms of evil. I believe that, other
+things being equal, an educated man, with his larger interests and
+his cultivated tastes, has a certain fastidiousness developed which
+keeps him from being so much tempted by the grosser forms of
+transgression. I believe that very largely you will empty your gaols
+in proportion as you fill your schools. And let no man say that I am
+an obscurantist, or that I am indifferent to the value of education
+and the benefits of intellectual culture, when I declare that all
+these may be attained, and the nature of the tree remain exactly
+what it was. You may prune, you may train along the wall, you may
+get bigger fruit, you will not get better fruit. Did you ever hear
+the exaggerated line that describes one of the pundits of science as
+'the greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind'? The plain fact is that
+the cultivation of the understanding has little to do with the
+purifying of the depths of the heart.
+
+And then comes another, and says, 'I am the genius of Beauty and Art.
+And my recipe is pictures and statues, and all that will refine the
+mind, and lift the taste.' That is the popular gospel of this day, in
+a great many quarters. Yes, and have we never heard of a period in
+European history which was, as they call it, 'the Renaissance' of art
+and the death of morality? Do we not know that side by side there have
+been cultivated in all ages, and are being cultivated to-day, the most
+exclusive devotion to the beauty that can be expressed by art, and the
+most intense indifference to the beauty of holiness? Ah! brethren, it
+wants something far deeper-going than pictures to purge the souls of
+men. And whilst, as before, I thankfully acknowledge the refining
+influence of this new cult, I would protest against the absurdity of
+putting it upon a pedestal as the guide and elevator of corrupted
+humanity.
+
+And then come others, and they say, 'Environment is the thing that
+is to blame for it all. How can you get decent lives in the slums?'
+No, I know you cannot; and God bless every effort made to get the
+people out of the slums, I say. Only do not let us exaggerate. You
+cannot change a man, as deeply as we need to be changed, by any
+change of his circumstances. 'Take the bitter tree,' as I remember
+an old Jewish saying has it, 'take the bitter tree and plant it in
+Eden, and water it with the rivers there; and let the angel Gabriel
+be the gardener, and the tree will still bear bitter fruit.' Are all
+the people who live in good houses good? Will a 'living wage'--eight
+shillings a day and eight hours' play--will these change a man's
+character? Will these go deep enough down to touch the springs of
+evil? You cannot alter the nature of a set of objects by arranging
+them in different shapes, parallelograms, or squares, or circles, or
+any others. As long as you have the elements that are in human
+nature to deal with, you may do as you like about the distribution
+of wealth, and the relation of Capital to Labour, and the various
+cognate questions which are all included in the vague word Socialism;
+and human nature will be too strong for you, and you will have the
+old mischiefs cropping out again. Brethren, you cannot put out
+Vesuvius by bringing to bear on it the squirts of all the fire
+engines in creation. The water will go up in steam, and do little or
+nothing to extinguish the fire. And whilst I would thankfully help
+in all these other movements, and look for certain limited results
+of good from them, I, for my part, believe, and therefore I am bound
+to declare, that neither singly, nor all of them in combination,
+will they ever effect the change on human nature which Jesus Christ
+regarded as the only possible means for securing that human nature
+should bear good fruit.
+
+For, if there were no other reason, there are two plain ones which I
+only touch. God is the source of all good, of all creatural purity
+as well as all creatural blessedness. And if a life has a blank wall
+turned to Him, and has cut itself off from Him, I do not care how
+you educate it, fill it full of science, plunge it into an
+atmosphere of art, make the most perfect arrangements for social and
+economical and political circumstances, that soul is cut off from
+the possibility of good, because it is cut off from the fontal
+source of all good. And there is another reason which is closely
+connected with this, and that is that the true bitter tang in us all
+is self-centring regard. That is the mother-tincture that, variously
+coloured and compounded, makes in all the poisonous element that we
+call sin, and until you get something that will cast that evil out
+of a man's heart, you may teach and refine and raise him and arrange
+things for him as you like, and you will not master the source of
+all wrong and corrupt fruit.
+
+III. Lastly, let me say a word about the triumphant solution.
+
+Law says, 'Make the tree good,' and does not try to do it. Christ
+said, 'Make the tree good,' and proceeds to do it. And how does He
+do it?
+
+He does it by coming to us; to every soul of man on the earth, and
+offering, first, forgiveness for all the past. I do not know that
+amongst all the bonds by which evil holds a poor soul that struggles
+to get away from it, there is one more adamantine and unyielding
+than the consciousness that the past is irrevocable, and that 'what
+I have written I have written,' and never can blot out. But Jesus
+Christ deals with that consciousness. It is true that 'whatsoever a
+man soweth that shall he also reap,' and the Christian doctrine of
+forgiveness does not contradict that solemn truth, but it assures us
+that God's heart is not turned away from us, notwithstanding the
+past, and that we can write the future better, and break altogether
+the fatal bond that decrees, apart from Him, that 'to-morrow shall
+be as this day, and much more abundant,' and that past sin shall
+beget a progeny of future sins. That fruitfulness of sin is at an
+end, if we take Christ for our Saviour.
+
+He makes the tree good in another fashion still; for the very
+centre, as it seems to me, of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that
+into our spirits He will breathe a new life kindred with His own, a
+new nature which is free from the law and bonds of past sin, and of
+present and future death. The tree is made good because He makes
+those who believe in Him 'new creatures in Christ Jesus.' Now, do
+not turn away and say that that is mysticism. Be it mysticism or
+not, it is God's truth. It is the truth of the Christian Revelation,
+that faith in Jesus Christ puts a new nature into any man, however
+sinful he may have been, and however deep the marks of the fetters
+may have been upon his limbs.
+
+Christ makes the tree good in yet another fashion, because He brings to
+the reinforcement of the new life which He imparts the mightiest
+motives, and sways by love, which leads to the imitation of the Beloved,
+which leads to obedience to the Beloved, which leads to shunning as the
+worst of evils anything that would break the communion with the Beloved,
+and which is in itself the decentralising of the sinful soul from its
+old centre, and the making of Christ the Beloved the centre round which
+it moves, and from which it draws radiance and light and motion. By all
+these methods, and many more that I cannot dwell upon now, the problem
+is triumphantly solved by Christianity. The tree is made good, and
+'instead of the briar shall come up the myrtle tree.'
+
+You may say, 'That is all very well in theory. What about the
+practice? I do not see such a mighty difference between you
+Christians and us.' Well, for myself and my brethren, I accept the
+rebuke. There is not such a difference as there ought to be. But do
+you know why? Not because our great Gardener cannot change the
+nature of the plant, but because we do not submit ourselves to His
+power as we ought to do. Debit us with as many imperfections and
+inconsistencies as you like, do not lay them to the charge of
+Christ.
+
+And yet we are willing to accept the test of Christianity which lies
+in its power to change men. I point to the persecutor on the road to
+Damascus. I point to the Bedfordshire tinker, to him that wrote
+_Pilgrim's Progress_. I point to the history of the Christian
+Church all down through the ages. I point to our mission fields to-day.
+I point to every mission hall, where earnest, honest men are working,
+and where, if you go and ask them, they will let you see people
+lifted from the very depths of degradation and sin, and made honest,
+sober, respectable, hard-working, though not very intelligent or
+refined, Christian people. I suppose that there is no man in an
+official position like mine who cannot look back over his ministry
+and remember, some of them dozens, some of them scores, some of them
+hundreds, of cases in which the change was made on the most hopeless
+people, by the simple acceptance of the simple gospel, 'Christ died
+for me, and Christ lives in me.' I know that I can recall such, and
+I am sure that my brethren can.
+
+People who are not Christians talk glibly about the failure of
+Christianity to transform men. They have never seen the
+transformations because they have never put themselves in the way of
+seeing them. They are being worked to-day; they might be worked here
+and now.
+
+Try the power of the Gospel for yourselves. You cannot make the tree
+good, but you can let Jesus Christ do it. The Ethiopian cannot
+change his skin, nor the leopard his spots, but Jesus can do both.
+'The lion shall eat straw like the ox.' It is weary work to be
+tinkering at your acts. Take the comprehensive way, and let Him
+change your character. I believe that in some processes of dyeing, a
+piece of cloth, prepared with a certain liquid, is plunged into a
+vat full of dye-stuffs of one colour, and is taken out tinged of
+another. The soul, wet with the waters of repentance, and plunged
+into the 'Fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness,' the crimson
+fountain of the blood of Christ, emerges 'whiter than snow.' Let Him
+'make the tree good and fruit will be good,' for if not we shall be
+'hewn down and cast into the fire,' because we cannot bear any fruit
+unto holiness, nor can the end be everlasting life.
+
+
+
+
+'A GREATER THAN JONAS'
+
+
+    'A greater than Jonas is here.'--MATT. xii. 41.
+
+There never was any man in his right mind, still more of influence
+on his fellows, who made such claims as to himself in such
+unmistakable language as Jesus Christ does. To say such things of
+oneself as come from His lips is a sign of a weak, foolish nature.
+It is fatal to all influence, to all beauty of character. It is not
+only that He claims official attributes as a fanatical or dishonest
+pretender to inspiration may do. He does that, but He does more--He
+declares Himself possessed of virtues which, if a man said he had
+them, it would be the best proof that he did not possess them and
+did not know himself. 'I am the way and the truth and the life.' 'I
+am the light of the world'--a 'greater than the temple,' a greater
+than Jonah, a 'greater than Solomon,' and then withal 'I am meek and
+lowly of heart.' And the world believes Him, and says, Yes! it is
+true.
+
+These three comparisons of Jesus with Temple, Jonas, and Solomon,
+carry great claims and great lessons. By the first Jesus asserts
+that He is in reality all that the Temple was in shadowy symbol, and
+sets Himself above ritual, sacrifices, and priests. By the second he
+asserts His superiority not only to one prophet but to them all. By
+the third He asserts His superiority to Solomon, whom the Jews
+reverenced as the bright, consummate flower of kinghood.
+
+Now we may take this comparison as giving us positive thoughts about
+our Lord. The points of comparison may be taken to be three, with
+Jonah as one of an order, with Jonah in his personal character as a
+servant of God, with Jonah as a prophet charged with a special work.
+
+I. The prophets and the Son.
+
+The whole prophetic order may fairly be taken as included here. And
+over against all these august and venerable names, the teachers of
+wisdom, the speakers of the oracles of God, this Nazarene peasant
+stands there before Pharisees and Scribes, and asserts His superiority.
+It is either the most insane arrogance of self-assertion, or it is a
+sober truth. If it be true that self-consciousness is ever the disease
+of the soul, and that the religious teacher who begins to think of
+himself is lost, how marvellous is this assertion!
+
+Compare it with Paul's, 'Unto me who am less than the least of all
+saints'--'I am not a whit behind the chief of the Apostles'--'though
+I be nothing'--'Not I, but Christ in me.' And yet this is meekness,
+for it is infinite condescension in Him to compare Himself with any
+son of man.
+
+(_a_) The contrast is suggested between the prophets and the
+theme of the prophets.
+
+'The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.' Though undoubtedly
+the prophet order had other work than prediction to do, yet the soul
+of their whole work was the announcement of the Messiah.
+
+In testimony whereof, Elijah, who was traditionally the chief of the
+prophets, stood beside Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration, and
+passed away as lost in His light.
+
+(_b_) The contrast is suggested between the recipients of the
+word of God and the Word of God.
+
+The relation of the prophets to their message is contrasted with His
+who was the Truth, who not merely received, but was, the Word of
+God.
+
+There is nothing in Christ's teaching to show that He was conscious
+of standing in a human relation to the truths which He spoke. His
+own personality is ever present in His teaching instead of being
+suppressed--as in all the prophets. His own personality is His
+teaching, for His revelation is by being as much as by saying.
+Similarly, His miracles are done by His own power.
+
+(_c_) The contrast is suggested between the partial teacher of
+God's Name and the complete revealer of it.
+
+The foundation was laid by the prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being
+the chief corner stone (Hebrews i. 1).
+
+II. The disobedient prophet and the perfect Son.
+
+Jonah stands as the great example of human weakness in the chosen
+instruments of God's hand.
+
+Take the story--his shrinking from the message given him. We know
+not why; but perhaps from faint-hearted fear, or from a sense of his
+unworthiness and unfitness for the task. His own words about God as
+long-suffering seem to suggest another reason, that he feared to go
+with a message of judgment which seemed to him so unlikely to be
+executed by the long-suffering God. If so, then what made him
+recreant was not so much fear from personal motives as intellectual
+perplexity and imperfect comprehension of the ways of God. Then we
+hear of his pitiable flight with its absurdity and its wickedness.
+Then comes the prayer which shows him to have been right and true at
+bottom, and teaches us that what makes a good man is not the absence
+of faults, but the presence of love and longing after God. Then we
+see the boldness of his mission. Then follows the reaction from that
+lofty height, the petulance or whatever else it was with which he
+sees the city spared. Even the mildest interpretation cannot acquit
+him of much disregard for the poor souls whom he had brought to
+repentance, and of dreadful carelessness for the life and happiness
+of his fellows.
+
+Now Jonah's behaviour is but a specimen of the vacillations, the
+alternations of feeling which beset every man; the loftiest, the
+truest, the best. Moses, David, Solomon, Elijah, John the Baptist,
+Peter, Luther, Cranmer. And it is full of instruction for us.
+
+Then we turn to the contrast in Christ's perfect obedience and
+faithfulness in His prophetic office. In Him is no trace of
+shrinking even when the grimness of the Cross weighed most on His
+heart. No confusion of mind as to the Father's will, or as to the
+union in Him of perfect righteousness and infinite mercy, ever
+darkened His clear utterances or cast a shadow over his own soul. He
+was never weakened by the collapse that follows on great effort or
+strong emotion. He never failed in his mission through lack of pity.
+
+But there is no need to draw out the comparison. We look on all
+God's instruments, and see them all full of faults and flaws. Here
+is one stainless name, one life in which is no blot, one heart in
+which are no envy, no failings--one obedience which never varied. He
+says of Himself, 'I do always those things which please Him,' and
+we, thinking of all the noblest examples of virtue that the world
+has ever seen, and seeing in them all some speck, turn to this whole
+and perfect chrysolite and say, Yes! 'a greater than they!'
+
+III. The bearer of a transitory message of repentance to one Gentile
+people, and the bearer of an eternal message of grace and love to
+the whole earth.
+
+Jonah is remarkable as having had the sphere of his activity wholly
+outside Israel.
+
+The nature of his message; a preaching of punishment; a call to
+repentance.
+
+The sphere of it--one Gentile city. The effect of it--transitory. We
+know what Nineveh became.
+
+Jesus is greater than Jonah or any prophet in this respect, that His
+message is to the world, and in this, that what He preaches and
+brings far transcends even the loftiest and most spiritual words of
+any of them.
+
+His voice is sweetest, tenderest, clearest and fullest of all that
+have ever sounded in men's ears. And just because it is so, the
+hearing of it brings the most solemn responsibility that was ever
+laid on men, and to us still more gravely and truly may it be said
+than to those who heard Jesus speak on earth, 'The men of Nineveh
+shall rise in judgment with this generation and condemn it.'
+
+
+
+
+'A GREATER THAN SOLOMON'
+
+
+    'A greater than Solomon is here.'--MATT. xii. 42.
+
+It is condescension in Him to compare Himself with any; yet if any
+might have been selected, it is that great name. To the Jews Solomon
+is an ideal figure, who appealed so strongly to popular imagination
+as to become the centre of endless legends; whose dominion was the
+very apex of national glory, in recounting whose splendours the
+historical books seem to be scarce able to restrain their triumph
+and pride.
+
+I. The Man. The story gives us a richly endowed and many-sided
+character. It begins with lovely, youthful enthusiasm, with a
+profound sense of his own weakness, with earnest longings after
+wisdom and guidance. He lived a pure and beautiful youth, and all
+his earlier and middle life was adorned with various graces. There
+is a certain splendid largeness about the character. He had a rich
+variety of gifts: he was statesman, merchant, sage, physicist,
+builder, one of the many-sided men whom the old world produced. And
+on this we may build a comparison and contrast.
+
+The completeness of Christ's Humanity transcends all other men, even
+the most various, and transcends all gathered together. Every type
+of excellence is in Him. We cannot say that His character is any one
+thing in special, it falls under no classification. It is a pure
+white light in which all rays are blended. This all-comprehensiveness
+and symmetry of character are remarkably shown in four brief records.
+
+But we have to take into account the dark shadows that fell on
+Solomon's later years. He clearly fell away from his early
+consecration and noble ideals, and let his sensuous appetites gain
+power. He countenanced, if he did not himself practise, idolatry. As
+a king he became an arbitrary tyrant, and his love of building led
+him to oppress his subjects, and so laid the foundation for the
+revolt under Jeroboam which rent the kingdom. So his history is
+another illustration of the possible shipwreck of a great character.
+It is one more instance of the fall of a 'son of the morning.' We
+need not elaborate the contrast with Christ's character. In Him is
+no falling from a high ideal, no fading of morning glory into a
+cloudy noon or a lurid evening. There is no black streak in that
+flawless white marble. Jesus draws the perfect circle, like Giotto's
+O, while all other lives show some faltering of hand, and consequent
+irregularity of outline. Greater than Solomon, with his over-clouded
+glories and his character worsened by self-indulgence, is Jesus,
+'the Sun of righteousness,' the perfect round of whose lustrous
+light is broken by no spots on the surface, no indentations in the
+circumference, nor obscured by any clouds over its face.
+
+II. The Teacher.
+
+Solomon was traditionally regarded as the author of much of the Book
+of Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes was written as by him. Possibly the
+attribution to him of some share in the former book may be correct,
+but at any rate, his wisdom was said to have drawn the Queen of
+Sheba to hear him, and that is the point of the comparison of our
+text.
+
+If we take these two books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes into
+account, as popularly attributed to him, they suggest points of
+comparison and contrast with Jesus as a teacher, which we may
+briefly point out. Now, Proverbs falls into two very distinct
+portions, the former part being a connected fatherly admonition to
+the pursuit of wisdom, and the latter a collection of prudential
+maxims, in which it is rare for any two contiguous verses to have
+anything to do with each other. In the former part Wisdom is set
+forth as man's chief good, and the Wisdom which is so set forth is
+mainly moral wisdom, the right disposition of will and heart, and
+almost identical with what the Old Testament elsewhere calls
+righteousness. But it is invested, as the writer proceeds, with more
+and more august and queenly attributes, and at last stands forth as
+being, if not a divine person, at least a personification of a
+divine attribute.
+
+Bring that ancient teaching and set it side by side with Jesus, and
+what can we say but that He is what the old writer, be he Solomon or
+another, dimly saw? He is the 'wisdom' which was traditionally
+called the 'wisdom of Solomon,' and which the Queen came from far to
+hear. Jesus is greater, as the light is more than the eye, or as the
+theme is more than the speaker. 'The power of God and the wisdom of
+God' is greater than the sage or seer who celebrates it. What is
+true of Solomon or whoever wrote that praise of Wisdom, is true of
+all teachers and wise men, they are 'not that light,' they are 'sent
+to bear witness of that light.' Jesus is Wisdom, other men are wise.
+Jesus is the greatest teacher, for He teaches us Himself. He is
+lesson as well as teacher. Unless He was a great deal more than
+Teacher, He could not be the perfect Teacher for whom the world
+groans.
+
+The second half of Proverbs is, as I have said, mostly a collection
+of prudential and moral maxims, with very little reference to God or
+high ideals of duty in them. They may represent to us the impotence
+of wise saws to get themselves practised. A guide-post is not a
+guide. It stretches out its gaunt wooden arms towards the city, but
+it cannot bend them to help a lame man lying at its foot. Men do not
+go wrong for lack of knowing the road, nearly so often as for lack
+of inclination to walk in it. We have abundant voices to tell us
+what we ought to do. But what we want is the swaying of inclination
+to do it, and the gift of power to do it. And it is precisely
+because Jesus gives us both these that He is what no collection of
+the wisest sayings can ever be, the efficient teacher of all
+righteousness, and of the true wisdom which is 'the principal
+thing.'
+
+As for Ecclesiastes, though not his, it represents not untruly the
+tone which we may suppose to have characterised his later days in
+its dwelling on the vanity of life. The sadness of it may be
+contrasted with the light thrown by the Gospel on the darkest
+problems. Solomon cries, 'All is vanity'--Jesus teaches His scholars
+to sing, 'All things work together for good.'
+
+III. The Temple builder.
+
+In this respect 'a greater than Solomon is here,' inasmuch as Jesus
+is Himself the true Temple, being for all men, which Solomon's
+structure only shadowed, the meeting-place of God and man, in whom
+God dwells and through whom we can draw near to Him, the place where
+the true Sacrifice is once for all offered, by which Sacrifice sin
+is truly put away. And, further, Jesus is greater than Solomon in
+that He is, through the ages, building up the great Temple of His
+Church of redeemed men, the eternal temple of which not one stone
+shall ever be taken down.
+
+IV. The peaceful King.
+
+There were no wars in Solomon's reign. But a dark shadow brooded
+over it in its later years, which were darkened by oppression,
+luxury, and incipient revolt.
+
+Contrast with that merely external and sadly imperfect peacefulness,
+the deep, inward peace of spirit which Jesus breathes into every man
+who trusts and obeys Him, and with the peace among men which the
+acceptance of His rule brings, and will one day bring perfectly, to
+a regenerated humanity dwelling on a renewed earth. He is King of
+righteousness, and after that also King of peace.
+
+Surely from all these contrasts it is plain that 'a greater than
+Solomon is here.'
+
+
+
+
+FOUR SOWINGS AND ONE RIPENING
+
+
+    'The same day went Jesus out of the house, and sat by
+    the sea side. 2. And great multitudes were gathered
+    together unto Him, so that He went into a ship, and
+    sat; and the whole multitude stood on the shore. 8. And
+    He spake many things unto them in parables, saying,
+    Behold, a sower went forth to sow; 4. And when he
+    sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls
+    came and devoured them up: 6. Some fell upon stony
+    places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith
+    they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth:
+    6. And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and
+    because they had no root, they withered away. 7. And
+    some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and
+    choked them: 8. But other fell into good ground, and
+    brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some
+    sixtyfold, some thirtyfold. 9. Who hath ears to hear,
+    let him hear.'--MATT. xiii. 1-9.
+
+The seven parables of the kingdom, in this chapter, are not to be
+regarded as grouped together by Matthew. They were spoken
+consecutively, as is obvious from the notes of time in verses 36 and
+53. They are a great whole, setting forth the 'mystery of the
+kingdom' in its method of establishment, its corruption, its outward
+and inward growth, the conditions of entrance into it, and its final
+purification. The sacred number seven, impressed upon them, is the
+token of completeness. They fall into two parts: four of them being
+spoken to the multitudes from the boat, and presenting the more
+obvious aspects of the development of the kingdom; three being
+addressed to the disciples in the house, and setting forth truths
+about it more fitted for them.
+
+The first parable, which concerns us now, has been generally called
+the Parable of the Sower, but he is not the prominent figure. The
+subject is much rather the soils; and the intention is, not so much
+to declare anything about him, as to explain to the people, who
+were looking for the kingdom to be set up by outward means,
+irrespective of men's dispositions, that the way of establishing it
+was by teaching which needed receptive spirits. The parable is both
+history and prophecy. It tells Christ's own experience, and it
+foretells His servants'. He is the great Sower, who has 'come forth'
+from the Father. His present errand is not to burn up thorns or to
+punish the husbandmen, but to scatter on all hearts the living seed,
+which is here interpreted, in accordance with the dominant idea of
+this Gospel, as being 'the word of the kingdom' (ver. 19). All who
+follow Him, and make His truth known, are sowers in their turn, and
+have to look for the same issue of their work. The figure is common
+to all languages. Truth, whether intellectual, moral, or spiritual,
+is seminal, and, deposited in the heart, understanding, or
+conscience, grows. It has a mysterious vitality, and its issue is
+not a manufacture, but a fruit. If all teachers, especially
+religious teachers, would remember that, perhaps there would be
+fewer failures, and a good deal of their work would be modified. We
+have here four sowings and one ripening--a sad proportion! We are
+not told that the quantity of seed was in each case the same. Rather
+we may suppose that much less fell on the wayside, and on the rocky
+soil, and among the thorns, than on the good ground. So we cannot
+say that seventy-five per cent, of it was wasted; but, in any case,
+the proportion of failure is tragically large. This Sower was under
+no illusion as to the result of His work.
+
+It is folly to sow on the hard footpath, or the rocky ground, or
+among thorns; but Christ and His servants have to do that, in
+endless hope that these unreceptive hearts may become good soil. One
+lesson of the parable is, Scatter the seed everywhere, on the most
+unlikely places.
+
+I. Our Lord begins with the case in which the seed remains quite
+outside the soil, or, without metaphor, in which the word finds
+absolutely no entrance into the heart or mind. A beaten path runs by
+the end, or perhaps through the middle, of the cornfield. It is of
+exactly the same soil as the rest, but many passengers have trodden
+it hard, and the very foot of the sower, as he comes and goes in his
+work, has helped. Some of the seed, sown broadcast, of course falls
+there, and lies where it falls, having no power to penetrate the
+hard surface. As in our own English cornfields, a flock of bold,
+hungry birds watch the sower; and, as soon as his back is turned,
+they are down with a swift-winged swoop, and away goes the exposed
+grain. So there is an end of it; and the path is as bare as ever,
+five minutes after it has been strewed with seeds.
+
+The explanation is too plain to be mistaken, but we may briefly
+touch its main features. Notice, then, that our Lord begins with the
+case in which there is least contact between His word and the soul,
+and that, as the contact is least in degree, so it is shortest in
+duration. A minute or two finishes it. Notice especially that the
+path has been made hard by external pressure. It is not rock, but
+soil like the other parts of the field. It represents the case of
+men whose insensibility to the word is caused by outward things
+having made a thoroughfare of their natures, and trodden them into
+incapacity to receive the message of Christ's love. The heavy
+baggage-wagons of commerce, the light cars of pleasure, merry
+dancers, and sad funeral processions, have all used that way, and
+each footfall has beaten the once loose soil a little firmer. We are
+made insensitive to the gospel by the effect of innocent and
+necessary things, unless we take care to plough up the path along
+which they travel, and to keep our spirits susceptible by a distinct
+effort. How many hearers of every teacher are there, who never take
+in his words at all, simply because they are so completely
+preoccupied!
+
+Notice what becomes of the seed that lies thus bare. 'Immediately,'
+says Mark, 'Satan cometh.' His agents are these light-winged
+thoughts that flutter round the hearer as soon as the sermon or the
+lesson is over. Talk of the weather, criticism of the congregation,
+or of the sower's attitude as he flung the seed, or politics, or
+business, drive away the remembrance of even the text, before many
+of our hearers are out of sight of the church. Then the whirl of
+traffic begins again, and the path is soon beaten a little harder.
+If the seed had got ever so little way into the ground, the sharp
+beaks of the thieves would not have carried it off so easily.
+Impressions so slight as Christ's word makes on busy men are quickly
+rubbed out. But if the seed sown vanishes thus swiftly, the fault is
+not in it, but in ourselves. Satan may seek to snatch it away, but
+we can hinder him.
+
+Our Lord uses a singular expression, 'This is he that was sown by
+the way side,' which appears to identify the man with the seed
+rather than with the soil. It has been suggested by some
+commentators that this expression is to be regarded as conveying the
+truth that the seed sown in the heart and growing up there becomes
+the life-spring of the individual, and that therefore we may speak
+of him or of it as bearing the fruit. But this explanation will not
+avail for the case where there is no entrance of the word into the
+heart, and so no new birth by the word. More probably we are to
+regard the expression simply as a conversational shorthand form of
+speech, not strictly accurate, but quite intelligible.
+
+II. The next variety of soil differs from the preceding in having its
+hindrance deep seated. Many a hillside in Galilee--as in Scotland or
+New England--would show a thin surface of soil over rock, like skin
+stretched tightly on a bone. No roots could get through the rock nor
+find nourishment in it; while the very shallowness of earth and the
+heat of the underlying stone would accelerate growth. Such premature
+and feeble shoots perish as quickly as they spring up; the fierce
+Eastern sun makes a speedy end of them, and a few days sees their
+springing and withering. It is a case of 'lightly come, lightly go.'
+Quick-sprouting herbs are soon-dying herbs. A shallow pond is up in
+waves under a breeze which raises no sea on the Atlantic, and it is
+calm again in a few minutes. Readily stirred emotion is transient.
+Brushwood catches fire easily, and burns itself out quickly. Coal
+takes longer to kindle, and is harder to put out.
+
+The persons meant are those of excitable temperament, whose feelings lie
+on the surface, and can be got at without first passing through the
+understanding or the conscience. Such people are easily played on by
+the epidemic influence of any prevalent enthusiasm or emotion, as every
+revival of religion shows. Their very 'joy' in hearing the word is
+suspicious; for a true reception of it seldom begins with joy, but
+rather with 'the sorrow which worketh repentance not to be repented of.'
+Their immediate reception of it is suspicious, for it suggests that
+there has been no time to consult the understanding or to form a
+deliberate purpose; stable resolutions are slowly formed. It is the
+sunny side of religion which, has attracted them. They know nothing of
+its difficulties and depths. Hence, as soon as they find out the
+realities of the course which they have embraced so lightly, they
+desert, like John Mark running away as soon as home comforts at Cyprus
+were left behind. The Christian life means self-denial, toil, hard
+resistance to many fascinations. It means sweat and blood, or it means
+nothing. Whether there be 'persecution' or no, there will be affliction,
+'because of the word,' and all the joyful emotion will ooze out at the
+man's finger-ends. The same superficial excitability which determined
+his swift reception of the word will determine his hasty casting of it
+aside, and immediately he stumbles. All his acts will be done in a
+hurry, and none of his moods will last. Feeling is in its place down
+in the engine-room, but it makes a poor pilot. Very significant is
+that phrase, 'No root in himself.' His roots are in the accidents of
+the moment. His religion has never really struck root in him, but only
+in the superficial layer of him. His conscience, will, understanding,
+are unpenetrated by its fibres. So it is easily pulled up, as well as
+soon withered.
+
+There is another profound truth in this picture. The hard,
+impenetrable rock lies right under the thin skin of soil. The nature
+which is over-emotional on its surface is utterly hard at its core.
+The most heartless people are those whose feelings are always ready
+to gush; the most unimpressible are those who are most easily
+brought to a certain degree of emotion by the sound of the word.
+This class is an advance on the former, in that there has been a
+real contact with the word, which has lain longer in their hearts,
+and has had some growth. We may regard it as either better or worse
+than the former, according as we consider that it is better to
+accept and feel than not to accept at all, or that it is worse to
+have in some measure possessed and felt than not to have received
+the word of the kingdom.
+
+III. In one part of the field was a patch where the soil was neither
+rammed solid, as on the footpath, nor thin, as where the rock
+cropped out, but where there had been a tangle of thorns, which grow
+luxuriantly in Palestine. These had been cut down, but not stubbed
+up, as is plain from the very fact that the seed reached the ground,
+as also from the description of them as 'springing up.' The two
+growths advance together. In this case, the seed has a longer life
+than in the former. It roots and grows, and even, according to the
+other evangelist's version, fruits, though it does not mature its
+fruit. There is no question of 'falling away' here. Only the
+hardier growth, which had the advantage of previous possession, and
+which pushes up its shoots above ground all round the more tender
+plant, gets the start of it, and smothers its green blades,
+overtopping it, and keeping it from sun and air, as well as drawing
+to itself the nourishment from the soil. The main point here is
+simultaneousness of the two growths. This man is, as James calls
+him, a 'double-minded man.' He is trying to grow both corn and thorn
+on the same soil. He has some religion, but not enough to make
+thorough work of it. He is endeavouring to ride on two horses at
+once. Religion says 'either--or'; he is trying 'both--and.' The
+human heart has only a limited amount of love and trust to give, and
+Christ must have it all. It has enough for one--that is, for Him;
+but not enough for two,--that is, for Him and the world. This man's
+religion has not been powerful enough to grub up the roots of the
+thorns. They were cut down when the seed was sown, for a little
+while, at the beginning of his course; the new life in him seemed to
+conquer, but the roots of the old lay hid, and, in due time, showed
+again above ground. 'Ill weeds grow apace'; and these, as is their
+nature, grow faster than the good seed. So the only thing to do is
+to get them out of the ground to the last fibre.
+
+Christ specifies what He deems thorns. We can all understand care
+being so called; but riches? Yes, they too have sharp prickles, as
+anybody will find who stuffs a pillow with them. But our Lord
+chooses His words to point the lesson that not outward things, but
+our attitude to them, make the barrenness of this soil. It is not
+'this world,' but 'the care of this world,' not 'riches,' but 'the
+deceitfulness of riches,' that choke the word. These two seem
+opposites, but they are really the same thing on two opposite sides.
+The man who is burdened with the cares of poverty, and the man who
+is deceived by the false promises of wealth, are really the same
+man. The one is the other turned inside out. We make the world our
+god, whether we worship it by saying, 'I am desolate without thee,'
+or by fancying that we are secure with it. Note that the issue in
+this case is--unfruitfulness. The man may, and I suppose usually
+does, keep up a profession of Christianity all his life. He very
+likely does not know that the seed is choked, and that he has become
+unfruitful. But he is a stunted, useless Christian, with all the sap
+and nourishment of his soul given to his worldly position, and his
+religion is a poor pining growth, with blanched leaves and abortive
+fruit. How much of Christ's field is filled with plants of that
+sort!
+
+IV. The parable tells us nothing about the comparative acreage of
+the path and the rocky and thorny soils on the one hand, and of the
+fertile soil on the other. It is not meant to teach the proportion
+of success to failure, but to exhibit the fact that the reception of
+the word depends on men's dispositions. The good soil has none of
+the faults of the rest of the field. It is loose, and thus unlike
+the path; deep, and thus unlike the rocky bit; clean, and thus
+unlike the thorn brake. The interpretation given of it by our Lord
+seems at first sight incomplete. It is all summed up in one word,
+'understandeth.' Then, did not the second and third classes, at all
+events, understand? They received the word, and it had some growth
+in them. The distinction between them and the good-soil hearer is
+surely of a moral nature, rather than of so purely intellectual a
+kind as 'understanding' suggests. Hence, Luke's keep fast 'in an
+honest and good heart' may seem a more adequate statement. But
+Biblical usage does not regard 'understanding' as a purely
+intellectual process, but rather as the action of the whole moral
+and spiritual nature. It knows nothing of dividing a man up into
+water-tight compartments, one of which may be full of evil, and the
+other clean and receptive of good. According to it, we 'understand'
+religious truth by our hearts and moral nature in conjunction with
+the dry light of intellect. So the word here is used in a pregnant
+sense, and includes the grasp of the truth with the whole being, the
+complete reception of the word of the kingdom not merely into the
+intellect, but into the central self which is the undivided fountain
+from which flow the issues of life, whether these be called
+intellect, or affection, or conscience, or will. Only he who has
+thus become one with the word, and housed it deep in his inmost
+soul, 'understands' it, in the sense in which our Lord here uses
+that expression. 'Thy word have I hid in mine heart' exactly
+corresponds to the 'understanding' which is here given as the
+distinctive mark of the good soil.
+
+The result of that reception into the depths of the spirit is that
+he 'verily beareth fruit.' The man who receives the word is
+identified with the plant that springs from the seed which he
+receives. The life of a Christian is the result of the growth in him
+of a supernatural seed. He bears fruit, yet the fruit comes not from
+him, but from the seed sown. 'I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth
+in me.' Fruitfulness is the aim of the sower, and the test of the
+reception of the seed. If there is not fruit, manifestly there has
+been no real understanding of the word. A touchstone, that, which
+will produce surprising results in detecting spurious Christianity,
+if it be honestly applied!
+
+There is variety in the degree of fruitfulness, according to the
+goodness of the soil; that is to say, according to the thoroughness
+and depth of the reception of the word. The great Husbandman does
+not demand uniform fertility. He is glad when He gets an
+hundredfold, but He accepts sixty, and does not refuse thirty, only
+He arranges them in descending order, as if He would fain have the
+highest rate from all the plants, and, not without disappointment,
+gradually stretches His merciful allowance to take in even the
+lowest. He will accept the scantiest fruitage, and will lovingly
+'purge' the branch 'that it may bring forth more fruit.'
+
+No parable teaches everything. Paths, rocks, and thorns cannot
+change. But men can plough up the trodden ways, and blast away the
+rock, and root out the thorns, and, with God's help, can open the
+door of their hearts, that the Sower and His seed may enter in. We
+are responsible for the nature of the soil, else His warning were
+vain, 'Take heed, therefore, how ye hear.'
+
+
+
+
+EARS AND NO EARS
+
+
+    'Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.--MATT. xiii. 8.
+
+This saying was frequently on our Lord's lips, and that in very
+various connections. He sometimes, as in the instance before us,
+appended it to teaching which, from its parabolic form, required
+attention to disentangle the spiritual truth implied. He sometimes
+used it to commend some strange, new revolutionary teaching to men's
+investigation--as, for instance, after that great declaration of the
+nullity of ceremonial worship, how that nothing could defile a man
+except what came from his heart. In other connections, which I need
+not now enumerate, we find it. Like printing a sentence in italics,
+or underscoring it, this saying calls special attention to the thing
+uttered. It is interesting to notice that our Lord, like the rest of
+us, had to use such means of riveting and sharpening the attention
+of His hearers. There is also a striking reappearance of the
+expression in the last book of Scripture. The Christ who speaks to
+the seven churches, from the heavens, repeats His old word spoken on
+earth, and at the end of each of the letters says once more, as if
+even the Voice that spoke from heaven might be listened to
+listlessly, 'He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith
+to the churches.'
+
+I. We all have ears.
+
+Now, it is a very singular instance of the superficial, indolent way
+in which people are led away by sound rather than by sense, that
+this saying of my text has often been taken to mean that there is a
+certain class that can listen, and that it is their business to
+listen, and there is another class that cannot, and so they are
+absorbed from all responsibility. The opposite conclusion is the
+correct one. Everybody has ears, therefore everybody is bound to
+hear. Which being translated, is that there is not a man or woman
+among us that has not the capacity of hearing in the sense of
+understanding, and of hearing in the sense of obeying the word that
+Jesus Christ speaks to us all. Every one of us, whatever may be our
+diversities of education, temperament, natural capacity in regard to
+other subjects of study and apprehension, has the ears that are
+capable of receiving the message that comes to us all in Jesus
+Christ.
+
+For what is it that He addresses? Universal human nature, the
+universal human wants, and mainly and primarily, as I believe, the
+sense of sin which lies dormant indeed, but capable of being
+awakened, in all men, because the fact of sin attaches to all men.
+There is no man but has the needs to which Christ addresses Himself,
+and no man but has the power of apprehending, of accepting, and of
+living by, the great Incarnate Word and His message to the world. So
+that instead of there being a restriction implied in the words
+before us, there is the broadest implication of the universality of
+Christ's message. And just as every man comes into the world with a
+pair of ears on his head, so every man comes into the world with the
+capacity of listening to, and accepting, that gracious Lord. That is
+the first thing that our Master distinctly declares here, that we
+all have ears.
+
+II. If we have ears we are bound to use them.
+
+'Let him hear.' In all regions, as I need not remind you, capacity
+and responsibility go together; and the power that we possess is the
+measure of the obligation under which we come. All our natural
+faculties, for instance, are given to us with the implied command,
+'See that you make the best use of them.' So that even these bodily
+organs of ours, much more the higher faculties and capacities of the
+spirit of which the body is partly the symbol and partly the
+instrument, are intrusted to us on terms of stewardship. And just as
+it is criminal for a man to go through life with a pair of ears on
+his head, and a pair of eyes in his forehead, neither of which he
+educates and cultivates, so is it criminal for a man having the
+capacity of grasping the great Revelation of God, who 'at sundry
+times and in divers manners hath spoken unto the Fathers by the
+prophets, but in these last days hath spoken unto us by the Son,' to
+turn away from that Voice, and pay no heed to it.
+
+It is universally true that obligation goes with capacity. It is
+especially true with regard to our relation to Jesus Christ. We are
+all bound to 'hear Him,' as the great Voice said on the Mount of
+Transfiguration. The upshot of all that manifestation of the divine
+glory welling up from the depths of Christ's nature, and
+transfiguring His countenance, the upshot of all that solemn and
+mysterious communion with the mighty dead, Moses and Elias, the end
+of all that encompassing glory that wrapped Him, was the Voice from
+Heaven which proclaimed, 'This is My beloved Son; hear ye Him.'
+Moses with his Law, Elijah with his Prophecy, faded away and were
+lost. But there stood forth singly the one Figure, relieved against
+the background of the glory-cloud, the Christ to whom we are all
+bound to turn with the vision of longing eyes, with the listening of
+docile ears, with the aspiration of yearning affection, with the
+submission of absolute obedience.
+
+'Hear ye Him.' For just as truly as light is meant for the eye, so
+truly are the words of the Incarnate Word, and the life which is
+speech and revelation, meant to be the supreme objects of our
+attention, of our contemplative regard, and of our practical
+submission. We are bound to hear because we have ears; and of all
+the voices that are candidates for our attention, and of all the
+music that sounds through the universe, no voice is so sweet and
+weighty, no words so fundamental and all-powerful, no music so
+melodious, so deep and thunderous, so thrilling and gracious, as are
+the words of that Word who was made flesh and dwelt among us. We are
+bound to hear, and we hear to most profit when it is Him that we
+hear.
+
+III. We shall not hear without an effort.
+
+Christ says in my text, 'Let him hear,' as if the possession of the
+ear did not necessarily involve that there should be hearing. And so
+it is; 'Having ears, they hear not,' is a description verified in a
+great many other walks of life than in regard to religious matters.
+But it is verified there in the most conspicuous and in the most
+tragic fashion. I wonder how many of us there are who, though we
+have heard with the hearing of the outward ear, have not heard in
+the sense of attending, have scarcely heard in the sense of
+apprehending, and have not heard at all in the sense of obeying?
+Friend, what is it that keeps you from hearing, if you do not hear?
+Let me run over two or three of the things that thus are like wax in
+a man's ears, making him deaf to the message of life in Jesus
+Christ, in order to bring out how needful it is that these should be
+counteracted by an effort of will, and the vigorous concentration of
+thought and heart upon that message.
+
+What is it that keeps men from hearing? Being busy with other things
+is one hindrance. There is an old story of St. Bernard riding along
+by a lake on his way to a Council, and being so occupied with
+thoughts and discussions, that after the day's travel he lifted up
+his eyes and said, 'Where is the lake?' And so we, many of us, go
+along all our days on the banks of the great sea of divine love, and
+we are so busy thinking about other things, or doing other things,
+that at the end of the journey we do not know that we have been
+travelling by the side of the flashing waters all the day long.
+Everybody knows how possible it is to be so engrossed with one's
+occupations or thoughts as that when the clock strikes in the next
+steeple, we hear it and do not hear it. We have read of soldiers
+being so completely absorbed in the fury of the fight that a
+thunderstorm has rattled over their heads, and no man heard the
+roll, and no man saw the flash. Many of us are so swallowed up in
+our trade, in our profession, in our special branch of study, in our
+occupations and desires, that all the trumpets of Sinai might be
+blown into our ears, and we should hear them as though we heard them
+not; and what is worse, that the pleading voice of that great Lord
+who is ever saying to each of us, 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour,
+and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,' passes us by, and
+produces no effect, any more than does the idle wind whistling
+through an archway. Brethren, you have the need, the sin, the
+weakness, the transiency, to which the Gospel appeals. You have the
+faculties to which it addresses itself. Jesus Christ is speaking to
+every one of us. I beseech you to ask yourselves, 'Do I hear Him?'
+If not, is it not because the clatter of the world's business, or
+the more refined sounds of some profession or study, have so taken
+up your attention that you have none to spare for that which
+requires and repays it most?
+
+Then there is another thing that makes attention, and concentration,
+and a dead lift of resolution necessary, if you are rightly to hear,
+and that is the very fact that, superficially, you have heard all
+your days. You do not know the despair that sometimes comes over men in
+my position when we face our congregations of people that are familiar
+to weariness with everything that we have to say, and because they are
+superficially so familiar with it, fancy that there is no need for
+them to give heed any more. What can a poor man like me do to get
+through that crust of familiarity with the mere surface of Christian
+truth and teaching which is round many of you? You come and listen to
+me, and say, 'Oh! he has nothing original to say. We have heard it all
+before.' Yes, your ears have heard it. Have _you_ heard? 'Jesus Christ
+died for me,' you have been told that ever since you were a little
+child; and so the thousand-and-first, the million-and-first, repetition
+of it has little power over you. If once, just once, that truth could
+get through the crust of familiarity, and touch your heart, your bare
+heart, with its quick naked point of fire-shod love, I think there
+might be a wound made that would mean healing. But some of you will
+go away presently, just as you have gone away a thousand times before,
+and my words will rebound from you like an india-rubber ball from a
+wall, or run off you like water from the sea-bird's plumes, just
+because you think you have heard it all before--and you have never
+heard it all your days. 'He that hath ears to hear, let him _hear_.'
+
+Then there is another hindrance. A man may put his fingers in his
+ears. And some of you, I am afraid, are not ignorant of what it is
+to have made distinct and conscious efforts to get rid of the
+impressions of religion, and of Christ's voice to us.
+
+And then there are some of us who, out of sheer listlessness, do not
+hear. It is not because we are too busy. It is not because we have
+any intellectual objection to the message. It is not because we have
+made any definite effort to get away from it. It is not even because
+we have been so accustomed to hear it, that it is impossible to make
+an impression on our listless indifference. Go down into Morecambe
+Bay when the tide is making; and, as the water is beginning to
+percolate through the sand, try to make an impression with a stick
+upon the tremulous jelly. As soon as you take out the point the
+impression is lost. And there are many of us like that, who, out of
+sheer stolid listlessness, retain no fragment of the truth that is
+sounding in our ears. Dear friends, 'If the word spoken by angels
+was steadfast, how shall we escape if we'--what? Reject? Deny? Fight
+against? Angrily repel? No;--'if we _neglect_ so great salvation?' That
+is the question for you negligent people, for you people who think you
+know all about it and there an end, for you people who are so busy
+with your daily lives that, amidst the hubbub of earth, heaven's silent
+voice is inaudible to your ears. Neglect stops the ears and ruins the
+man. But you will not hear, though you have ears, unless you make an
+effort of will and concentration of attention.
+
+IV. And now the last thing that I have to say is:--If we do not
+hear, we shall become deaf.
+
+That is what Christ said in the context. The sentence which I have
+taken as my text was spoken at the close of the Parable of the
+Sower; and when His disciples came and asked Him why He spake in
+parables, His answer was in effect that the people to whom He spoke
+had not profited by what they had heard, 'hearing, they heard not,'
+and therefore He spoke in parables which veiled as well as revealed
+the truth. It was not given to them to know the mysteries of the
+Kingdom, because they had not given heed to what had been made known
+to them. The great law was taking effect which gives to him that has
+and takes from him that has not; and that law applied not only to
+the form of Christ's teaching, but also to the faculty of receiving
+it. That diminished capacity is sometimes represented as men's own
+act, and sometimes as the divinely inflicted penalty of not hearing,
+but in either case the same fact is in view--namely, the loss of
+susceptibility by neglect, the dying out of faculties by disuse.
+
+Just as in the bodily life capacities untrained and unexercised
+become faint and disappear; just as the Indian _fakir_, who
+holds his arm up above his head for years, never using the muscles,
+has the muscles atrophied, and at last cannot bring his arm down to
+his side;--so the people who neglect to use the ears that God has
+given them by degrees will lose the capacity of hearing at all.
+Which, being put into plain English, just comes to this: that if we
+do not listen to Jesus Christ when He calls to us in His love, we
+shall gradually have the capacity of hearing diminished until--I do
+not know if it ever reaches that point here--until its ultimate
+extinction.
+
+Dear friends, this word of the love and pity and pardon and
+purifying power of God manifest in Jesus Christ for us all, which I
+am trying to preach to you now, is not without an effect even on the
+men by whom it is most superficially and perfunctorily heard. It
+either softens or hardens. As the old mystics used to say, the same
+heat that melts wax hardens clay into brick. The same light that
+brings blessing to one eye brings pain to another. You have heard,
+and hearing you have not heard; and you will cease to be able to
+hear at all; and then the thunders may rattle over your heads, and
+be inaudible to you; and that Voice which is as loud as the sound of
+many waters, and sweet as harpers harping on their harps, and which
+says to each of us, 'Come to Me, and I will be thy peace and thy
+rest and thy strength,' will no more be audible in your atrophied
+ears. Dear friends! I do not know, as I have said, whether that
+ultimate tragic result is ever wholly reached in this world. I am
+sure that it is not reached with some of you as yet. And I beseech
+you to obey that voice which says, 'This is My beloved Son; hear
+Him,' and to let there not be only outward hearing, but to let there
+be inward acceptance, attention, apprehension, and obedience. And
+then we shall be able to say, 'Blessed are our ears, for they hear;
+blessed are our eyes, for they see.' 'Many prophets and righteous
+men desired to hear the things that ye hear, and heard them not,
+take care that, since you are thus advanced in the outward
+possession of the perfect word of God, there be also the yielding
+to, and reception of it.
+
+
+
+
+'TO HIM THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN'
+
+
+    'Whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall
+    have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him
+    shall be taken away even that he hath.'-- MATT. xiii. 12.
+
+There are several instances in the Gospels of our Lord's repetition
+of sayings which seem to have been, if we may use the expression,
+favourites with Him; as, for instance, 'There are first which shall
+be last, and there are last which shall be first'; or, again, 'The
+servant is not greater than his master, nor the disciple than his
+lord.' My text is one of these. It is here said as part of the
+explanation why He chose to speak in parables, in order that the
+truth, revealed to the diligent and attentive, might be hidden from
+the careless. Again, we find it in two other Gospels, in a somewhat
+similar connection, though with a different application, where Jesus
+enunciates it as the basis of His warning, 'Take heed how'--or, in
+another version, 'what'--'ye hear.' Again He employs it in this
+Gospel in the parable of the talents, as explaining the principle on
+which the retribution to the slothful servant was meted out. And we
+find it yet once more in the parable of the pounds in Luke's Gospel,
+which, though entirely different in conception and purpose from that
+of the talents, is identical in the portion connected with the
+slothful servant.
+
+So there are two very distinct directions in which this saying
+looks, as it was used by our Lord--one in reference to the attitude
+of men towards the Revelation of God, and one in reference to the
+solemn subject of future retribution. I wish, now, mainly to try and
+illustrate the great law which is set forth here, and to follow out
+the various spheres of its operation, and estimate the force of its
+influence. For I think that large and very needful lessons for us
+all may be drawn therefrom. The principle of my text shapes all
+life. It is a paradox, but it is a deep truth. It sounds harsh and
+unjust, but it contains the very essence of righteous retribution.
+The paradox is meant to spur attention, curiosity, and inquiry. The
+key to it lies here--to use is to have. There is a possession which
+is no possession. That I have rights of property in a thing, as
+contradistinguished to your rights, does not make it in any deep and
+real sense mine. What I use I have; and all else is, as one of the
+other evangelists has it, but 'seeming' to have.
+
+So much, then, by way of explanation of our text. Now, let me ask
+you to look with me into two or three of the regions where we shall
+find illustrations of its working.
+
+I. Take the application of this principle to common life.
+
+The lowest instance is in regard to material possessions. It is a
+complaint that is made against the present social arrangements and
+distribution of wealth, that money makes money; that wealth has a
+tendency to clot; the rich man to get richer, and the poor man to
+get poorer. Just as in a basin of water when the plug is out, and
+circular motion is set up, the little bits of foreign matter that
+may be there all tend to get together, so it is in regard to these
+external possessions. 'To him that hath shall be given'; and people
+grumble about that and say, 'It never rains but it pours, and the
+man that needs more money least gets it most easily.' Of course.
+Treasure used grows; treasure hoarded rusts and dwindles. The
+millionaire will double his fortune by a successful speculation. The
+man with half a dozen large shops drives the poor little tradesman
+out of the field. So it is all round: 'To him that hath shall be
+given; but from him that hath not shall be taken even that he hath.'
+
+Next, go a step higher. Look at how this law works in regard to
+powers of body. That is a threadbare old illustration. The
+blacksmith's arm we have all heard about; the sailor's eye, the
+pianist's wrist, the juggler's fingers, the surgeon's deft hand--all
+these come by use. 'To him that hath shall be given.' And the same
+man who has cultivated one set of organs to an almost miraculous
+fineness or delicacy or strength will, by the operation of the other
+half of the same principle, have all but atrophied another set. So
+with the blacksmith's arm, which has grown muscular at the expense
+of his legs. Part of the physical frame has monopolised what might
+have been distributed throughout the whole. Use is strength; use
+makes growth. We have what we employ. And even in regard to our
+bodily frame the organs that we do not use we carry about with us
+rather as a weight attached to us than as a possession.
+
+Again, come a little higher. This great principle largely goes to
+determine our position in the world and our work. The man that can do
+a thing gets it to do. In the long run the tools come to the hand that
+can use them. So here is one medical man's consulting-room crammed
+full of patients, and his neighbour next door has scarcely one. The
+whole world runs to read A's, B's, or C's books. The briefless
+barrister complains that there is no middle course between having
+nothing to do and being overwhelmed with briefs. 'To him that hath
+shall be given'--the man can do a thing, and he gets it to do--'and
+from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath,'
+That law largely settles every man's place in the world.
+
+Let us come still higher. The same law has much--not all, but much--to
+do in making men's characters. For it operates in its most intense
+fashion, and with results most blessed or most disastrous, in the
+inner life. The great example that I would adduce is conscience. Use
+it, obey it, listen for its voice, never thwart it, and it grows and
+grows and grows, and becomes more and more sensitive, more and more
+educated, more and more sovereign in its decisions. Neglect it, still
+more, go in its teeth, and it dwindles and dwindles and dwindles; and
+I suppose it is possible--though one would fain hope that it is a very
+exceptional case--for a man, by long-continued indifference to the
+voice within that says 'Thou shalt' or 'Thou shalt not,' to come at
+last to never hearing it at all, or to its never speaking at all. It
+is 'seared as with a hot iron,' says one of the Apostles; and in
+seared flesh there is no feeling any more. Are any of you, dear
+friends, bringing about such a state? Are you doing what you know you
+ought not to do? Then you will be less and less troubled as the days
+go on; and, by neglecting the voice, you will come at last to be like
+the profligate woman in the book of Proverbs, who, after her sin,
+'wipes her mouth and says, I have done no harm.' Do you think _that_
+is a desirable state--to put out the eyes of your soul, to stifle
+what is the truest echo of God's voice that you will ever hear? Do
+you not think that it would be wiser to get the blessed half of this
+law on your side, instead of the dreadful one? Listen to that voice.
+Never, as you value yourselves, neglect it. Cultivate the habit of
+waiting for its monitions, its counsels prohibitory or commendatory,
+and then you will have done much to secure that your spirit shall be
+enriched by the operations of this wide-spread law.
+
+Take another illustration. People who, by circumstances, are placed
+in some position of dependence and subordination, where they have
+seldom to exercise the initiative of choice, but just to do what
+they are bid, by degrees all but lose the power of making up their
+minds about anything. And so a slave set free is proverbially a
+helpless creature, like a bit of driftwood; and children who have
+been too long kept in a position of pupilage and subordination, when
+they are sent into the world are apt to turn out very feeble men,
+for want of a good, strong backbone of will in them. So, many a
+woman that has been accustomed to leave everything in her husband's
+hands, when the clods fall on his coffin finds herself utterly
+helpless and bewildered, just because in the long, happy years she
+never found it necessary to exercise her own judgment or her own
+will about practical matters.
+
+So do not get into the habit of letting circumstances settle what
+you are to do, or you will lose the power of dominating them, before
+very long. And if a man for years leaves himself, as it were, to be
+guided by the stream of circumstances, like long green weeds in a
+river, he will lose the power of determining his own fate, and the
+Will will die clean out of him. Cultivate it, and it will grow.
+
+Again, this same principle largely settles our knowledge, our
+convictions, the operations and the furniture of our understandings.
+If a man holds any truth slackly, or in the case of truths that are
+meant to influence life and conduct, does not let it influence these,
+then that is a kind of having truth that is sure to end in losing it.
+If you want to lose your convictions grasp them loosely--do not act
+upon them, do not take them for guides of your life--and they will
+soon relieve you of their unwelcome presence. If you wish mind and
+knowledge to grow, grip with a grip of iron what you do know, and
+let it dominate you, as it ought. He that truly _has_ his
+learning will learn more and pile by slow degrees stone upon stone,
+until the building is complete.
+
+So, dear friends, here, in these illustrations, which might have
+been indefinitely enlarged, we see the working of a principle which
+has much to do in making men what they are. What you use you
+increase, what you leave unused you lose. There are grey heads in my
+present audience who, when they were young men, had dreams and
+aspirations that they bitterly smile at now. There are men here who
+began life with possibilities that have never blossomed or fruited,
+but have died on the stem. Why? Because they were so much occupied
+with the vulpine craft of making their position and their 'pile'
+that generous emotions and noble sympathies and lofty aspirations,
+intellectual or otherwise, were all neglected, and so they are dead;
+and the men are the poorer incalculably, because of what has thus
+been shed away from them. You make your characters by the parts of
+yourselves that you choose to cultivate and employ. Do you think
+that God gave us whatever of an intellectual and emotional and moral
+kind is in us, in order that it might be all used up in our daily
+business? A very much scantier outfit would have done for all that
+is wanted for that. But there are abortive and dormant organs in
+your spiritual nature, as there are in the corporeal, which tell you
+what you were meant for, and which it is your sin to leave
+undeveloped. Brethren, the law of my text shapes us in the two ways,
+that whatever we cultivate, be it noble or be it bestial, will grow,
+and whatever we repress or neglect will die. Choose which of the two
+halves of yourselves you will foster, and on which you will frown.
+
+So much, then, for the first general application of these words. Now
+let me turn for a moment to another.
+
+II. I would note, secondly, the application of this two-fold law in
+regard to God's revelation of Himself.
+
+That is the bearing of it in the immediate context from which our
+text is taken. Our Lord explains that teaching by parable--a
+transparent veil over a truth--was adopted in order that the veiled
+truth might be a test as well as a revelation. And although I do not
+believe that the Christian revelation has been made in any degree
+less plain and obvious than it could have been made, I cannot but
+recognise the fact that the necessities of the case demand that,
+when God speaks to us, He should speak in such a fashion as that it
+is possible to say, 'Tush! It is not God that is speaking; it is
+only Eli!' and so to turn about the young Samuel's mistake the other
+way. I do not believe that God has diminished the evidence of His
+Revelation in order to try us; but I do maintain that the Revelation
+which He has made does come to us, and must come to us, in such a
+form as that, not by mathematical demonstration but by moral
+affinity, we shall be led to recognise and to bow to it. He that
+will be ignorant, let him be ignorant, and he that will come asking
+for truth, it will flood his eyeballs with a blessed illumination.
+The veil will but make more attractive to some eyes the outlines of
+the fair form beneath it, whilst others are offended at it and say,
+'Unless we see the truth undraped, we will not believe that it is
+truth at all.'
+
+So, brethren, let me remind you--what is really but a repetition in
+reference to another subject of what I have already said,--that in
+regard to God's speech to men, and especially in regard to what I,
+for my part, believe to be the complete and ultimate and perfect
+speech of God to men, in Jesus Christ our Saviour, the principle of
+my text holds good.
+
+'To him that hath shall be given.' If you will make that truth your
+own by loyal faith and honest obedience, if you will grapple it to
+your heart, then you will learn more and more. Whatever tiny corner
+of the great whole you have grasped, hold on by that and draw it
+into yourselves, and you will by degrees get the entire, glorious,
+golden web to wrap round you. 'If any man wills to do His will he
+shall know.' That is Christ's promise; and it will be fulfilled to
+us all. 'To him that hath shall be given.'
+
+If, on the other hand, you 'have' Christian truth and Christ, who is
+the Truth, in the fashion in which so many of us have it and Him, as
+a form, as a mere intellectual possession, so that we can, when we
+go to church, repeat the creed without feeling that we are telling a
+lie, but that when we go to market we do not carry the Commandments
+with us--if that is our Christianity, then it will dribble away into
+nothing. We shall not be much the poorer for the loss of such a sham
+possession, but it will go. It drops out of the hands that are not
+clasped to hold it. It is just that a thing so neglected shall some
+day be a thing withdrawn. So in regard to Revelation and a man's
+perception and reception of it, my text holds good in both its
+halves.
+
+III. Lastly, look at the application of these words in the future.
+
+That is our Lord's own application of them, twice out of the five
+times in which the saying appears in the three Gospels: in the
+parable of the talents and in the parallel portion of the parable of
+the pounds. I do not venture into the regions of speculation about
+that future, but from the words before us there come clearly enough
+two aspects of it. The man with the ten talents received more; the
+man that had hid the talent or the pound in the ground was deprived
+of that which he had not used.
+
+Now, with regard to the former there is no difficulty in translating
+the representations of the parables, sustained as they are by
+distinct statements of other portions of Scripture. They come to
+this, that, for the life beyond, indefinite progress in all that is
+noble and blessed and Godlike in heart and character, in intellect
+and power, are certain; that faith, hope, love, here cultivated but
+putting forth few blossoms and small fruitage, there, in that higher
+house where these be planted, will flourish in the courts of the
+Lord, and will bear fruit abundantly; that here the few things
+faithfully administered will be succeeded yonder by the many things
+royally ruled over; that here one small coin, as it were, is put
+into our palm--namely the present blessedness and peace and strength
+and purity of a Christian life; and that yonder we possess the
+inheritance of which what we have here is but the earnest. It used
+to be the custom when a servant was hired for the next term-day to
+give him one of the smallest coins of the realm as what was called
+'arles'--wages in advance, to seal the bargain. Similarly, in buying
+an estate a bit of turf was passed over to the purchaser. We get the
+earnest here of the broad acres of the inheritance above. 'To him
+that hath shall be given.'
+
+And the other side of the same principle works in some terrible ways
+that we cannot speak about. 'From him that hath not shall be taken
+away even that which he hath.' I have spoken of the terrible analogy
+to this solemn prospect which is presented us by the imperfect
+experiences of earth. And when we see in others, or discover in
+ourselves, how it is possible for unused faculties to die entirely
+out, I think we shall feel that there is a solemn background of very
+awful truth, in the representation of what befell the unfaithful
+servant. Hopes unnourished are gone; opportunities unimproved are
+gone, capacities undeveloped are gone; fold after fold, as it were,
+is peeled off the soul, until there is nothing left but the naked
+self, pauperised and empty-handed for evermore. 'Take it from him';
+he never was the better for it; he never used it; he shall have it
+no longer.
+
+Brethren, cultivate the highest part of yourselves, and see to it that,
+by faith and obedience, you truly have the Saviour, whom you have by
+the hearing of the ear and by outward profession. And then death will
+come to you, as a nurse might to a child that came in from the fields
+with its hands full of worthless weeds and grasses, to empty them in
+order to fill them with the flowers that never fade. You can choose
+whether Death--and Life too, for that matter--shall be the porter
+that will open to you the door of the treasure-house of God, or the
+robber that will strip you of misused opportunities and unused talents.
+
+
+
+
+SEEING AND BLIND
+
+
+    'They seeing, see not.'--MATT. xiii, 13.
+
+This is true about all the senses of the word 'seeing'; there is
+not one man in ten thousand who sees the things before his eyes. Is
+not this the distinction, for instance, of the poet or painter, and
+man of science--just that they do see? How true is this about the
+eye of the mind, what a small number really understand what they
+know! But these illustrations are of less moment than the saddest
+example--religious indifference. I wish to speak about this now,
+and to ask you to consider--
+
+    I. The extent to which it prevails.
+    II. The causes from which it springs.
+    III. The fearful contrasts it suggests.
+    IV. The end to which it conducts.
+
+I. The extent to which it prevails.
+
+I have no hesitation in saying that it is the condition of by far
+the largest proportion of our nation. It is the true enemy of souls.
+I do not believe that any large proportion of Englishmen are actual
+disbelievers, who reject Christianity as unworthy of credence, or
+attach themselves to any of the innumerable varieties of deistical
+and pantheistical schools. I am not saying at present whether it
+would be a more or less hopeful state if it were so, but only that
+it is not so, and that a complacent taking for granted of religious
+truth, a torpor of soul, an entire carelessness about God and
+Christ, and the whole mighty scheme of the Gospel, is the
+characteristic of many in all classes of English society. We have it
+here in our churches and chapels as the first foe we have to fight
+with. Disbelief slays its thousands, and dissipation its tens of
+thousands, but this sleek, well-to-do carelessness, its millions. As
+some one says, it is as if an opium sky had rained down soporifics.
+
+II. The causes from which it springs.
+
+Of course, the great cause of this condition is man's evil heart of
+alienation, the spirit of slumber--but we may find proximate and
+special causes.
+
+There is the indifference springing from the absorbing interests of
+the present. A man has only a certain quantity of interest to put
+forth. If he expends it all on small things, he has none for great.
+This overmastering, overshadowing present draws us all to itself,
+and we have no power of attention or interest to spare for anything
+else, or for reflection upon Christian truth in connection with our
+own conduct.
+
+Then there is the indifference caused by fear of what the results of
+attention might be. It is sometimes broken in upon, and men are in
+danger of having their eyes opened, then with an effort they fling
+themselves into some distraction, and sleep again. As the text says,
+'Their eyes have they closed; lest they should see with their eyes.'
+
+Then there is the indifference fed by an indolent acquiescence in
+the truth. That is a favourite way of breaking the force of all
+unwelcome moral truth, and especially of the Gospel. A man says, 'Oh
+yes, it is true,' and because it is, therefore he thinks he has done
+enough when he has acknowledged it. Many do not seem to dream that
+the Word has any personal application to them at all.
+
+Then there is the indifference which comes from long familiarity
+with the truth. It is this which haunts our congregations and makes
+it so impossible to get at many who know all our message already.
+You can tell them nothing they do not know. As with men who live by
+a forge, the sound of the blow of the hammer only lulls them to
+sleep. The Gospel is so familiar to them that there is no longer any
+power about it. The vulgar emotion of wonder is not excited, and the
+other of love and admiration has not taken its place.
+
+Men who live in mountain scenery do not know its beauties, and as
+with all other operations of the listless eye so with this, the old
+is deemed to be uninteresting, and the common is the commonplace. As
+even in the piece of earth that you have trodden on longest, you
+would find marvels that you do not dream of if you would look, so
+here. You have heard too much and reflected too little. Oh,
+brethren, it oppresses a man who has to speak to you when he
+reflects how often you have heard it all, how the flow of the river
+only seems to have worn your souls smooth enough to let it glide
+past without one stoppage.
+
+III. The contrasts it suggests.
+
+Contrast the indolence here with the earnestness in life. The same
+men who sit with faces stolid and expressionless over a sermon--meet
+them on Monday morning! They go to sleep at prayer or over a Bible,
+but see them in a bargain or over a ledger. Think of what powers of
+intense love, yea, of almost fearful devotion and energy, lie in us,
+ay and come out of us, and then think how poor, how cold we are
+here, and we may well be ashamed. It is as if a burning mountain
+with its cataract of fire were suddenly quenched and locked in
+everlasting frost, and all the flaming glory running down its
+heaving sides turned into a slow glacier. There comes ice instead of
+fire, frost instead of flame, snow instead of sparks. It is as if
+some magician waved a wand and stiffened men into a paralysis.
+Religion seems to numb men instead of inspiring them. It is an awful
+thought of how they serve themselves and the world, how they can
+love one another, how they can be stirred to noble enthusiasm, and
+how little of all this ever comes to God.
+
+Contrast the indifference of the men and the awfulness of the things
+they are indifferent about. God--Christ--their souls--heaven--hell.
+The grandest things men can think about, the mightiest realities in
+the universe, the eternal, the most powerful, these it is which some
+of you, seeing, see not.
+
+Contrast men's indifference and the earnestness of the rest of the
+creation. God rose early and sent His prophets. He so loved the
+world that He gave His Son. Christ died, lives, works, rules,
+expects, beseeches. Angels desire to look into the wonders that you
+'seeing, see not'. What makes heaven fill with rapture, and flash
+through all her golden glories with light, what makes hell look on
+with the lurid scowl of baffled malignity, that is what _you_
+are careless about. My friend, you and other men like you are the
+only beings in the universe careless about the salvation of your
+souls.
+
+IV. The end to which it conducts.
+
+That end is certain ruin. Ah, dear friends, you do not need to do
+much to ruin your own souls. You have only to continue indifferent
+and you will do it effectually. Negligence is quite enough. Ruin is
+what it will certainly end in.
+
+And remember that when the possibility of salvation ends, your
+indifference will end too. The poor toad that is fascinated by the
+serpent, and drops powerless into the cruel jaws, wakes from the
+stupor when it feels the pang. And the lifelong torpor will be
+dissolved for you when you pass into another world. What an awful
+awaking that will be when men look back and see by the light of
+eternity what they were doing here! Oh! friends, would to God that
+any poor word of mine could rouse you from this drugged and opiate
+sleep! Believe me, it is merciful violence which would rouse you.
+Anything rather than that the poison should work on till the heavy
+slumber darkens into death. Let me implore you, as you value your
+own souls, as you would not fling away your most precious jewel to
+'awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ
+shall give thee light.' Beware of the treacherous indifference which
+creeps on, till, like men in the Arctic regions, the sleepers die.
+
+
+
+
+MINGLED IN GROWTH, SEPARATED IN MATURITY
+
+
+    'Another parable put He forth unto them, saying, The
+    kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed
+    good seed in his field: 25. But while men slept, his
+    enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went
+    his way. 26. But when the blade was sprung up, and
+    brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also.
+    27. So the servants of the householder came and said
+    unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy
+    field? from whence then hath it tares? 28. He said
+    unto them, An enemy hath done this. The servants said
+    unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up?
+    29. But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the
+    tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. 80. Let
+    both grow together until the harvest: and in the time
+    of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye
+    together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to
+    burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.'
+    --MATT. xiii. 24-30.
+
+The first four parables contained in this chapter were spoken to a
+miscellaneous crowd on the beach, the last three to the disciples in
+the house. The difference of audience is accompanied with a diversity
+of subject. The former group deals with the growth of the kingdom, as
+it might be observed by outsiders, and especially with aspects of the
+growth on which the multitude needed instruction; the latter, with
+topics more suited to the inner circle of followers. Of these four,
+the first three are parables of vegetation; the last, of assimilation.
+The first two are still more closely connected, inasmuch as the person
+of the sower is prominent in both, while he is not seen in the others.
+The general scenery is the same in both, but with a difference. The
+identification of the seed sown with the persons receiving it, which
+was hinted at in the first, is predominant in the second. But while
+the former described the various results of the seed, the latter
+drops out of sight the three failures, and follows its fortunes in
+honest and good hearts, showing the growth of the kingdom in the
+midst of antagonistic surroundings. It may conveniently be considered
+in three sections: the first teaching how the work of the sower is
+counter-worked by his enemy; the second, the patience of the sower
+with the thick-springing tares; and the third, the separation at the
+harvest.
+
+I. The work of the sower counter-worked by his enemy, and the
+mingled crops.
+
+The peculiar turn of the first sentence, 'The kingdom of heaven is
+likened unto a man that sowed,' etc., suggests that the main purpose
+of the parable is to teach the conduct of the king in view of the
+growth of the tares. The kingdom is concentrated in Him, and the
+'likening' is not effected by the parable, but, as the tenses of
+both verbs show, by the already accomplished fact of His sowing. Our
+Lord veils His claims by speaking of the sower in the third person;
+but the hearing ear cannot fail to catch the implication throughout
+that He Himself is the sower and the Lord of the harvest. The field
+is 'his field,' and His own interpretation tells us that it means
+'the world.' Whatever view we take of the bearing of this parable on
+purity of communion in the visible Church, we should not slur over
+Christ's own explanation of 'the field,' lest we miss the lesson
+that He claims the whole world as His, and contemplates the sowing
+of the seed broadcast over it all. The Kingdom of Heaven is to be
+developed on, and to spread through, the whole earth. The world
+belongs to Christ not only when it is filled with the kingdom, but
+before the sowing. The explanation of the good seed takes the same
+point of view as in the former parable. What is sown is 'the word';
+what springs from the seed is the new life of the receiver. Men
+become children of the kingdom by taking the Gospel into their
+hearts, and thereby receive a new principle of growth, which in
+truth becomes themselves.
+
+Side by side with the sower's beneficent work the counter-working of
+'his enemy' goes on. As the one, by depositing holy truth in the
+heart, makes men 'children of the kingdom,' the other, by putting
+evil principles therein, makes men 'children of evil.' Honest
+exposition cannot eliminate the teaching of a personal antagonist of
+Christ, nor of his continuous agency in the corruption of mankind.
+It is a glimpse into a mysterious region, none the less reliable
+because so momentary. The sulphurous clouds that hide the fire in
+the crater are blown aside for an instant, and we see. Who would
+doubt the truth and worth of the unveiling because it was short and
+partial? 'The devil is God's ape.' His work is a parody of Christ's.
+Where the good seed is sown, there the evil is scattered thickest.
+False Christs and false apostles dog the true like their shadows.
+Every truth has its counterfeit. Neither institutions, nor
+principles, nor movements, nor individuals, bear unmingled crops of
+good. Not merely creatural imperfection, but hostile adulteration,
+marks them all. The purest metal oxidises, scum gathers on the most
+limpid water, every ship's bottom gets foul with weeds. The history
+of every reformation is the same: radiant hopes darkened, progress
+retarded, a second generation of dwarfs who are careless or
+unfaithful guardians of their heritage.
+
+There are, then, two classes of men represented in the parable, and
+these two are distinguishable without doubt by their conduct. Tares
+are said to be quite like wheat until the heads show, and then there
+is a plain difference. So our Lord here teaches that the children of
+the kingdom and those of evil are to be discriminated by their
+actions. We need not do more than point in a sentence to His
+distinct separation of men (where the seed of the kingdom has been
+sown) into two sets. Jesus Christ holds the unfashionable, 'narrow'
+opinion that, at bottom, a man must either be His friend or His
+enemy. We are too much inclined to weaken the strong line of
+demarcation, and to think that most men are neither black nor white,
+but grey.
+
+The question has been eagerly debated whether the tares are bad men
+in the Church, and whether, consequently, the mingled crop is a
+description of the Church only. The following considerations may
+help to an answer. The parable was spoken, not to the disciples, but
+to the crowd. An instruction to them as to Church discipline would
+have been signally out of place; but they needed to be taught that
+the kingdom was to be 'a rose amidst thorns,' and to grow up among
+antagonisms which it would slowly conquer, by the methods which the
+next two parables set forth. This general conception, and not
+directions about ecclesiastical order, was suited to them. Again,
+the designation of the tares as 'the children of evil' seems much
+too wide, if only a particular class of evil men--namely, those who
+are within the Church--are meant by it. Surely the expression
+includes all, both in and outside the Church, who 'do iniquity.'
+Further, the representation of the children of the kingdom, as
+growing among tares in the field of the world, does not seem to
+contemplate them as constituting a distinct society, whether pure or
+impure; but rather as an indefinite number of individuals,
+intermingled in a common soil with the other class. 'The kingdom of
+heaven' is not a synonym for the Church. Is it not an anachronism to
+find the Church in the parable at all? No doubt, tares are in the
+Church, and the parable has a bearing on it; but its primary lesson
+seems to me to be much wider, and to reveal rather the conditions of
+the growth of the kingdom in human society.
+
+II. We have the patience of the husbandman with the quick-springing
+tares.
+
+The servants of the householder receive no interpretation from our
+Lord. Their question is silently passed by in His explanation.
+Clearly then, for some reason, He did not think it necessary to say
+any more about them; and the most probable reason is, that they and
+their words have no corresponding facts, and are only introduced to
+lead up to the Master's explanation of the mystery of the growth of
+the tares, and to His patience with it. The servants cannot be
+supposed to represent officials in the Church, without hopelessly
+destroying the consistency of the parable; for surely all the
+children of the kingdom, whatever their office, are represented in
+the crop. Many guesses have been made,--apostles, angels, and so on.
+It is better to say 'The Lord hath not showed it me.'
+
+The servant's first question expresses, in vivid form, the sad, strange
+fact that, where good was sown, evil springs. The deepest of all
+mysteries is the origin of evil. Explain sin, and you explain everything.
+The question of the servants is the despair of thinkers in all ages.
+Heaven sows only good; where do the misery and the wickedness
+come from? That is a wider and sadder question than, How are churches
+not free from bad members? Perhaps Christ's answer may go as far
+towards the bottom of the bottomless as those of non-Christian thinkers,
+and, if it do not solve the metaphysical puzzles, at any rate gives
+the historical fact, which is all the explanation of which the question
+is susceptible.
+
+The second question reminds us of 'Wilt Thou that we command fire...
+from heaven, and consume them?' It is cast in such a form as to put
+emphasis on the householder's will. His answer forbidding the
+gathering up of the tares is based, not upon any chance of mistaking
+wheat for them, nor upon any hope that, by forbearance, tares may
+change into wheat, but simply on what is best for the good crop.
+There was a danger of destroying some of it, not because of its
+likeness to the other, but because the roots of both were so
+interlaced that one could not be pulled up without dragging the
+other after it.
+
+Is this prohibition, then, meant to forbid the attempt to keep the
+Church pure from un-Christian members? The considerations already
+adduced are valid in answering this question, and others may be
+added. The crowd of listeners had, no doubt, many of them, been
+influenced by John the Baptist's fiery prophecies of the King who
+should come, fan in hand, to 'purge His floor,' and were looking for
+a kingdom which was to be inaugurated by sharp separation and swift
+destruction. Was not the teaching needed then, as it is now, that
+that is not the way in which the kingdom of heaven is to be founded
+and grow? Is not the parable best understood when set in connection
+with the expectations of its first hearers, which are ever floating
+anew before the eyes of each generation of Christians? Is it not
+Christ's _apologia_ for His delay in filling the _rôle_ which John had
+drawn out for him? And does that conception of its meaning make it
+meaningless for us? Observe, too, that the rooting up which is forbidden
+is, by the proprieties of the emblem, and by the parallel which it
+must necessarily afford to the final burning, something very solemn
+and destructive. We may well ask whether excommunication is a
+sufficiently weighty idea to be taken as its equivalent. Again, how
+does the interpretation which sees ecclesiastical discipline here
+comport with the reason given for letting the tares grow on? By the
+hypothesis in the parable, there is no danger of mistake; but is there
+any danger of casting out good men from the Church along with the
+bad, except through mistake? Further, if this parable forbids casting
+manifestly evil men out of the Church, it contradicts the divinely
+appointed law of the Church as administered by the apostles. If it
+is to be applied to Church action at all, it absolutely forbids the
+separation from the Church of any man, however notoriously un-Christian,
+and that, as even the strongest advocates of comprehension admit,
+would destroy the very idea of the Church. Surely an interpretation
+which lands us in such a conclusion cannot be right. We conclude,
+then, that the intermingling which the parable means is that of good
+men and bad in human society, where all are so interwoven that
+separation is impossible without destroying its whole texture; that
+the rooting up, which is declared to be inconsistent with the growth
+of the crop, means removal from the field, namely, the world; that
+the main point of the second part of the parable is to set forth the
+patience of the Lord of the harvest, and to emphasise this as the
+law of the growth of His kingdom, that it advances amidst antagonism;
+and that its members are interlaced by a thousand rootlets with those
+who are not subjects of their King. What the interlacing is for, and
+whether tares may become wheat, are no parts of its teaching. But
+the lesson of the householder's forbearance is meant to be learned
+by us. While we believe that the scope of the parable is wider than
+instruction in Church discipline, we do not forget that a fair inference
+from it is that, in actual churches, there will ever be a mingling of
+good and evil; and, though that fact is no reason for giving up the
+attempt to make a church a congregation of faithful men, and of such
+only, it is a reason for copying the divine patience of the sower in
+ecclesiastical dealings with errors of opinion and faults of
+conduct.
+
+III. The final separation at the harvest.
+
+The period of development is necessarily a time of intermingling, in
+which, side by side, the antagonistic principles embodied in their
+representatives work themselves out, and beneficially affect each
+other. But each grows towards an end, and, when it has been reached,
+the blending gives place to separation. John's prophecy is plainly
+quoted in the parable, which verbally repeats his 'gather the wheat
+into his barn,' and alludes to his words in the other clause about
+burning the tares. He was right in his anticipations; his error was
+in expecting the King to wield His fan at the beginning, instead of
+at the end of the earthly form of His kingdom. At the consummation
+of the allotted era, the bands of human society are to be dissolved,
+and a new principle of association is to determine men's place.
+Their moral and religious affinities will bind them together or
+separate them, and all other ties will snap. This marshalling
+according to religious character is the main thought of the solemn
+closing words of the parable and of its interpretation, in which our
+Lord presents Himself as directing the whole process of judgment by
+means of the 'angels' who execute His commands. They are 'His
+angels,' and whatever may be the unknown activity put forth by them
+in the parting of men, it is all done in obedience to Him. What
+stupendous claims Jesus makes here! What becomes of the tares is
+told first in words awful in their plainness, and still more awful
+in their obscurity. They speak unmistakably of the absolute
+separation of evil men from all society but that of evil men; of a
+close association, compelled, and perhaps unwelcome. The tares are
+gathered out of 'His kingdom,'--for the field of the world has then
+all become the kingdom of Christ. There are two classes among the
+tares: men whose evil has been a snare to others (for the 'things
+that offend' must, in accordance with the context, be taken to be
+persons), and the less guilty, who are simply called 'them that do
+iniquity.'
+
+Perhaps the 'bundles' may imply assortment according to sin, as in
+Dante's circles. What a bond of fellowship that would be!
+'_The_ furnace,' as it is emphatically called by eminence,
+burns up the bundles. We may freely admit that the fire is part of
+the parable, but yet let us not forget that it occurs not only in
+the parable, but in the interpretation; and let us learn that the
+prose reality of 'everlasting destruction,' which Christ here
+solemnly announces, is awful and complete. For a moment He passes
+beyond the limits of that parable, to add that terrible clause about
+'weeping and gnashing of teeth,' the tokens of despair and rage. So
+spoke the most loving and truthful lips. Do we believe His warnings
+as well as His promises?
+
+The same law of association according to character operates in the
+other region. The children of the kingdom are gathered together in
+what is now 'the kingdom of My Father,' the perfect form of the
+kingdom of Christ, which is still His kingdom, for 'the throne of
+God and of the Lamb,' the one throne on which both sit to reign, is
+'in it.' Freed from association with evil, they are touched with a
+new splendour, caught from Him, and blaze out like the sun; for so
+close is their association, that their myriad glories melt as into a
+single great light. Now, amid gloom and cloud, they gleam like tiny
+tapers far apart; then, gathered into one, they flame in the
+forehead of the morning sky, 'a glorious church, not having spot,
+nor wrinkle, nor any such thing.'
+
+
+
+
+LEAVEN
+
+
+    'The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a
+    woman took, and bid to three measures of meal, till
+    the whole was leavened.'--MATT. xiii. 33.
+
+How lovingly and meditatively Jesus looked upon homely life, knowing
+nothing of the differences, the vulgar differences, between the
+small and great! A poor woman, with her morsel of barm, kneading it
+up among three measures of meal, in some coarse earthenware pan,
+stands to Him as representing the whole process of His work in the
+world. Matthew brings together in this chapter a series of seven
+parables of the kingdom, possibly spoken at different times, and
+gathered here into a sequence and series, just as he has done with
+the great procession of miracles that follows the Sermon on the
+Mount, and just as, perhaps, he has done with that sermon itself.
+The two first of the seven deal with the progress of the Gospel in
+individual minds and the hindrances thereto. Then there follows a
+pair, of which my text is the second, which deal with the
+geographical expansion of the kingdom throughout the world, in the
+parable of the grain of mustard-seed growing into the great herb,
+and with the inward, penetrating, diffusive influence of the
+kingdom, working as an assimilating and transforming force in the
+midst of society.
+
+I do not purpose to enter now upon the wide and difficult question
+of the relation of the kingdom to the Church. Suffice it to say that
+the two terms are by no means synonymous, but that, at the same
+time, inasmuch as a kingdom implies a community of subjects, the
+churches, in the proportion in which they have assimilated the
+leaven, and are holding fast by the powers which Christ has lodged
+within them, are approximate embodiments of the kingdom. The
+parable, then, suggests to us, in a very striking and impressive
+form, the function and the obligations of Christian people in the
+world.
+
+Let me deal, in a purely expository fashion, with the emblem before
+us.
+
+'The kingdom of heaven is like leaven.' Now of course, leaven is
+generally in Scripture taken as a symbol of evil or corruption. For
+example, the preliminary to the Passover Feast was the purging of
+the houses of the Israelites of every scrap of evil ferment, and the
+bread which was eaten on that Feast was prescribed to be unleavened.
+But fermentation works ennobling as well as corruption, and our Lord
+lays hold upon the other possible use of the metaphor. The parable
+teaches that the effect of the Gospel, as ministered by, and
+residing in, the society of men, in whom the will of God is supreme,
+is to change the heavy lump of dough into light, nutritious bread.
+There are three or four points suggested by the parable which I
+could touch upon; and the first of them is that significant
+disproportion between the apparent magnitude of the dead mass that
+is to be leavened, and the tiny piece of active energy which is to
+diffuse itself throughout it.
+
+We get there a glimpse into our Lord's attitude, measuring Himself
+against the world and the forces that were in it. He knows that in
+Him, the sole Representative, at the moment, of the kingdom of
+heaven upon earth--because in Him, and in Him alone, the divine will
+was, absolutely and always, supreme--there lie, for the time
+confined to Him, but never dormant, powers which are adequate to the
+transformation of humanity from a dead, lumpish mass into an
+aggregate all-penetrated by a quickening influence, and, if I might
+so say, fermented with a new life that He will bring. A tremendous
+conception, and the strange thing about it is that it looks as if
+the Nazarene peasant's dream was going to come true! But He was
+speaking to the men whom He was charging with a delegated task, and
+to them He says, 'There are but twelve of you, and you are poor,
+ignorant men, and you have no resources at your back, but you have
+Me, and that is enough, and you may be sure that the tiny morsel of
+yeast will penetrate the whole mass.' Small beginnings characterise
+the causes which are destined to great endings; the things that are
+ushered into the world large, generally grow very little further,
+and speedily collapse. 'An inheritance may be gotten hastily at the
+beginning, but the end shall not be blessed.' The force which is
+destined to be worldwide, began with the one Man in Nazareth, and
+although the measures of meal are three, and the ferment is a scrap,
+it is sure to permeate and transform the mass.
+
+Therefore, brethren, let us take the encouragement that our Lord
+here offers. If we are adherents of unpopular causes, if we have to
+'stand alone with two or three,' do not let us count heads, but
+measure forces. 'What everybody says must be true,' is a cowardly
+proverb. It may be a correct statement that an absolutely universal
+opinion is a true opinion, but what most people say is usually
+false, and what the few say is most generally true. So if we have to
+front--and if we are true men we shall sometimes have to front--an
+embattled mass of antagonism, and we be in a miserable minority,
+never mind! We can say, 'They that be with us are more than they
+that be with them.' If we have anything of the leaven in us, we are
+mightier than the lump of dough.
+
+But there is another point here, and that is the contact that is
+necessary between the leaven and the dough. We have passed from the
+old monastic idea of Religion being seclusion from life. But that
+mistake dies hard, and there are many very Evangelical and very
+Protestant--and in their own notions superlatively good--people, who
+hold a modern analogue of the old monastic idea; and who think that
+Christian men and women should be very tepidly interested in
+anything except what they call the preaching of the Gospel, and the
+saving of men's souls. Now nobody that knows me, and the trend of my
+preaching, will charge me with undervaluing either of these things,
+but these do not exhaust the function of the Church in the world,
+nor the duty of the Church to society. We have to learn from the
+metaphor in the parable. The dough is not kept on one shelf and the
+leaven on another; the bit of leaven is plunged into the heart of
+the mass, and then the woman kneads the whole up in her pan, and so
+the influence is spread. We Christians are not doing our duty, nor
+are we using our capacities, unless we fling ourselves frankly and
+energetically into all the currents of the national life,
+commercial, political, municipal, intellectual, and make our
+influence felt in them all. The 'salt of the earth' is to be rubbed
+into the meat in order to keep it from putrefaction; the leaven is
+to be kneaded up into the dough in order to raise it. Christian
+people are to remember that they are here, not for the purpose of
+isolating themselves, but in order that they may touch life at all
+points, and at all points bring into contact with earthly life the
+better life and the principles of Christian morality.
+
+But in this contact with all phases of life and forms of activity,
+Christian men are to be sure that they take the leaven with them.
+There are professing Christians that say: 'Oh! I am not strait-laced
+and pharisaical. I do not keep myself apart from any movements of
+humanity. I count nothing that belongs to men alien to a Christian.'
+All right! but when you go into these movements, when you go into
+Parliament, when you become a city Councillor, when you mingle with
+other men in commerce, when you meet other students in the walks of
+intellect, do you take your Christianity there, or do you leave it
+behind? The two things are equally necessary, that Christians should
+be in all these various spheres of activity, and that they should be
+there, distinctly, manifestly, and, when need be, avowedly, as
+Christian men.
+
+Further, there is another thought here, on which I just say one
+word, and that is the effect of the leaven on the dough.
+
+It is to assimilate, to set up a ferment. And that is what
+Christianity did when it came into the world, and
+
+  'Cast the kingdoms old
+   Into another mould.'
+
+And that is what it ought to do to-day, and will do, if Christian
+men are true to themselves and to their Lord. Do you not think that
+there would be a ferment if Christian principles were applied, say,
+for instance, to national politics? Do you not think there would be
+a ferment if Christian principles were brought to bear upon all the
+transactions on the Exchange? Is there any region of life into which
+the introduction of the plain precepts of Christianity as the
+supreme law would not revolutionise it? We talk about England as a
+Christian country. Is it? A Christian country is a country of
+Christians, and Christians are not people that only say 'I have
+faith in Jesus Christ.' but people that do His will. That is the
+leaven that is to change, and yet not to change, the whole mass; to
+change it by lightening it, by putting a new spirit into it, leaving
+the substance apparently unaffected except in so far as the
+substance has been corrupted by the evil spirit that rules.
+Brethren, if we as Christians were doing our duty, it would be true
+of us as it was of the early preachers of the Cross, that we are men
+who turn the world upside down.
+
+But there is one more point on which I touch. I have already
+anticipated some of what I would say upon it, but I must dwell upon
+it for a little longer; and that is, the manner in which the leaven
+is to work.
+
+Here is a morsel of barm in the middle of a lump of dough. It works
+by contact, touches the particles nearest it, and transforms them
+into vehicles for the further transmission of influence. Each
+particle touched by the ferment becomes itself a ferment, and so the
+process goes on, outwards and ever outwards, till it permeates the
+whole mass. That is to say, the individual is to become the
+transmitter of the influence to him who is next him. The
+individuality of the influence, and the track in which it is to
+work, viz. upon those in immediate contiguity to the transformed
+particle which is turned from dough into leaven, are taught us here
+in this wonderful simile.
+
+Now that carries a very serious and solemn lesson for us all. If you
+have received, you are able, and you are bound, to transmit this
+quickening, assimilating, transforming, lightening influence, and
+you need never complain of a want of objects upon which to exercise
+it, for the man or woman that is next you is the person that you
+ought to affect.
+
+Now I have already said, in an earlier portion of these remarks,
+that some good people, taking an erroneous view of the function and
+obligations of the Church in the world, would fain keep its work to
+purely evangelistic effort upon individual souls in presenting to
+them the Gospel of Jesus Christ the Saviour. But whilst I vehemently
+protest against the notion that that is the whole function of the
+Christian Church, I would as vehemently protest against the notion
+that the so-called social work of the Church can ever be efficiently
+done except upon the foundation laid of this evangelistic work.
+First and foremost amongst the ways in which this great obligation
+of leavening humanity is to be discharged, must ever stand, as I
+believe, the appeal to the individual conscience and heart, and the
+presentation to single souls of the great Name in which are stored
+all the regenerative and quickening impulses that can ever alleviate
+and bless humanity. So that, first and foremost, I put the preaching
+of the Gospel, the Gospel of our salvation, by the death and in the
+life of the Incarnate Son of God.
+
+But then, besides that, let me remind you there are other ways,
+subsidiary but indispensable ways, in which the Church has to
+discharge its function; and I put foremost amongst these, what I
+have already touched upon, and therefore need not dilate on now, the
+duty of Christians as Christians to take their full share in all the
+various forms of national life. I need not dwell upon the evils
+rampant amongst us, which have to be dealt with, and, as I believe,
+may best if not only, be dealt with, upon Christian principles.
+Think of drink, lust, gambling, to name but three of them, the
+hydra-headed serpent that is poisoning the English nation. Now it
+seems to me to be a deplorable, but a certainly true thing, that not
+only are these evils not attacked by the Churches as they ought to
+be, but that to a very large extent the task of attacking them has
+fallen into the hands of people who have little sympathy with the
+Church and its doctrines. They are fighting the evils on principles
+drawn from Jesus Christ, but they are not fighting the evils to the
+extent that they ought to do, with the Churches alongside. I beseech
+you, in your various spheres, to see to it that, as far as you can
+make it so, Christian people take the place that Christ meant them
+to take in the conflict with the miseries, the sorrows, the sins
+that honeycomb England to-day, and not to let it be said that the
+Churches shut themselves up and preach to people, but do not lift a
+finger to deal with the social evils of the nation.
+
+
+
+
+TREASURE AND PEARL
+
+
+    The kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a
+    field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and
+    for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and
+    buyeth that field. 45. Again, the kingdom of heaven is
+    like unto a merchantman, seeking goodly pearls: 46. Who,
+    when he had found one pearl of great price, went and
+    sold all that he had, and bought it.'--MATT. xiii. 44-46.
+
+In this couple of parables, which are twins, and must be taken
+together, our Lord utilises two very familiar facts of old-world
+life, both of them arising from a similar cause. In the days when
+there were no banks and no limited liability companies, it was
+difficult for a man to know what to do with his little savings. In
+old times government meant oppression, and it was dangerous to seem
+to have any riches. In old days war stalked over the land, and men's
+property must be portable or else concealed. So, on the one hand we
+find the practice of hiding away little hoards in some suitable
+place, beneath a rock, in the cleft of a tree, or a hole dug in the
+ground, and then, perhaps, the man died before he came back for his
+wealth. Or, again, another man might prefer to carry his wealth
+about with him. So he went and got jewels, easily carried, not
+easily noticed, easily convertible into what he might require.
+
+And, says our Lord, these two practices, with which all the people
+to whom He was speaking were very much more familiar than we are,
+teach us something about the kingdom of God. Now, I am not going to
+be tempted to discuss what our Lord means by that phrase, so
+frequent upon His lips, 'the kingdom of God' or 'of heaven.' Suffice
+it to say that it means, in the most general terms, a state or order
+of things in which God is King, and His will supreme and sovereign.
+Christ came, as He tells us, to found and to extend that kingdom
+upon earth. A man can go into it, and it can come into a man, and
+the conditions on which he enters into it, and it into him, are laid
+down in this pair of parables. So I ask you to notice their
+similarities and their divergences. They begin alike and they run on
+alike for a little way, and then they diverge. There is a fork in
+the road, and they reunite at the end again. They agree in their
+representation of the treasure; they diverge in their explanation of
+the process of discovering it, and they unite at last in the final
+issue. So, then, we have to look at these three points.
+
+I. Let me ask you to think that the true treasure for a man lies in
+the kingdom of God.
+
+It is not exactly said that the treasure is the kingdom, but the
+treasure is found in the kingdom, and nowhere else. Let us put away
+the metaphor; it means that the only thing that will make us rich is
+loving submission to the supreme law of the God whom we love because
+we know that He loves us.  You may put that thought into half a
+dozen different forms. You may say that the treasure is the blessing
+that comes from Christianity, or the inward wealth of a submissive
+heart, or may use various modes of expression, but below them all
+lies this one great thought, that it is laid on my heart, dear
+brethren, to try and lay on yours now, that, when all is said and
+done, the only possession that makes us rich is--is what? God
+Himself. For that is the deepest meaning of the treasure. And
+whatever other forms of expression we may use to designate it, they
+all come back at last to this, that the wealth of the human soul is
+to have God for its very own.
+
+Let me run over two or three points that show us that. That treasure
+is the only one that meets our deepest poverty. We do not all know
+what that is, but whether you know it or not, dear friend, the thing
+that you want most is to have your sins dealt with, in the double
+way of having them forgiven as guilt, and in having them taken away
+from you as tyrants and dominators over your wills. And it is only
+God who can do that, 'God in Christ reconciling the world unto
+Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them,' and giving them,
+by a new life which He breathes into dead souls, emancipation from
+the tyrants that rule over them, and thus bringing them 'into the
+liberty of the glory of the sons of God.' 'Thou sayest that Thou art
+rich and increased with goods ... and knowest not that thou art poor
+... and naked.' Brother, until you have found out that it is only God
+who will save you from being bankrupt, and enable you to pay your
+debts, which are your duties, you do not know where your true riches
+are. And if you have all that men can acquire of the lower things of
+life, whether of what is generally called wealth or of other material
+benefits, and have that great indebtedness standing against you, you
+are but an insolvent after all. Here is the treasure that will make
+you rich, because it will pay your debts, and endow you with capacity
+enough to meet all future expenditure--viz. the possession of the
+forgiving and cleansing grace of God which is in Jesus Christ. If
+you have that, you are rich; if you do not possess it, you are poor.
+Now you believe that, as much as I do, most of you. Well, what do you
+do in consequence?
+
+Further, the possession of God, who belongs to all those that are
+the subjects of the kingdom of God, is our true treasure, because
+that wealth, and that alone, meets at once all the diverse wants of
+the human soul. There is nothing else of which that can be said.
+There are a great many other precious things in this world--human
+loves, earthly ambitions of noble and legitimate kinds. No one but a
+fool will deny the convenience and the good of having a competency
+of this world's possessions. But all these have this miserable
+defect, or rather limitation, that they each satisfy some little
+corner of a man's nature, and leave all the rest, if I may so say,
+like the beasts in a menagerie whose turn has not yet come to be
+fed, yelping and growling while the keeper is at the den of another
+one. There is only one thing that, being applied, as it were, at the
+very centre, will diffuse itself, like some fragrant perfume,
+through the whole sphere, and fill the else scentless air with its
+rich and refreshing fragrance. There is but one wealth which meets
+the whole of human nature. You, however small you are, however
+insignificant people may think you, however humbly you may think of
+yourselves, you are so great that the whole created Universe, if it
+were yours, would be all too little for you. You cannot fill a
+bottomless bog with any number of cartloads of earth. And you know
+as well as I can tell you that 'he that loveth silver shall not be
+satisfied with silver, nor he that loveth abundance with increase,'
+and that none of the good things here below, rich and precious as
+many of them are, are large enough to fill, much less to expand, the
+limitless desires of one human heart. As the ancient Latin father
+said, 'Lord, Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is unquiet
+till it attains to Thee.'
+
+Closely connected with that thought, but capable of being dealt with
+for a moment apart, is the other, that this is our true treasure,
+because we have it all in one.
+
+You remember the beautiful emphasis of one of the parables in our
+text about the man that dissipated himself in seeking for many
+goodly pearls? He had secured a whole casket full of little ones.
+They were pearls, they were many; but then he saw one Orient pearl,
+and he said, 'The one is more than the many. Let me have unity, for
+there is rest; whereas in multiplicity there is restlessness and
+change.' The sky to-night may be filled with galaxies of stars.
+Better one sun than a million twinkling tininesses that fill the
+heavens, and yet do not scatter the darkness. Oh, brethren, to have
+one aim, one love, one treasure, one Christ, one God--there is the
+secret of blessedness. 'Unite my heart to fear Thy name'; and then
+all the miseries of multiplicity, and of drawing our supplies from a
+multitude of separate lakes, will be at an end, when our souls are
+flooded from the one fountain of life that can never fail or be
+turbid. Thus, the unity of the treasure is the supreme excellence of
+the treasure.
+
+Nor need I remind you in more than a word of how this is our true
+treasure, because it is our permanent one. Nothing that can be taken
+from me is truly mine. Those of you who have lived in a great
+commercial community as long as I have done, know that it is not for
+nothing that sovereigns are made circular, for they roll very
+rapidly, and 'riches take to themselves wings and fly away.' We can
+all go back to instances of men who set their hearts upon wealth,
+and flaunted their little hour before us as kings of the Exchange,
+and were objects of adoration and of envy, and at last were left
+stranded in poverty. Nothing that can be stripped from you by the
+accidents of life, or by inevitable death, is worth calling your
+'good.' You must have something that is intertwined with the very
+fibres of your being. And I, unworthy as I am, come to you, dear
+friends, now, with this proffer of the great gift of wealth from
+which 'neither life, nor death, nor angels, nor principalities, nor
+powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor
+depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us.' And I
+beseech you to ask yourselves, Is there anything worth calling
+wealth, except that wealth which meets my deepest need, which
+satisfies my whole nature, which I may have all in one, and which,
+if I have, I may have for ever? That wealth is the God who may be
+'the strength of your hearts and your heritage for ever.'
+
+II. Now notice, secondly, the concealment of the treasure.
+
+According to the first of our parables, the treasure was hid in a
+field. That is very largely local colouring, which gives veracity
+and vraisemblance to the fact of the story. And there has been a
+great deal of very unnecessary and misplaced ingenuity spent in
+trying to force interpretations upon every feature of the parable,
+which I do not intend to imitate, but I just wish to suggest one
+thing. Here was this man in the story, who had plodded across that
+field a thousand times, and knew every clod of it, and had never
+seen the wealth that was lying six inches below the surface. Now,
+that is very like some of my present hearers. God's treasure comes
+to the world in a form which to a great many people veils, if it
+does not altogether hide, its preciousness. You have heard sermons
+till you are sick of sermons, and I do not wonder at it, if you have
+heard them and never thought of acting on them. You know all that I
+can tell you, most of you, about Jesus Christ, and what He has done
+for you, and what you should do towards Him, and your familiarity
+with the Word has blinded you to its spirit and its power. You have
+gone over the field so often that you have made a path across it,
+and it seems incredible to you that there should be anything worth
+your picking up there. Ah! dear friends, Jesus Christ, when He was
+here, 'in whom were hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,'
+had to the men that looked upon Him 'neither form nor comeliness
+that they should desire Him,' and He was to them a stumbling-block
+and foolishness. And Christ's Gospel comes among busy men, worldly
+men, men who are under the dominion of their passions and desires,
+men who are pursuing science and knowledge, and it looks to them
+very homely, very insignificant; they do not know what treasure is
+lying in it. You do not know what treasure is lying--may I venture
+to say it?--in these poor words of mine, in so far as they truly
+represent the mind and will of God. Dear brethren, the treasure is
+hid, but that is not because God did not wish you to see it; it is
+because you have made yourselves blind to its flashing brightness.
+'If our Gospel be hid, it is hid to them ... in whom the god of this
+world hath blinded their eyes.' If your whole desires are passionately
+set on that which Manchester recognises as the _summum bonum_, or,
+if you are living without a thought beyond this present, how can you
+expect to see the treasure, though it is lying there before your eyes?
+You have buried it, or, rather, you have made that which is its
+necessary envelope to be its obscuration. I pray you, look through the
+forms, look beneath the words of Scripture, and try and clear your
+eyesight from the hallucinations of the dazzling present, and you will
+see the treasure that is hid in the field.
+
+III. Again, let me ask you to notice, further, the two ways of
+finding.
+
+The rustic in the first story, who, as I said, had plodded across
+the field a hundred times, was doing it for the hundred and first,
+or perhaps was at work there with his mattock or his homely plough.
+And, perchance, some stroke of the spade, or push of the coulter,
+went a little deeper than usual, and there flashed the gold, or some
+shower of rain came on, and washed away a little of the
+superincumbent soil, and laid bare the bag. Now, that is what often
+happens, for you have to remember that though you are not seeking
+God, God is always seeking you, and so the great saying comes to be
+true, 'I am found of them that sought Me not.' There have been many
+cases like the one of the man who, breathing out threatenings and
+slaughter, with no thought in his mind except to bind the disciples
+and bring them captive to Jerusalem, saw suddenly a light from
+heaven flashing down upon him, and a Voice that pulled him up in the
+midst of his career. Ah! it would be an awful thing if no one found
+Christ except those who set out to seek for Him. Like the dew on the
+grass 'that waiteth not for men, nor tarrieth for the sons of men,'
+He often comes to hearts that are thinking about nothing less than
+about Him.
+
+There are men and women listening to me now who did not come here
+with any expectation of being confronted with this message to their
+souls; they may have been drawn by curiosity or by a hundred other
+motives. If there is one such, to whom I am speaking, who has had no
+desires after the treasure, who has never thought that God was his
+only Good, who has been swallowed up in worldly things and the
+common affairs of life, and who now feels as if a sudden flash had
+laid bare the hidden wealth in the familiar Gospel, I beseech such a
+one not to turn away from the discovered treasure, but to make it
+his own. Dear friend, you may not be looking for the wealth, but
+Christ is looking for His lost coin. And, though it has rolled away
+into some dusty corner, and is lying there all unaware, I venture to
+say that He is seeking you by my poor words to-night, and is saying
+to you: 'I counsel thee to buy of Me gold tried in the fire.'
+
+But then another class is described in the other parable of the
+merchantman who was seeking many goodly pearls. I suppose he may
+stand as a representative of a class of whom I have no doubt there
+are some other representatives hearing me now, namely, persons who,
+without yielding themselves to the claims of Christ, have been
+searching, honestly and earnestly, for 'whatsoever things are lovely
+and of good report.' Dear brethren, if you have been smitten by the
+desire to live noble lives, if you have been roused
+
+  'To follow knowledge, like a sinking star,
+   Beyond the furthest bounds of human thought,'
+
+or if in any way you are going through the world with your eyes
+looking for something else than the world's gross good, and are
+seeking for the many pearls, I beseech you to lay this truth to
+heart, that you will never find what you seek, until you understand
+that the many have not it to give you, and that the One has. And
+when Christ draws near to you and says, 'Whatsoever things are
+lovely and of good report, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever
+things are venerable, if thou seekest them, take Me, and thou wilt
+find them all,' I beseech you, accept Him. There are two ways of
+finding the treasure. It is flashed on unexpectant eyes, and it is
+disclosed to seeking souls.
+
+III. And now, lastly, let us look at the point where the parables
+converge.
+
+There are two ways of finding; there is only one way of getting. The
+one man went and sold all that he had and bought the field. Never
+mind about the morality of the transaction: that has nothing to do
+with our Lord's purpose. Perhaps it was not quite honest of this man
+to bury the treasure again, and then to go and buy the field for
+less than it was worth, but the point is that, however a soul is
+brought to see that God in Christ is all that he needs, there is
+only one way of getting Him, and that is, 'sell all that thou hast.'
+
+'Then it is barter, is it? Then it is salvation by works after all?'
+No! To 'sell all that thou hast' is first, to abandon all hope of
+acquiring the treasure by anything that thou hast. We buy it when we
+acknowledge that we have nothing of our own to buy it with. Buy it
+'without money and without price'; buy it by yielding your hearts;
+buy it by ceasing to cling to earth and creatures, as if they were
+your good. That trust in Jesus Christ, which is the condition of
+salvation is selling 'all that thou hast.' Self is 'all that thou
+hast.' Abandon self and clutch Him, and the treasure is thine. But
+the initial act of faith has to be carried on through a life of
+self-denial and self-sacrifice, and the subjection of self-will,
+which is the hardest of all, and the submission of one's self
+altogether to the kingdom of God and to its King.  If we do thus we
+shall have the treasure, and if we do not thus we shall not.
+
+Surely it is reasonable to fling away paste pearls for real ones.
+Surely it is reasonable to fling away brass counters for gold coins.
+Surely, in all regions of life, we willingly sacrifice the second
+best in order to get the very best. Surely if the wealth which is in
+God is more precious than all besides, you have the best of the
+bargain, if you part with the world and yourselves and get Him. And
+if, on the other hand, you stick to the second best and cleave to
+yourselves and to this poor diurnal sphere and what it contains,
+then I will tell you what your epitaph will be. It is written in one
+of the Psalms, 'He shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at
+his latter end shall be a fool.'
+
+And there is a more foolish fool still--the man who, when he has
+seen the treasure, flings another shovelful of earth upon it, and
+goes away and does _not_ buy it, nor think anything more about
+it. Dear brother, do not do that, but if, by God's help, any poor
+words of mine have stirred anything in your hearts of recognition of
+what your true wealth is, do not rest until you have done what is
+needful to possess it, given away yourselves, and in exchange
+received Christ, and in Him wealth for evermore.
+
+
+
+
+THE MARTYRDOM OF JOHN
+
+
+    'At that time Herod the tetrarch heard of the fame of
+    Jesus, 2. And said unto his servants, This is John the
+    Baptist; he is risen from the dead; and therefore
+    mighty works do shew forth themselves in him. 3. For
+    Herod had laid hold on John, and bound him, and put him
+    in prison for Herodias' sake, his brother Philip's wife.
+    4. For John said unto him, It is not lawful for thee to
+    have her. 5. And when he would have put him to death,
+    he feared the multitude, because they counted him as a
+    prophet. 6. But when Herod's birthday was kept, the
+    daughter of Herodias danced before them, and pleased
+    Herod. 7. Whereupon he promised with an oath to give
+    her whatsoever she would ask. 8. And she, being before
+    instructed of her mother, said, Give me here John
+    Baptist's head in a charger. 9. And the king was sorry:
+    nevertheless for the oath's sake, and them which sat
+    with him at meat, he commanded it to be given her.
+    10. And he sent, and beheaded John in the prison.
+    11. And his head was brought in a charger, and given to
+    the damsel: and she brought it to her mother. 12. And
+    his disciples came, and took up the body, and buried it,
+    and went and told Jesus.'--MATT. xiv. 1-12.
+
+The singular indifference of the Bible to the fate of even its
+greatest men is exemplified in the fact that the martyrdom of John
+is only told incidentally, in explanation of Herod's alarm. But for
+that he would apparently have dropped out of the narrative, as a man
+sinks in the sea, without a bubble or a ripple. Christ is the sole
+theme of the Gospels, and all others are visible only as His light
+falls on them.
+
+It took a long time for news of Christ to reach the ears of Herod.
+Peasants hear of Him before princes, whose thick palace walls and
+crowds of courtiers shut out truth. The first thing to note is the
+alarm of the conscience-stricken king. We learn from the other
+evangelists that there was a difference of opinion among the
+attendants of Herod--not very good judges of a religious teacher--as
+to who this new miracle-working Rabbi might be, but the tetrarch has
+no hesitation. There is no proof that Herod was a Sadducee; but he
+probably thought as little about a resurrection as if he had been,
+and, in any case, did not expect dead men to be starting up again,
+one by one, and mingling with the living. His conscience made a
+coward of him, and his fear made that terrible which would else have
+been thought impossible. In his terror he makes confidants of his
+slaves, overleaping the barriers of position, in his need of some
+ears to pour his fears into. He was right in believing that he had
+not finished with John, and in expecting to meet him again with
+mightier power to accuse and condemn. 'If 'twere done when 'tis
+done,' says Macbeth; but it is not done. There is a resurrection of
+deeds as well as of bodies, and all our buried badnesses will front
+us again, shaking their gory locks at us, and saying that we did
+them.
+
+Instead of following closely the narrative, we may best gather up
+its lessons by considering the actors in the tragedy.
+
+I. We see in Herod the depths of evil possible to a weak character.
+The singular double which he, Herodias and John present to Ahab,
+Jezebel and Elijah, has been often noticed. In both cases a weak
+king is drawn in opposite directions by the stronger-willed
+temptress at his side, and by the stern ascetic from the desert. How
+John had found his way into 'kings' houses' we do not know; but, as
+he carried thither his undaunted boldness of plain-spoken preaching
+of morality and repentance, it was inevitable that he should soon
+find his way from the palace to the dungeon. There must have been
+some intercourse between Herod and him before his imprisonment, or
+he could not have shaken the king's conscience with his blunt
+denunciations. From the account in Mark, it would appear that, after
+his imprisonment, he gained great influence over the tetrarch, and
+led him some steps on the way of goodness. But Herod was 'infirm of
+purpose,' and a beautiful fiend was at his side, and she had an iron
+will sharpened to an edge by hatred, and knew her own mind, which
+was murder. Between them, the weaker nature was much perplexed, and
+like a badly steered boat, yawed in its course, now yielding to the
+impulse from John, now to that from Herodias. Matthew attributes his
+hesitation as to killing John to his fear of the popular voice,
+which, no doubt, also operated. Thus he 'let I dare not wait upon I
+would,' and had not strength of mind enough to hold to the one and
+despise the other of his discordant counsellors. He was evidently a
+sensual, luxurious, feeble-willed, easily frightened, superstitious
+and cunning despot; and, as is always the case with such, he was
+driven farther in evil than he meant or wished. He was entrapped
+into an oath, and then, instead of saying, 'Promises which should
+not have been made should not be kept,' he weakly consents, from
+fantastic fear of what his guests will say of him, and unwillingly,
+out of pure imbecility, stains his soul for ever with blood. In this
+wicked world, weak men will always be wicked men; for it is less
+trouble to consent than to resist, and there are more sirens to
+whisper 'Come' than prophets to thunder, 'It is not lawful.'
+Strength of will is needful for all noble life.
+
+We may learn from Herod, also, how far we may go on the road of
+obedience to God's will, and yet leave it at last. What became of
+all his eager listening, of his partial obedience, of his care to
+keep John safe from Herodias's malice? All vanished like early dew.
+What became of his conscience-stricken alarms on hearing of Christ?
+Did they lead to any deep convictions?  They faded away, and left
+him harder than before. Convictions not followed out ossify the
+heart. If he had sent for Christ, and told Him his fears, all might
+have been well. But he let them pass, and, so far as we know, they
+never returned. He did meet Jesus at last, when Pilate sent him the
+Prisoner, as a piece of politeness, and in what mood?--childish
+pleasure at the chance of seeing a miracle. How did Jesus answer his
+torrent of frivolous questions? 'He answered him nothing.' That sad
+silence speaks Christ's knowledge that now even His words would be
+vain to create one ripple of interest on the Dead Sea of Herod's
+soul. By frivolity, lust, and neglect he had killed the germ of a
+better life, and silence was the kindest answer which perfect love
+could give him.
+
+He shows us, too, the intimate connection of all sins. The common
+root of every sin is selfishness, and the shapes which it takes are
+protean and interchangeable. Lust dwells hard by hate. Sensual
+crimes and cruelty are closely akin. The one vice which Herod would
+not surrender, dragged after it a whole tangle of other sins. No sin
+dwells alone. There is 'none barren among them.' They are
+gregarious, and a solitary sin is more seldom seen than a single
+swallow. Herod is an illustration, too, of a conscience
+fantastically sensitive while it is dead to real crimes. He has no
+twinges for his sin with Herodias, and no effective ones at killing
+John, but he thinks it would be wrong to break his oath. The two
+things often go together; and many a brigand in Calabria, who would
+cut a throat without hesitation, would not miss mass, or rob without
+a little image of the Virgin in his hat. We often make compensation
+for easy indulgence in great sins by fussy scrupulosity about little
+faults, and, like Herod, had rather commit murder than not be polite
+to visitors.
+
+II. The next actors in the tragedy are Herodias and her daughter. What
+a miserable destiny to be gibbeted for ever by half a dozen sentences!
+One deed, after which she no doubt 'wiped her mouth, and said, I have
+done no harm,' has won for the mother an immortality of ignominy. Her
+portrait is drawn in few strokes, but they are enough. In strength of
+will and unscrupulous carelessness of human life, she is the sister of
+Jezebel, and curiously like Shakespeare's awful creation, Lady Macbeth;
+but she adds a stain of sensuous passion to their vices, which
+heightens the horror. Her first marriage was with her full uncle; and
+her second, if marriage it can be called when her husband and Herod's
+wife were both living, was with her step-uncle, and thus triply
+unlawful. John's remonstrance awoke no sense of shame in her, but only
+malignant and murderous hate. Once resolved, no failures made her
+swerve from her purpose. Hers was no passing fury, but cold-blooded,
+deliberate determination. Her iron will and unalterable persistence
+were accompanied by flexibility of resource. When one weapon failed,
+she drew another from a full quiver. And the means which were finally
+successful show not only her thorough knowledge of the weak man she
+had to deal with, but her readiness to stoop to any degradation for
+herself and her child to carry her point. 'A thousand claims to'
+abhorrence 'meet in her, as mother, wife, and queen.' Many a shameless
+woman would have shrunk from sullying a daughter's childhood, by
+sending her to play the part of a shameless dancing-girl before a
+crew of half-tipsy revellers, and from teaching her young lips to
+ask for murder. But Herodias sticks at nothing, and is as insensible
+to the duty of a mother as to that of a wife. If we put together these
+features in her character, her hot animal passions, her cool inflexible
+revenge, her cynical disregard of all decency, her deadness to natural
+affection for her child, her ferocity and her cunning, we have a
+hideous picture of corrupted womanhood. We cannot but wonder
+whether, in after days, remorse ever did its merciful work upon
+Herodias. She urged Herod to his ruin at last by her ambition, which
+sought for him the title of king, and, with one redeeming touch of
+faithfulness, went with him into dreary exile in Gaul. Perhaps
+there, among strangers, and surrounded by the wreck of her projects,
+and when the hot fire of passion had died down, she may have
+remembered and repented her crime.
+
+The criminality of the daughter largely depends upon her age, of
+which we have no knowledge. Perhaps she was too mere a child to
+understand the degradation of the dance, or the infamy of the
+request which her, we hope, innocent and panting lips were tutored
+to prefer. But, more probably, she was old enough to be her mother's
+fellow-conspirator, rather than her tool, and had learned only too
+well her lessons of impurity and cruelty. What chance had a young
+life in such a sty of filth? When the mother becomes the devil's
+deputy, what can the daughter grow up to be, but a worse edition of
+her? This poor girl, so sinning, and so sinned against, followed in
+Herodias's footsteps, and afterwards married, according to the
+custom of the Herods, her uncle, Philip the tetrarch. She inherited
+and was taught evil; that was her misfortune. She made it her own;
+that was her crime. As she stands there, shameless and flushed, in
+that hideous banqueting-hall, with her grim gift dripping red blood
+on the golden platter, and wicked triumph gleaming in her dark eyes,
+she suggests grave questions as to parents' responsibility for
+children's sins, and is a living symbol of the degradation of art to
+the service of vice, and of the power of an evil soul to make
+hideous all the grace of budding womanhood.
+
+III. There is something dramatically appropriate in the silent death
+in the dungeon of the lonely forerunner.  The faint noise of revelry
+may have reached his ears, as he brooded there, and wondered if the
+coming King would never come for his enlargement. Suddenly a gleam
+of light from the opened door enters his cell, and falls on the
+blade of the headsman's sword. Little time can be wasted, for
+Herodias waits. With short preface the blow falls. The King has
+come, and set His forerunner free, sending him to prepare His way
+before Him in the dim regions beyond. A world where Herod sits in
+the festal chamber, and John lies headless in the dungeon, needs
+some one to set it right. When the need is sorest, the help is
+nearest. Truth succeeds by the apparent failure of its apostle.
+Herodias may stab the dead tongue, as the legend tells that she did,
+but it speaks louder after death than ever. Herod kept his birthday
+with drunken and bloody mirth; but it was a better birthday for his
+victim.
+
+IV. It needed some courage for John's disciples to come to that
+gloomy, blood-stained fortress, and bear away the headless trunk
+which scornful cruelty had flung out to rot unburied. When reverent
+love and sorrow had finished their task, what was the little flock
+without a shepherd to do? The possibility of their continued
+existence as a company of disciples was at an end. They show by
+their action that their master had profited from his last message to
+Jesus. At once they turn to Him, and, no doubt, the bulk of them
+were absorbed in the body of His followers. Sorrowful and bereaved
+souls betake themselves naturally to His sweet sympathy for
+soothing, and to His gentle wisdom for direction. The wisest thing
+that any of us can do is to 'go and tell Jesus' our loneliness, and
+let it bind us more closely to Him.
+
+
+
+
+THE GRAVE OF THE DEAD JOHN AND THE GRAVE OF THE LIVING JESUS
+
+
+    'And John's disciples came, and took up the body, and
+    buried it, and went and told Jesus.'--MATT. xiv. 12.
+
+    'And they departed quickly from the sepulchre with fear
+    and great joy.'--MATT. xxviii. 8.
+
+There is a remarkable parallel and still more remarkable contrast
+between these two groups of disciples at the graves of their
+respective masters. John the Baptist's followers venture into the
+very jaws of the lion to rescue the headless corpse of their
+martyred teacher from a prison grave. They bear it away and lay it
+reverently in its unknown sepulchre, and when they have done these
+last offices of love they feel that all is over. They have no longer
+a centre, and they disintegrate. There was nothing to hold them
+together any more. The shepherd had been smitten, and the flock were
+scattered. As a 'school' or a distinct community they cease to be,
+and are mostly absorbed into the ranks of Christ's followers. That
+sorrowful little company that turned from John's grave, perhaps
+amidst the grim rocks of Moab, perhaps in his native city amongst
+the hills of Judah, parted then, to meet no more, and to bear away
+only a common sorrow that time would comfort, and a common memory
+that time would dim.
+
+The other group laid their martyred Master in His grave with as
+tender hands and as little hope as did John's disciples. The bond
+that held them together was gone too, and the disintegrating process
+began at once. We see them breaking up into little knots, and soon
+they, too, will be scattered. The women come to the grave to perform
+the woman's office of anointing, and they are left to go alone.
+Other slight hints are given which show how much the ties of
+companionship had been relaxed, even in a day, and how certainly and
+quickly they would have fallen asunder. But all at once a new
+element comes in, all is changed. The earliest visitors to the
+sepulchre leave it, not with the lingering sorrow of those who have
+no more that they can do, but with the quick, buoyant step of people
+charged with great and glad tidings. They come to it wrapped in
+grief--they leave it with great joy. They come to it, feeling that
+all was over, and that their union with the rest who had loved Him
+was little more than a remembrance. They go away, feeling that they
+are all bound together more closely than ever.
+
+The grave of John was the end of a 'school.' The grave of Jesus was
+the beginning of a Church. Why? The only answer is the message which
+the women brought back from the empty sepulchre on that Easter day:
+'The Lord is risen.' The whole history of the Christian Church, and
+even its very existence, is unintelligible, except on the
+supposition of the resurrection. But for that, the fate of John's
+disciples would have been the fate of Christ's--they would have
+melted away into the mass of the nation, and at most there would
+have been one more petty Galilean sect that would have lived on for
+a generation and died out when the last of His companions died. So
+from these two contrasted groups we may fairly gather some thoughts
+as to the Resurrection of Christ, as attested by the very existence
+of a Christian Church, and as to the joy of that resurrection.
+
+I. Now the first point to be considered is, that the conduct of
+Christ's disciples after His death was exactly the opposite of what
+might have been expected.
+
+They held together. The natural thing for them to do would have been
+to disband; for their one bond was gone; and if they had acted
+according to the ordinary laws of human conduct, they would have
+said to themselves, Let us go back to our fishing-boats and our
+tax-gathering, and seek safety in separation, and nurse our sorrow
+apart. A few lingering days might have been given to weep together
+at His grave, and to assuage the first bitterness of grief and
+disappointment; but when these were over, nothing could have
+prevented Christianity and the Church from being buried in the same
+sepulchre as Jesus. As certainly as the stopping up of the fountain
+would empty the river's bed, so surely would Christ's death have
+scattered His disciples. And that strange fact, that it did not
+scatter them, needs to be looked well into and fairly accounted for
+in some plausible manner. The end of John's school gives a parallel
+which brings the singularity of the fact into stronger relief; and
+looking at these two groups as they stand before us in these two
+texts, the question is irresistibly suggested, Why did not the one
+fall away into its separate elements, as the other did? The keystone
+of the arch was in both cases withdrawn--why did the one structure
+topple into ruin while the other stood firm?
+
+Not only did the disciples of Christ keep united, but their
+conceptions of Jesus underwent a remarkable change, after His death.
+We might have expected, indeed, that, when memory began to work, and
+the disturbing influence of daily association was withdrawn, the
+same idealising process would have begun on their image of Him,
+which reveals and ennobles the characters of our dear ones who have
+gone away from us. Most men have to die before their true worth is
+discerned. But no process of that sort will suffice to account for
+the change and heightening of the disciples' thoughts about their
+dead Lord. It was not merely that, when they remembered, they said,
+Did not our hearts burn within us by the way while He talked with
+us?--but that His death wrought exactly the opposite effect from
+what it might have been expected to do. It ought to have ended their
+hope that He was the Messiah, and we know that within forty-eight
+hours it was beginning to do so, as we learn from the plaintive
+words of disappointed and fading hope: 'We _trusted_ that it
+had been He which should have redeemed Israel.' If, so early, the
+cold conviction was stealing over their hearts that their dearest
+expectation was proved by His death to have been a dream, what could
+have prevented its entire dominion over them, as the days grew into
+months and years? But somehow or other that process was arrested,
+and the opposite one set in. The death that should have shattered
+Messianic dreams confirmed them. The death that should have cast a
+deeper shadow of incomprehensibleness over His strange and lofty
+claims poured a new light upon them, which made them all plain and
+clear. The very parts of His teaching which His death would have
+made those who loved Him wish to forget, became the centre of His
+followers' faith. His cross became His throne. Whilst He lived with
+them they knew not what He said in His deepest words, but, by a
+strange paradox, His death convinced them that He was the Son of
+God, and that that which they had seen with their eyes, and their
+hands had handled, was the Eternal Life. The cross alone could never
+have done that. Something else there must have been, if the men were
+sane, to account for this paradox.
+
+Nor is this all. Another equally unlikely sequel of the death of
+Jesus is the unmistakable moral transformation effected on the
+disciples. Timorous and tremulous before, something or other touched
+them into altogether new boldness and self-possession. Dependent on
+His presence before, and helpless when He was away from them for an
+hour, they become all at once strong and calm; they stand before the
+fury of a Jewish mob and the threatenings of the Sanhedrim, unmoved
+and victorious. And these brave confessors and saintly heroes are
+the men who, a few weeks before, had been petulant, self-willed,
+jealous, cowardly. What had lifted them suddenly so far above
+themselves? Their Master's death? That would more naturally have
+taken any heart or courage out of them, and left them indeed as
+sheep in the midst of wolves. Why, then, do they thus strangely
+blaze up into grandeur and heroism? Can any reasonable account be
+given of these paradoxes? Surely it is not too much to ask of people
+who profess to explain Christianity on naturalistic principles, that
+they shall make the process clear to us by which, Christ being dead
+and buried, His disciples were kept together, learned to think more
+loftily of Him, and sprang at once to a new grandeur of character.
+Why did not they do as John's disciples did, and disappear? Why was
+not the stream lost in the sand, when the head-waters were cut off?
+
+II. Notice then, next, that the disciples' immediate belief in the
+Resurrection furnishes a reasonable, and the only reasonable,
+explanation of the facts.
+
+There is no better historical evidence of a fact than the existence
+of an institution built upon it, and coeval with it. The Christian
+Church is such evidence for the fact of the Resurrection; or, to put
+the conclusion in the most moderate fashion, for the belief in the
+Resurrection. For, as we have shown, the natural effect of our
+Lord's death would have been to shatter the whole fabric: and if
+that effect were not produced, the only reasonable account of the
+force that hindered it is, that His followers believed that He rose
+again. Since that was their faith, one can understand how they were
+banded more closely together than ever. One can understand how their
+eyes were opened to know Him who was 'declared to be the Son of God
+with power by the resurrection from the dead.' One can understand
+how, in the enthusiasm of these new thoughts of their Lord, and in
+the strength of His victory over death, they put aside their old
+fears and littlenesses and clothed themselves in armour of light.
+'The Lord is risen indeed' was the belief which made the continuous
+existence of the Church possible. Any other explanation of that
+great outstanding fact is lame and hopelessly insufficient.
+
+We know that that belief was the belief of the early Church. Even if
+one waived all reference to the Gospels, we have the means of
+demonstrating that in Paul's undisputed epistles. Nobody has
+questioned that he wrote the First Epistle to the Corinthians. The
+date most generally assumed to that letter brings it within about
+five-and-twenty years of the crucifixion. In that letter, in
+addition to a multitude of incidental references to the Lord as
+risen, we have the great passage in the fifteenth chapter, where the
+apostle not only declares that the Resurrection was one of the two
+facts which made his 'gospel,' but solemnly enumerates the witnesses
+of the risen Lord, and alleges that this gospel of the Resurrection
+was common to him and to all the Church. He tells us of Christ's
+appearance to himself at his conversion, which must have taken place
+within six or seven years of the crucifixion, and assures us that at
+that early period he found the whole Church believing and preaching
+Christ's resurrection. Their belief rested on their alleged
+intercourse with Him a few days after His death, and it is
+inconceivable that within so short a period such a belief should
+have sprung up and been universally received, if it had not begun
+when and as they said that it did.
+
+But we are not left even to inferences of this kind to show that,
+from the beginning, the Church witnessed to the Resurrection of
+Jesus. Its own existence is the great witness to its faith. And it
+is important to observe that, even if we had not the documentary
+evidence of the Pauline epistles as the earliest records, of the
+Gospels, and of the Acts of the Apostles, we should still have
+sufficient proof that the belief in the Resurrection is as old as
+the Church. For the continuance of the Church cannot be explained
+without it. If that faith had not dawned on their slow, sad hearts
+on that Easter morning, a few weeks would have seen them scattered;
+and if once they had been scattered, as they inevitably would have
+been, no power could have reunited them, any more than a diamond
+once shattered can be pieced together again. There would have been
+no motive and no actors to frame a story of resurrection, when once
+the little company had melted away. The existence of the Church
+depended on their belief that the Lord was risen. In the nature of
+the case that belief must have followed immediately on His death.
+It, and it only, reasonably accounts for the facts. And so, over and
+above Apostles, and Gospels, and Epistles, the Church is the great
+witness, by its very being, to its own immediate and continuous
+belief in the Resurrection of our Lord.
+
+III. Again, we may remark that such a belief could not have
+originated or maintained itself unless it had been true.
+
+Our previous remarks have gone no farther than to establish the
+belief in the Resurrection of Christ, as the basis of primitive
+Christianity. It is vehemently alleged, and we may freely admit that
+the step is a long one from subjective belief to objective reality.
+But still it is surely perfectly fair to argue that a given belief
+is of such a nature that it cannot be supposed to rest on anything
+less solid than a fact; and this is eminently the case in regard to
+the belief in Christ's Resurrection. There have been many attempts
+on the part of those who reject that belief to account for its
+existence, and each of them in succession has 'had its day, and
+ceased to be.' Unbelief devours its own children remorselessly, and
+the succession to the throne of antichristian scepticism is won, as
+in some barbarous tribes, by slaying the reigning sovereign. The
+armies of the aliens turn their weapons against one another, and
+each new assailant of the historical veracity of the Gospels
+commences operations by showing that all previous assailants have
+been wrong, and that none of their explanations will hold water.
+
+For instance, we hear nothing now of the coarse old explanation that
+the story of the Resurrection was a lie, and became current through
+the conscious imposture of the leaders of the Church. And it was
+high time that such a solution should be laid aside. Who, with half
+an eye for character, could study the deeds and the writings of the
+apostles, and not feel that, whatever else they were, they were
+profoundly honest, and as convinced as of their own existence, that
+they had seen Christ 'alive after His passion, by many infallible
+proofs'? If Paul and Peter and John were conspirators in a trick,
+then their lives and their words were the most astounding anomaly.
+Who, either, that had the faintest perception of the forces that
+sway opinion and frame systems, could believe that the fair fabric
+of Christian morality was built on the sand of a lie, and cemented
+by the slime of deceit bubbling up from the very pit of hell? Do men
+gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? That insolent
+hypothesis has had its day.
+
+Then when it was discredited, we were told that the mythical
+tendency would explain everything. It showed us how good men could
+tell lies without knowing it, and how the religious value of an
+alleged fact in an alleged historical revelation did not in the
+least depend on its being a fact. And that great discovery, which
+first converted solid historical Christianity into a gaseous
+condition, and then caught the fumes in some kind of retort, and
+professed to hand us them back again improved by the sublimation,
+has pretty well gone the way of all hypotheses. Myths are not made
+in three days, or in three years, and no more time can be allowed
+for the formation of the myth of the Resurrection. What was the
+Church to feed on while the myth was growing? It would have been
+starved to death long before.
+
+Then, the last new explanation which is gravely put forward, and is
+the prevailing one now, sustains itself by reference to undeniable
+facts in the history of religious movements, and of such abnormal
+attitudes of the mind as modern spiritualism. On the strength of
+which analogy we are invited to see in the faith of the early
+Christians in the Resurrection of the Lord a gigantic instance of
+'hallucination.' No doubt there have been, and still are,
+extraordinary instances of its power, especially in minds excited by
+religious ideas. But we have only to consider the details of the
+facts in hand to feel that they cannot be accounted for on such a
+ground. Do hallucinations lay hold on five hundred people at once?
+Does a hallucination last for a long country walk, and give rise to
+protracted conversation? Does hallucination explain the story of
+Christ eating and drinking before His disciples? The uncertain
+twilight of the garden might have begotten such an airy phantom in
+the brain of a single sobbing woman; but the appearances to be
+explained are so numerous, so varied in character, embrace so many
+details, appeal to so many of the senses--to the ear and hand as
+well as to the eye--were spread over so long a period, and were
+simultaneously shared by so large a number, that no theory of such a
+sort can account for them, unless by impugning the veracity of the
+records. And then we are back again on the old abandoned ground of
+deceit and imposture. It sounds plausible to say, Hallucination is a
+proved cause of many a supposed supernatural event--why not of this?
+But the plausibility of the solution ceases as soon as you try it on
+the actual facts in their variety and completeness. It has to be
+eked out with a length of the fox's skin of deceit before it covers
+them; and we may confidently assert that such a belief as the belief
+of the early Church in the Resurrection of the Lord was never the
+product either of deceit or of illusion, or of any amalgam of the
+two.
+
+What new solutions the fertility of unbelief may yet bring forth,
+and the credulity of unbelief may yet accept, we know not; but we
+may firmly hold by the faith which breathed new hope and strange joy
+into that sad band on the first Easter morning, and rejoice with
+them in the glad, wonderful fact that He is risen from the dead.
+
+IV. For that message is a message to us as truly as to the heavy-hearted
+unbelieving men that first received it. We may think for a moment of the
+joy with which we ought to return from the empty sepulchre of the risen
+Saviour.
+
+How little these women knew that, as they went back from the grave
+in the morning twilight, they were the bearers of 'great joy which
+should be to all people'! To them and to the first hearers of their
+message there would be little clear in the rush of glad surprise,
+beyond the blessed thought, Then He is not gone from us altogether.
+Sweet visions of the resumption of happy companionship would fill
+their minds, and it would not be until calmer moments that the
+stupendous significance of the fact would reveal itself.
+
+Mary's rapturous gesture to clasp Him by the feet, when the
+certainty that it was in very deed He flooded her soul with dazzling
+light, reveals her first emotion, which no doubt was also the first
+with them all, 'Then we shall have Him with us again, and all the
+old joy of companionship will be ours once more.' Nor were they
+wrong in thinking so, however little they as yet understood the
+future manner of their fellowship, or anticipated His leaving them
+again so soon. Nor are we without a share even in that phase of
+their joy; for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ gives us a living
+Lord for our love, an ever present Companion and Brother for our
+hearts to hold, even if our hands cannot clasp Him by the feet. A
+dead Christ might have been the object of faint historical
+admiration, and the fair statue might have stood amidst others in
+the galleries of history; but the risen, living Christ can love and
+be loved, and we too may be glad with the joy of those who have
+found a heart to rest their hearts upon, and a companionship that
+can never fail.
+
+As the early disciples learned to reflect upon the fact of Christ's
+Resurrection, its riches unfolded themselves by degrees, and the
+earliest aspect of its 'power' was the light it shed on His person
+and work. Taught by it, as we have seen, they recognised Him for the
+Messiah whom they had long expected, and for something more--the
+Incarnate Son of God. That phase of their joy belongs to us too. If
+Christ, who made such avowals of His nature as we know that He did,
+and hazarded such assertions of His claims, His personality and His
+office, as fill the Gospels, were really laid in the grave and saw
+corruption, then the assertions are disproved, the claims
+unwarranted, the office a figment of His imagination. He may still
+remain a great teacher, with a tremendous deduction to be made from
+the worth of His teaching, but all that is deepest in His own words
+about Himself and His relation to men must be sorrowfully put on one
+side. But if He, after such assertions and claims, rose from the
+dead, and rising, dieth no more, then for the last time, and in the
+mightiest tones, the voice that rent the heavens at His baptism and
+His transfiguration proclaims: 'This is My beloved Son; hear ye
+Him.' Our joy in His Resurrection is the joy of those to whom He is
+therein declared to be the Son of God, and who see in Christ risen
+their accepted Sacrifice, and their ever-living Redeemer.
+
+Such was the earliest effect of the Resurrection of Jesus, if we
+trust the records of apostolic preaching. Then by degrees the joyful
+thought took shape in the Church's consciousness that their Shepherd
+had gone before them into the dark pen where Death pastured his
+flocks, and had taken it for His own, for the quiet resting-place
+where He would make them lie down by still waters, and whence He
+would lead them out to the lofty mountains where His fold should be.
+The power of Christ's Resurrection as the pattern and pledge of ours
+is the final source of the joy which may fill our hearts as we turn
+away from that empty sepulchre.
+
+The world has guessed and feared, or guessed and hoped, but always
+guessed and doubted the life beyond. Analogies, poetic adumbrations,
+probabilities drawn from consciousness and from conscience, from
+intuition and from anticipation, are but poor foundations on which
+to build a solid faith. But to those to whom the Resurrection of
+Christ is a fact their own future life is a fact. Here we have a
+solid certainty, and here alone. The heart says as we lay our dear
+ones in the grave, 'Surely we part not for ever.' The conscience
+says, as it points us to our own evil deeds, 'After death the
+judgment.' A deep indestructible instinct prophesies in every breast
+of a future. But all is vague and doubtful. The one proof of a life
+beyond the grave is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Therefore let
+us be glad with the gladness of men plucked from a dark abyss of
+doubt and planted on the rock of solid certainty; and let us rejoice
+with joy unspeakable, and laden with a prophetic weight of glory, as
+we ring out the ancient Easter morning's greeting, 'The Lord is
+risen indeed!'
+
+
+
+
+THE FOOD OF THE WORLD
+
+
+    'He gave the loaves to the disciples, and the disciples
+    to the multitude. 20. And they did all eat, and were
+    filled; and they took up of the fragments that remained
+    twelve baskets full.'--MATT. xiv. 19, 20.
+
+The miracles of Scripture are not merely wonders, but signs. It is
+one of their most striking characteristics that they are not, like
+the pretended portents of false faiths, mere mighty deeds standing
+in no sort of intellectual relation to the message of which they
+claim to be the attestation, but that they have themselves a
+doctrinal significance. Our Lord's miracles have been called 'the
+great bell before the sermon,' but they are more than that. They are
+themselves no unimportant part of the sermon. In fact, it would not
+be difficult to construct from them a revelation of His nature,
+person, and work, scarcely less full and explicit than that
+contained in His words, or even than that more systematic and
+developed one which we receive in the writings of His apostles.
+
+This miracle, for instance, of the feeding of the five thousand with
+five barley loaves and two small fishes, is one of the few which the
+Apostle John relates in his Gospel, and his reason for selecting it
+seems to be the commentary with which our Lord followed it, and
+which John alone has preserved. That commentary is all the wonderful
+discourse about Christ as the bread of life, and eating His flesh as
+our means of receiving His life into ourselves. We are warranted,
+then, in regarding this miracle as a symbolic revelation of Christ
+as supplying all the wants of this hungry world. If so, we may
+perhaps venture to take one more step, and regard the manner in
+which He dispenses His gifts as also significant. His agents are His
+disciples, or as would appear probable from the twelve baskets full
+of fragments, the twelve apostles, the nucleus and representatives
+of His Church. Thus we come to the point from which we wish to
+regard this narrative now. There are three stages in the words of
+our text--the distribution, the meal, and the gathering up of the
+abundance that was left. These three stages may guide us to some
+thoughts regarding the work to which Christ calls His Church, the
+success which attends it, and the results to the distributors
+themselves.
+
+I. Christ feeds the famishing world by means of His Church.
+
+'He gave the loaves to the disciples, and the _disciples_ to
+the multitude.' One very striking feature in all our Lord's miracles
+is economy of power. The miraculous element being admitted for some
+good and sufficient reason, it is kept down to the lowest possible
+point. Precisely so much of it as is needed is permitted, and not
+one hairsbreadth more. It does not begin to make its appearance at
+any point in the process where ordinary human agency can be used. It
+does not produce a result beyond the actual necessity. It does not
+last one instant longer than is required. It inosculates closely
+with the natural order of things.
+
+Take an illustration from the beginning of miracles where Jesus
+manifested forth His glory, at the marriage in Cana of Galilee--that
+great miracle in which our Lord hallowed the ties of human
+affection, and consecrated the joy of united hearts. The necessity
+is felt before He supplies it. The servants fill the waterpots. The
+water is used as the material on which the miraculous power
+operates. Only so much as is drawn for present use becomes wine. The
+servants are used as the agents for the distribution, and all is
+done so unostentatiously, though it be the manifesting of His glory,
+that no man knows but they.
+
+Take another illustration from the other great contrasted miracle at
+the grave of Lazarus, where our Lord hallowed the breaking of
+earthly bonds by death, and sanctified the sorrows of parted love.
+He does not work His wonder from the other side Jordan, but comes.
+He does not avert the death which He will conquer, nor prevent the
+grief which He shares. He goes to the side of the grave--true human
+tears are wet upon His cheek. They have to roll away the stone.
+Then, there is flung into the darkness of the tomb the mighty word,
+'Lazarus! come forth.' The inconceivable miraculous act is done, and
+life stirs in the sheeted dead. But there the miraculous ceases. The
+man with his restored life has himself to come out of the grave, and
+human hands have tremblingly to lift the napkin from the veiled face
+(how they must have thrilled as they did it, wondering what nameless
+horror they might see in the eyes that had looked on the inner
+chamber of death), and human help has to unfold the grave-clothes
+from the tightly swathed and stumbling limbs, 'Loose him, and let
+him go.'
+
+This marked characteristic of all our Lord's miracles is full of
+instruction, which it would lead us too far from our present purpose to
+indicate at any length. But we may just observe in passing, that it
+brings these into striking parallel with the divine creative act, where
+there is ever the same precise adaptation of power employed to result
+contemplated, the same background of veiled omnipotence, the same
+emergence of proportioned, adequate, but not superfluous force, so
+that, in fact, economy of power may be said to be the very signature
+and broad arrow of divinity stamped on all His works. Again, it
+presents a broad contrast to the wild, reckless miracle-mongering of
+false faiths, and is at once a test of the genuineness of all 'lying
+signs and wonders,' and an indication of the self-restraint of the
+Worker, and of the fine sanity and truthfulness of the narrators, of
+these Gospel miracles. And yet, again, it is one phase of the
+disciplinary character of the whole revelation of God in Christ--not
+obtrusive, though obvious, capable of being overlooked if men will.
+There was the hiding of His power. 'If any man wills to be ignorant,
+let him be ignorant.'
+
+But coming more immediately to the narrative before us, we find this
+same characteristic in full prominence in it. The people are allowed
+to hunger. The disciples are permitted to feel themselves at their
+wits' end. They are bid to bring their poor resources to Christ. The
+lad who had come with his little store, perhaps a fisherman's boy
+from some of the lake villages who hoped to sell his loaves and
+fishes in the crowd, supplies the material on which Christ wills to
+exercise His miraculous power. The disciples' agency is pressed into
+the service. Each man separately receives his portion, and when all
+are supplied, the fragments are carefully preserved for the use of
+those who had been fed by miracle, and of Him who had fed them!
+
+Besides the general lessons already referred to, as naturally
+arising from this feature of the miracle, there is that one which
+belongs to it especially, namely, that Christ feeds the famishing
+world by means of His Church.
+
+Precisely as in the miracles in general, so in the work of Christ as a
+whole, the field of supernatural intervention is rigidly confined, and
+fits in with the established order of things. The Incarnation and
+Sacrifice of our Lord are the purely supernatural work of the divine
+Power and Mercy. He comes, enters into our human conditions, assumes
+our humanity, dies the death for us all. 'I have trodden the wine-press
+alone.' There is no question of any human agency co-operating there,
+any more than there is in the word 'Lazarus, come forth,' or in the
+multiplication of the loaves. There, by Christ alone, is brought to
+us and is finished for us an eternal redemption, with which the whole
+race of man have nothing to do but to receive it, to eat and be filled.
+But this having been done by the solitary work of Jesus Christ, this
+new power having been introduced into the world, human agency is
+henceforth called into operation to diffuse it, just as the servants
+at Cana had to draw the wine which He had made, just as the disciples
+at the Sea of Tiberias have to give to the multitude the bread which
+was blessed and broken by His hands.
+
+The supernaturally given Bread of Life is to be carried over the
+world in accordance with the ordinary laws by which all other truth
+is diffused and all other gifts that belong to one man are held by
+him in stewardship for all his fellows. True, there is ever in and
+with that word of life a divine Spirit, which is the real cause of
+its progress, which guards it from destruction though all men were
+faithless, and keeps it alive though all Israel bowed the knee to
+Baal. But, however easy it may be for us to confuse ourselves with
+metaphysical puzzles about the relation between the natural and the
+supernatural elements--the human agency and the divine energiser--in
+the successful discharge of the Church's work, practically the
+matter is very plain.
+
+The truth that it behoves us all to lay to heart is just this--that
+Christian people are Christ's instruments for effecting the
+realisation of the purposes of His death. Not without them shall He
+see of the travail of His soul. Not without them shall the preaching
+be fully known. Not without the people willing in the day of His
+power, and clothed in priestly beauty, shall the Priest King set His
+feet upon His enemies. Not without the armies of heaven following
+Him, shall the 'Word of God' ride forth to victory. Neither the
+divine decree, nor the expansive power of the Truth, nor the crowned
+expectancy of the waiting Lord, nor the mighty working of the
+Comforter, are the complete means for the accomplishment of the
+divine promise that all nations shall be blessed in Him. Could all
+these be conceived of as existing without the service and energies
+of God's Church proclaiming the name of Christ, they were not
+enough. He has willed that to us, less than the least of all saints,
+should this grace be given, that we should make known the
+unsearchable riches of Christ. God reveals His truth, that men who
+believe it may impart it. God gives the word, that, caught up by
+those who receive it into an honest and good heart, it may be poured
+forth, in mighty chorus from the lips of the 'great company of them
+that publish it.' 'He gave the loaves to the disciples, and the
+_disciples_ to the multitude.'
+
+Christian men! learn your high vocation, and your solemn
+responsibilities. 'What! came the word of God out from you, or came
+it _unto_ you only?' For what did you receive it? For the same
+reason for which you have received everything else which you
+possess--that you might share it with your brethren. How did you
+receive it? As a gift, unmerited, the result of a miracle of divine
+mercy, that you might feel bound to give as ye have received, and
+spread the free divine gift by cheerful human work of distribution.
+From whom did you receive it? From Christ, who in the very act of
+giving binds you to live for Him and not for yourselves, and to
+mould your lives after the pattern of His. What a multitude of
+motives converge on the solemn duty of work for Christ, if we read
+in the light of this deeper meaning the simple words of our text,
+'He gave the loaves to the disciples!' What manner of servant is he
+who can bear to have no part in the blessed work that follows--'and
+the disciples to the multitude'?
+
+It is further noticeable how these apostles were prepared for the
+work which they had to do. The first lesson which they had to learn
+was the almost ludicrous disproportion between the resources at
+their command and the necessities of the crowd. 'How many loaves
+have ye? go and see.' And this is the first lesson that we have to
+learn in all our work for Christ and for our brethren, that in
+ourselves we have nothing fit for the task before us. Think of what
+that task is as measured by the necessities and sorrows of men.
+Think of all the sighs that go up at every moment from burdened
+hearts, of the tears that run down so many blanched and anxious
+cheeks. Think of '_all_ the misery that is done under the sun!'
+If it could be made visible, what a dark pall would swathe the
+world, an atmosphere of sorrow rolling ever with it through space.
+The sight is too sad to be seen by any but by Him who cures it all,
+and it wrung from His heart the sigh with which ere He cured one
+poor sufferer--a drop in the ocean--He looked up to heaven, as in
+mute appeal against all these heaped miseries of suffering man.
+
+And we, what can we do in ourselves? On what comparison of our
+resources do we not feel utterly inadequate to the work? If we think
+of the proportion in numbers, we have to say, like the narrator of
+the wars in Israel, 'The children of Israel pitched before them like
+two little flocks of kids, but the Syrians filled the country.' If
+we think of the strength that we ourselves possess and look at our
+own tremulous faith, at our own feeble love, at the uncertain hold
+which we ourselves have on the Gospel that we profess, at the mists
+and darkness which cover so much of God's revelation from our own
+understandings, at the sins and faults of our own lives, must we not
+cry out, Send whom Thou wilt send, O Lord, but take not me, so
+sinful, so little influenced by Thy grace, to be the messenger of
+Thy grace? 'Who is sufficient for these things?'
+
+And such contemplations, when they drive home to our hearts the
+wholesome lesson of our own weakness, are the beginning, and the only
+possible beginning, of divine strength. The only temper in which we
+can serve God and bless man is that of lowliest self-abasement. God
+works with bruised reeds, and out of them makes polished shafts,
+pillars in His house. Only when we are low on our faces before God,
+crying out,' Unclean, unclean,' does the purifying coal touch our
+lips and the prophet strength flow into our souls.
+
+Be humble and self-distrustful, and then learn the further lesson of
+this narrative, and carry your poor inadequate resources to Christ.
+'Bring them hither to Me.' In His hands they become sufficient. He
+multiplies them. He gives wisdom, strength, and all that fits for
+the task to which He calls us. Bring your little faith to Him and He
+will increase it. Bring your feeble love to Him, and ask Him to
+kindle it from the pure flame of His own, and He will make your
+heart burn within you. Bring your partial understanding of His will
+and way to Him, and He will be to you wisdom. Bring all the poverty
+of your natures, all the insufficiency of your religious character,
+all the inadequacy of your poor work, to your Lord. Feel it all. Let
+the conviction of your nothingness sink into your soul. Then wait
+before Him in simple faith, in lowly obedience, and power will come
+to you equal to your desire and to your duties, and He will put His
+spirit upon you, and will anoint you to proclaim liberty to the
+captives and to give bread to all the hungry. 'Who is sufficient for
+these things?' must ever precede, and will ever be followed by, 'our
+sufficiency is of God.'
+
+Mark again that the disciples seem themselves to have partaken of
+the bread before they parted it among the multitudes. That is our
+true preparation for the work of feeding the hungry. The Church
+which feeds the world is able to do so, only because, and in
+proportion as, it has found in Christ its own sustenance and life.
+It is only they who can say 'we have tasted and felt and handled of
+the word of life' who can declare it to others. Personal participation
+in the bread of life makes any man able to offer it to some fainting
+spirit. Nothing else makes him able. Ability involves responsibility.
+'Power to its last particle is duty.' You, dear friends, who have
+'tasted that the Lord is gracious,' have thereby come under weighty
+obligations. Your own personal experience of that precious bread has
+fitted you to do something in offering it to others. The manner in
+which you do so must be determined by your character and circumstances.
+Every one has his proper walk; but something you can do. To some lips
+you can commend the food for all the world. Somewhere your word is
+a power. See that you do what you can do. Remember that Christ feeds
+the world by His Church, and that every man who has himself eaten of
+the bread of life is thereby consecrated to carry it to those who yet
+are perishing in the far-off hunger-ridden land, and trying to fill
+their bellies with the husks that the swine eat.
+
+II. The Bread is enough for all the world.
+
+'They did all eat and were filled.' One can fancy how doubtingly and
+grudgingly the apostles doled out the supplies at first, and how the
+portion of each was increased, as group after group was provided,
+and no diminution appeared in Christ's full hands, until, at last,
+all the five thousand, of all ages, of both sexes, of every sort,
+were fed, and the fragments lying uncared for proved how sufficient
+had been the share of each.
+
+May we not see in that scene a picture of the full supply for all
+the wants of the whole world which there is in that Bread of Life
+which came down from heaven? The Gospel proclaims a full feast,
+which is enough for all mankind, which is intended for all mankind,
+which shall one day satisfy all mankind.
+
+This universal adaptation of the message of the Gospel to the whole
+world arises from the obvious fact that it addresses itself to
+universal wants, to the great rudimentary, universally diffused
+characteristics of human nature, and that it provides for all these,
+in the grand simplicity of its good tidings, the one sufficing word.
+It entangles itself with no local or historical peculiarities of the
+time and place of its earthly origin, which can hinder it in its
+universal diffusion. It commits itself to no transient human
+opinions. It addresses itself to no sectional characteristics of
+classes of men. It brushes aside all the surface distinctions which
+separate us from one another, and goes right down to the depths of
+the central identities in which we are all alike. However we may
+differ from one another, in training, in habits, in cast of thought,
+in idiosyncrasies of character, in circumstances, in age--all these
+are but the upper strata which vary locally. Beneath all these there
+lie everywhere the solid foundations of the primeval rocks, and
+beneath these, again, the glowing central mass, the flaming heart of
+the world. Christianity sends its shaft right down through all these
+upper and local beds, till it reaches the deepest depths which are
+the same in every man--the obstinate wilfulness of a nature averse
+from God, and the yet deeper-lying longings of a soul that flames
+with the consciousness of God, and yearns for rest and peace. To the
+sense of sin, to the sense of sorrow, to the conscience never wholly
+stifled, to the desires after good never utterly eradicated and
+never slaked by aught besides itself, does this mighty word come.
+Not to this or that sort of man, not to men in this or that phase of
+progress, age of the world, or stage of civilisation, does it
+address itself, but to the common humanity which belongs to all, to
+the wants and sorrows and inward consciousness which belong to man
+as man, be he philosopher or fool, king or slave, Eastern or
+Western, 'pagan suckled in a creed outworn,' or Englishman with the
+new lights and material science of this twentieth century.
+
+Hence its universal adaptation to mankind. It alone of all so-called
+faiths overleaps all geographical limits and lives in all centuries.
+It alone wins its trophies and bestows its gifts on all sorts and
+conditions of men. Other plants which the 'Heavenly Father hath not
+planted' have their zones of vegetation and die outside certain
+degrees of latitude, but the seed of the kingdom is like corn, an
+exotic nowhere, for wherever man lives it will grow, and yet an
+exotic everywhere, for it came down from heaven. Other food requires
+an educated palate for its appreciation, but any hungry man in any
+land will relish bread. For every soul on earth this living dying
+love of the Lord Jesus Christ addresses itself to, and satisfies,
+his deepest wants. It is the bread which gives life to the world.
+
+And one of the constituents of that company by the Galilean lake was
+children. It is one great glory of Christianity that its merciful
+mysteries can find their way to the hearts of the little children.
+Its mysteries, we say--for the Gospel has its mysteries no less than
+these old systems of heathenism which fenced round their deepest
+truths with solemn barriers, only to be passed by the initiated. But
+the difference lies here--that its mysteries are taught at first to
+the neophytes, and that the sum of them lies in the words which we
+learned at our mother's knees so long ago that we have forgotten
+that they were ever new to us: 'God so loved the world that He gave
+His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not
+perish, but should have eternal life.' The little child who has
+learned his earliest lessons of what father and son, loving and
+giving, trust and life mean, by the sweet experiences of his own
+father's home and his own mother's love, can grasp these blessed
+words. They carry the deepest mysteries which will still gleam
+before us unfathomed in all their profundity, unappropriated in all
+their blessedness, when millenniums have passed since we stood in
+the inner shrine of heaven. Wonderful is the word which blesses the
+child, which transcends the angel before the throne!
+
+This is the bread for the world--meant for it, and one day to be
+partaken of by it. For these ordered fifties at their Christ-provided
+meal are for us a prophecy of the day that shall surely dawn, when
+all the hunger of wandering prodigals is over, and the deceived
+heart of the idol-worshipper no longer drawing him aside to feed on
+ashes, they shall come from the East and from the West, and from
+the North and from the South, and sit at the feast which the Lord
+hath prepared for all nations, and when all the earth shall be satisfied
+with the goodness of His house, even of His holy temple.
+
+III. The Bread which is given to the famishing is multiplied for the
+future of the Distributors.
+
+'They took of the fragments that remained twelve baskets full.' More
+was gathered than they had possessed at first. They preserved over,
+for their own sustenance and refreshment in days to come, a far
+larger store than the five loaves and two small fishes with which
+they had begun. The fact contains a principle which is true about
+almost all except material possessions, which is often in God's
+providence made true about them, and which is emphatically true
+about spiritual blessings, about our religious emotions, our
+Christian beliefs, the joys and powers which Christ comes to give.
+
+For all these, the condition of increase is diffusion. To impart to
+others is to gain for oneself. Every honest effort to bring some
+other human heart into conscious possession of Christ's love deepens
+one's own sense of its preciousness. Every attempt to lead some
+other understanding to the perception of the truth, as it is in
+Jesus, helps me to understand it better myself. If you would learn,
+teach. That will clear your mind, will open hidden harmonies, will
+reveal unsuspected deficiencies and contradictions in your own
+conceptions, will help you to feel more the truths that come from
+your lips. It will perhaps shame your cold appreciation of them,
+when you see how others grasp at them from your teaching, or give
+you more confidence in the Gospel as the power of God unto
+salvation, when you behold it, even as ministered through you,
+mighty to pull down strongholds. At the lowest, it will keep your
+own mind in healthy contact with what you art but too apt to forget.
+If you would learn to love Christ more, try to lead some one else to
+love Him, You will catch new gleams from His gracious heart in the
+very act of commending Him to others. If you would have your own
+spiritual life strengthened and deepened, remember that not by
+solitary meditation or raptures of silent communion alone can that
+be accomplished, but by these and by honest manful work for God in
+the world. The Mount of Transfiguration must be left, although there
+were there Moses and Elias, and the cloud of the divine glory and
+the words of approval from heaven, because there were a demoniac boy
+and his weeping, despairing father needing Christ down below. Work
+for God if you would live with God. Give the bread to the hungry, if
+you would have it for the food of your own souls.
+
+The refusal to engage in such service is one fruitful cause of the
+low state of spiritual health in which so many Christians pass their
+days. They seem to think that they receive the bread from heaven
+only for their own use, and that they have done all that they have
+to do with it, when they eat it themselves. And so come all manner
+of spiritual diseases. A selfish, that is an inactive, religion is
+always more or less a morbid religion. For health you need exercise.
+'In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread'; that law expresses
+not only the fact that work is needed to get it, but that toil must
+give the appetite and fit the frame to digest it. There is such a
+thing as a morbid Christianity brought on by want of healthy
+exercise.
+
+'There is that scattereth and yet increaseth, and there is that
+withholdeth more than is meet, and it tendeth to poverty.' Good
+husbandry does not grind up all the year's wheat for loaves for
+one's own eating, but keeps some of it for seed to be scattered in
+the furrows. And if Christian men will deal with the great love of
+God, the great work of Christ, the great message of the Gospel, as
+if it were bestowed on them for their own sakes only, they will have
+only themselves to blame if holy desires die out in their hearts,
+and the consciousness of Christ's love becomes faint, and all the
+blessed words of truth come to sound far off and mythical in their
+ears. The standing water gets green scum on it. The close-shut barn
+breeds weevils and smut. Let the water run. Fling the seed
+broadcast. 'Thou shalt find it after many days,' bread for thy own
+soul--even as these ministering apostles were enriched whilst they
+gave, and the full-handed liberality 'with which they carried
+Christ's gifts among the crowd' had something to do in providing the
+large residue which filled their stores for days to come.
+
+Thus, then, this scene on the sweet springing grass down by the side
+of blue Gennesaret is an emblem of the whole work of the Church in
+this starving world. The multitudes famish. Tell Christ of their
+wants. Count your own small resources till you have completely
+learned your poverty, then take them to Jesus. He will accept them,
+and in His hands they will become mighty, being transfigured from
+human thoughts and forces into divine words, into spiritual powers.
+On that bread which He gives, do you yourselves live. Then carry it
+boldly to all the hungry. Rank after rank will eat. All races, all
+ages, from grey hairs to babbling childhood, will find there the
+food of their souls. As you part the blessing, it will grow beneath
+His eye; and the longer you give, the fuller-handed you will become.
+Nor shall the bread fail, nor the word become weak, till all the
+world has tasted of its  sweetness and been refreshed by its potent
+life.
+
+This miracle is the lesson for the workers. There is another
+wondrous meal recorded in Scripture, which is the prophecy for the
+workers when they rest. The little ship has been tossing all the
+night on the waters of that Galilean lake. Fruitless has been the
+fishing. The morning breaks cold and grey, and lo! there stands on
+the shore One who first blesses the toilers' work, and then bids
+them to His table. There, mysteriously kindled, burns the fire with
+the welcome meal already laid upon it. They add to it the
+contribution of their night of toil, and then, hushed and blessed in
+His still company, they sup with Him and He with them. So when the
+weary work is over for the Church on earth, we shall be aware of His
+merciful presence on the shore, and, coming at the last safe to
+land, we shall 'rest from our labours,' in that we see the 'fire of
+coals, and fish laid thereon and bread'; and our 'works shall follow
+us,' in that we are 'bidden to bring of the fish that we have
+caught.' Then, putting off the wet fisher's coat, and leaving behind
+the tossing of the unquiet sea and the toil of the weary fishing, we
+shall sit down with Him at that meal spread by His hands, who
+blesseth the works of His servants here below, and giveth to them a
+full fruition of immortal food at His table at the last.
+
+
+
+
+THE KING'S HIGHWAY
+
+
+    'And straightway Jesus constrained His disciples to get
+    into a ship, and to go before Him unto the other side,
+    while He sent the multitudes away. 23. And when He had
+    sent the multitudes away, He went up into a mountain
+    apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was
+    there alone. 24. But the ship was now in the midst of
+    the sea, tossed with waves: for the wind was contrary.
+    25. And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went
+    unto them, walking on the sea. 26. And when the
+    disciples saw Him walking on the sea, they were
+    troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried out
+    for fear. 27. But straightway Jesus spake unto them,
+    saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid.
+    28. And Peter answered Him and said, Lord, if it be
+    Thou, bid me come unto Thee on the water. 29. And He
+    said, Come. And when Peter was come down out of the
+    ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus. 30. But
+    when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and
+    beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me.
+    31. And immediately Jesus stretched forth His hand, and
+    caught him, and said unto him, O thou of little faith,
+    wherefore didst thou doubt. 32. And when they were come
+    into the ship, the wind ceased. 33. Then they that were
+    in the ship came and worshipped Him, saying, Of a truth
+    Thou art the Son of God. 34. And when they were gone
+    over, they came into the land of Gennesaret. 35. And
+    when the men of that place had knowledge of Him, they
+    sent out into all that country round about, and brought
+    unto Him all that were diseased; 36. And besought Him
+    that they might only touch the hem of His garment: and
+    as many as touched were made perfectly whole.'
+    --MATT. xiv. 22-36.
+
+The haste and urgency with which the disciples were sent away,
+against their will, after the miracle of feeding the five thousand,
+is explained in John's account. The crowd had been excited to a
+dangerous enthusiasm by a miracle so level to their tastes. A
+prophet who could feed them was something like a prophet. So they
+determine to make him a king. Our Lord, fearing the outburst,
+resolves to withdraw into the lonely hills, that the fickle blaze
+may die down. If the disciples had remained with Him, He could not
+have so easily stolen away, and they might have caught the popular
+fervour. To divide would distract the crowd, and make it easier for
+Him to disperse them, while many of them, as really happened, would
+be likely to set off by land for Capernaum, when they saw the boat
+had gone. The main teaching of this miracle, over and above its
+demonstration of the Messianic power of our Lord, is symbolical. All
+the miracles are parables, and this eminently so. Thus regarding it,
+we have--
+
+I. The struggling toilers and the absent Christ.
+
+They had a short row of some five or six miles in prospect, when
+they started in the early evening. An hour or so might have done it,
+but, for some unknown reason, they lingered. Perhaps instead of
+pulling across, they may have kept inshore, by the head of the lake,
+expecting Jesus to join them at some point. Thus, night finds them
+but a short way on their voyage. The paschal moon would be shining
+down on them, and perhaps in their eager talk about the miracle they
+had just seen, they did not make much speed. A sudden breeze sprang
+up, as is common at nightfall on mountain lakes; and soon a gale,
+against which they could make no headway, was blowing in their
+teeth. This lasted for eight or nine hours. Wet and weary, they
+tugged at the oars through the livelong night, the seas breaking
+over them, and the wind howling down the glens.
+
+They had been caught in a similar storm once before, but then He had
+been on board, and it was daylight. Now it was dark, 'and Jesus had
+not yet come to them,' How they would look back at the dim outline
+of the hills, where they knew He was, and wonder why He had sent them
+out into the tempest alone! Mark tells us that He saw them distressed,
+hours before He came to them, and that makes His desertion the stranger.
+It is but His method of lovingly training them to do without His
+personal presence, and a symbol of what is to be the life of His people
+till the end. He is on the mountain in prayer, and He sees the labouring
+boat and the distressed rowers. The contrast is the same as is given in
+the last verses of Mark's Gospel, where the serene composure of the
+Lord, sitting at the right hand of God, is sharply set over against
+the wandering, toiling lives of His servants, in their evangelistic
+mission. The commander-in-chief sits apart on the hill, directing the
+fight, and sending regiment after regiment to their deaths. Does that
+mean indifference? So it might seem but for the words which follow,
+'the Lord working with them.' He shares in all the toil; and the lifting
+up of His holy hands sways the current of the fight, and inclines the
+balance. His love appoints effort and persistent struggle as the law
+of our lives. Nor are we to mourn or wonder; for the purpose of the
+appointment, so far as we are concerned, is to make character, and to
+give us 'the wrestling thews that throw the world.' Difficulties make
+men of us. Summer sailors, yachting in smooth water, have neither the
+joy of conflict nor the vigour which it gives. Better the darkness,
+when we cannot see our way, and the wind in our faces, if the good of
+things is to be estimated by their power to 'strengthen us with
+strength in our soul!'
+
+II. We have the approaching Christ.
+
+Not till the last watch of the night does He come, when they have
+long struggled, and the boat is out in the very middle of the lake,
+and the storm is fiercest. We may learn from this the delays of His
+love. Because He loved Mary and Martha and Lazarus, He stayed still,
+in strange inaction, for two days, after their message. Because He
+loved Peter and the praying band, He let him lie in prison till the
+last hour of the last watch of the last night before his intended
+execution, and then delivered him with a leisureliness (making him
+put on article after article of dress) which tells of conscious
+omnipotence. Heaven's clock goes at a different rate from our little
+timepieces. God's day is a thousand years, and the longest tarrying
+is but 'a little while.' When He has come, we find that it is 'right
+early,' though before He came He seemed to us to delay. He comes
+across the waves. Their restless and yielding crests are smoothed
+and made solid by the touch of His foot. 'He walketh on the sea as
+on a pavement' (Septuagint version of Job ix. 8). It is a revelation
+of divine power. It is one of the very few miracles affecting
+Christ's own person, and may perhaps be regarded as being, like the
+Transfiguration, a casual gleam of latent glory breaking through the
+body of His humiliation, and so, in some sense, prophetic. But it is
+also symbolic. He ever uses tumults and unrest as a means of
+advancing His purposes. The stormy sea is the recognised Old
+Testament emblem of antagonism to the divine rule; and just as He
+walked on the billows, so does He reach His end by the very
+opposition to it, 'girding Himself' with the wrath of men, and
+making it to praise Him. In this sense, too, His 'paths are in the
+great waters.' In another aspect, we have here the symbol of
+Christ's using our difficulties and trials as the means of His
+loving approach to us. He comes, giving a deeper and more blessed
+sense of His presence by means of our sorrows, than in calm sunny
+weather. It is generally over a stormy sea that He comes to us, and
+golden treasures are thrown on our shores after a tempest.
+
+III. We have the terror and the recognition.
+
+The disciples were as yet little lifted above their fellows; they
+had no expectation of His coming, and thought just what any rude
+minds would have thought, that this mysterious Thing stalking
+towards them across the waters came from the unseen world, and
+probably that it was the herald of their drowning. Terror froze
+their blood, and brought out a shriek (as the word might be
+rendered) which was heard above the dash of waves and the raving
+wind. They had gallantly fought the tempest, but this unmanned them.
+We too often mistake Christ, when He comes to us. We do not
+recognise His working in the storm, nor His presence giving power to
+battle with it. We are so absorbed in the circumstances that we fail
+to see Him through them. Our tears weave a veil which hides Him, or
+the darkness obscures His face, and we see nothing but the
+threatening crests of the waves, curling high above our little boat.
+We mistake our best friend, and we are afraid of Him as we dimly see
+Him; and sometimes we think that the tokens of His presence are only
+phantasms of our own imagination.
+
+They who were deceived by His appearance knew Him by His voice, as
+Mary did at the sepulchre. How blessed must have been the moment
+when that astounding certitude thrilled through their souls! That
+low voice is audible through all the tumult. He speaks to us by His
+word, and by the silent speech in our spirits, which makes us
+conscious that He is there. He does speak to us in the deepest of
+our sorrows, in the darkest of our nights; and when we hear of His
+voice, and with wonder and joy cry out, 'It is the Lord,' our sorrow
+is soothed, and the darkness is light about us.
+
+The consciousness of His presence banishes all fear. 'Be not afraid,'
+follows 'It is I.' It is of no use to preach courage unless we preach
+Christ first. If we have not Him with us, we do well to fear: His
+presence is the only rational foundation for calm fearlessness. Only
+when the Lord of Hosts is with us, ought we not to fear, 'though the
+waters roar ... and be troubled.' 'Through the dear might of Him that
+walked the waves' can we feeble creatures face all terrors, and feel
+no terror.
+
+
+IV. We have the end of the storm and of the voyage.
+
+The storm ceases as soon as Jesus is on board. John does not mention
+the cessation of the tempest, but tells us that they were
+immediately at the shore. It does not seem necessary to suppose
+another miracle, but only that the voyage ended very speedily. It is
+not always true that His presence is the end of dangers and
+difficulties, but the consciousness of His presence does hush the
+storm. The worst of trouble is gone when we know that He shares it;
+and though the long swell after the gale may last, it no longer
+threatens. Nor is it always true that His coming, and our
+consciousness that He has come, bring a speedy close to toils. We
+have to labour on, but in how different a mood these men would bend
+to their oars after they had Him on board! With Him beside us toil
+is sweet, burdens are lighter, and the road is shortened. Even with
+Him on board, life is a stormy voyage; but without Him, it ends in
+shipwreck. With Him, it may be long, but it will look all the
+shorter while it lasts, and when we land the rough weather will be
+remembered but as a transient squall. These wearied rowers, who had
+toiled all night, stepped on shore as the morning broke on the
+eastern bank. So we, if we have had Him for our shipmate, shall land
+on the eternal shore, and dry our wet garments in the sunshine, and
+all the stormy years that seemed so long shall be remembered but as
+a watch in the night.
+
+
+
+
+PETER ON THE WAVES
+
+
+    'And Peter answered Him and said, Lord, if it be Thou,
+    bid me come unto Thee on the water.'--MATT. xiv. 28.
+
+We owe this account of an episode in the miracle of Christ's walking
+on the waters to Matthew alone. Singularly enough there is no
+reference to Peter's venturesomeness and failure in the Gospel which
+is generally believed to have been written under his special
+inspection and suggestion. Mark passes by that part of the narrative
+without a word. That may be because Peter was somewhat ashamed of
+it, or it may be from a natural disinclination to make himself
+prominent in the story at all. But, whatever the reason, we may be
+thankful that in this first Gospel we have the story, for it is not
+only interesting as illustrating the characteristics of the apostle
+in a very picturesque fashion, but also as carrying in it very
+plainly large lessons that are of use for us all.
+
+I. Note, first, Peter's venturesomeness, half faith, and half
+presumption.
+
+There is a singular mixture of good and bad in it. Looked at one
+way, it seems all right; like a bit of shot silk, in one light it is
+bright, and in another it is black enough. What was good in it?
+Well, there was the man's out-and-out confidence in his Master; and
+there was, further, the unconsidered, instinctive shoot of love in
+his heart to the mysterious figure standing there upon the water, so
+that his desire was to be beside Him. It was far more 'Bid me come
+_to Thee_!' than 'Bid me come to Thee _on the water_.' The
+incident was a kind of rehearsal, with a noticeable difference, and
+yet with nearly parallel circumstances, of the other incident when,
+after the Resurrection, he discovered the Lord standing on the
+shore, and floundered through the water anyhow; whether on it or in
+it did not matter to him, so long as he could get near his Master.
+But though the apostle's action was blended with a great deal that
+was childish and sensuous, and was perhaps quite as much the result
+of mere temperament as of conscious affection, still there was good
+in that eager longing to be beside his Lord, which it would be well
+for us if we in some measure shared, and in that indifference to the
+perils of the strange path so long as it led to Christ's side,
+which, if it were ours, would ennoble our lives, and in that perfect
+confidence that Christ could enable him to tread the unquiet sea,
+which would make us lords of all storms, if it wrought in us.
+
+What was bad in it? First, the characteristic pushing of himself to
+the front, and wish to be singled out from his brethren by some
+special token. 'Bid _me_ come.' Why should he be bidden any more
+than John, who sits quietly and gazes, or the others, who are tugging
+at the oars? Then the impetuous rashness and signal over-estimate of
+his own capacity and courage were bad. Perhaps, too, there was a
+little dash of a boyish kind of wish to do a strange thing, and now
+that he sees his Master there, walking on the waters, he thinks he
+would like to try it too. So the request is a rash, self-confident
+pushing of himself before his brethren into circumstances of wholly
+unnecessary peril and trial, of which he had not estimated the
+severity till he felt the water beginning to yield under his feet
+and the wind smiting him on the face. So that the incident is a
+rehearsal and anticipation of the precisely similar thing that he did
+when, on the morning of Christ's trial, he shouldered himself
+unnecessarily into the high priest's palace, and got himself close
+up against the fire there, without a moment's reflection on the
+possible danger he was running of having his loyalty melted by a
+fiercer flame, and little dreaming that he was going to fall, and all
+his courage to ooze out at his finger-ends, before the sharp tongue
+of a maid-servant. In like manner as he says here, 'Bid me come to
+Thee,' without the smallest doubt that when he was bade to come he
+would be able to do it, so he said that night: 'Though all should
+forsake Thee, yet will not I,'--and yet he denied Him.
+
+Let us take the warning from this venturesomeness of a generous,
+impulsive, enthusiastic religious nature, and remember that the most
+genuine faith and religious emotion need to be sobered and steadied
+by reflection, and by searching into our own motives, before we
+venture upon the water, howsoever much we may wish to go there. Make
+very sure that your zeal for the Lord has an element of sober
+permanence in it, and that it is the result, not of a mere
+transitory feeling, but of a steady, settled purpose. And do not
+push yourself voluntarily into places of peril or of difficulty,
+where the fighting is hard and the fire heavy, unless you have
+reasonable grounds for believing that you can stand the strain.
+Bring quiet, sober reason into the loftiest and loveliest enthusiasm
+of your faith, and then there will be something in it that will live
+through storm, and walk the water with unwetted and unsinking foot.
+An impure alloy of selfish itching for pre-eminence and distinction
+does not seldom mingle with the fine gold of religious enthusiasm
+and desire to serve and be near our Lord. Therefore we have to test
+our motives and seek to refine our purest emotions, and the more
+scrupulously the purer they seem, lest we be yielding to the
+impulses of self while we fancy that we are being drawn by the
+magnetism of Christ.
+
+II. We have here the momentary triumph and swift collapse of an
+impure faith.
+
+One can fancy with what hushed expectation the other apostles looked at
+Peter as he let himself down over the side of the ship, and his feet
+touched the surges and did not sink. Christ's grave, single-worded
+answer 'Come' barely sanctions the apostle's request. It is at most a
+permission, but scarcely a command, and it is permission to try, in
+order that Peter may learn his own weakness. He did walk on the water
+to go to Jesus. What kept him up? Not Christ's hand, nor any power
+bestowed on the apostle, but simply the exercise of Christ's will. But
+if he was held up by the operation of that will, why did he begin to
+sink? The vivid narrative tells us: 'When he saw the wind boisterous,
+he was afraid.' That was why. It had been blowing every bit as hard
+before he stepped out of the ship. The waves were not running any
+higher after than when he said, 'Bid me come to Thee.' But he was
+down amongst them, and that makes a wonderful difference. For a
+moment he stood, and then the peril into which he had so heedlessly
+thrust himself began to tell on him. Presumption subsided swiftly
+into fright, as it usually does, and fear began to fulfil itself,
+as it usually does. 'He became afraid,' and that made him heavy and
+he began to sink. Not because the gale was any more violent, not
+because the uneven pavement was any more yielding, but because he was
+frightened, and his faith began to falter at the close sight of the
+danger.
+
+And why did the ebbing away of faith mean the withdrawal of Christ's
+will to keep him up? Why? Because it could not but be so. There is
+only one door through which Christ's upholding power gets into a
+man, and that is the door of the man's trust in the power; and if he
+shuts the door, the power stops outside. So Peter went down. The
+text does not tell us how far down he went. Depend upon it, it was
+further than over the shoes! But he went down because he began to
+lose his trust that Christ could hold him up; and when he lost his
+trust, Christ lost His power over him.
+
+All this is a parable, carrying very plain and important lessons. We
+are upborne by Christ's power, and that power, working on and in our
+weakness, invests us with prerogatives in some measure like His own.
+If He can stand quiet on the heaving wave, so can His servant. 'The
+works that I do shall ye do also'--and 'the depths of the sea
+"become" a way for the ransomed to pass over.' That power is
+exercised on condition of our faith. As soon as faith ceases the
+influx of His grace is stayed. Peter, though probably he was not
+thinking of this incident, has put the whole philosophy of it into
+plain words in his own letter, when he says, 'You who are kept
+_by_ the power of God _through_ faith unto salvation.' He was held up
+as long as he believed. His belief was a hand, and that which it
+grasped was what held him up, and that was Christ's will and power.
+So we shall be held up everywhere, and in any storm, as long as, and
+no longer than, we set our confidence upon Him.
+
+Our faith is sure to fail when we turn away our eyes from Christ to
+look at the tempest and the dangers. If we keep our gaze fixed upon
+Him, the consciousness and the confidence of His all-sustaining
+power will hold us up. If once we turn aside to look at the waves as
+they heave, and prick our ears to listen to the wind as it whistles,
+then we shall begin to doubt whether He is able to keep us up.
+'Looking off' from all these dangers 'unto Jesus' is needful if we
+are to run the race set before us.
+
+A man walking along a narrow ledge of some Alpine height has only
+one chance of safety, and that is, not to look at his feet or at the
+icy rocks beside him, or at the gulf beneath, into which he will be
+dashed if he gazes down. He must look up and onwards, and then he
+will walk along a knife-edge, and he shall not fall. So, Peter,
+never mind the water, never mind the wind; look at Jesus and you
+will get to Him dry shod. If you turn away your eyes from Him, and
+take counsel of the difficulties and trials and antagonisms, down
+you will be sure to go. 'They sank to the bottom like a stone, the
+depths covered them.' Christ holds us up. He cannot hold us up
+unless we trust Him. Faith and fear contend for supremacy in our
+hearts. If we rightly trust, we shall not be afraid. If we are
+afraid, terror will slay trust. To look away from Christ, and occupy
+our thoughts with dangers and obstacles, is sure to lead to the
+collapse of faith and the strengthening of terror. To look past and
+above the billows to Him that stands on them is sure to cast out
+fear and to hearten faith. Peter ignored the danger at the wrong
+time, before he dropped over the side of the boat, and he was aware
+of it at the wrong time, while he was actually being held up and
+delivered from it. Rashness ignores peril in the wrong way, and
+thereby ensures its falling on the presumptuous head. Faith ignores
+it in the right way, by letting the eye travel past it, to Christ
+who shields from it, and thereby faith brings about the security it
+expects, and annihilates the peril from which it looks away to
+Jesus.
+
+III. We have here the cry of desperate faith and its immediate
+answer.
+
+The very thing which had broken Peter's faith mended it again. Fear
+sunk him by making him falter in his confidence; and, as he was
+sinking, the very desperation of his terror drove him back to his
+faith, and he 'cried' with a shrill, loud voice, heard above the
+roar of the boisterous wind, 'Lord, save me.' So difficulties and
+dangers, when they begin to tell upon us, often send us back to the
+trust which the anticipation of them had broken; and out of the very
+extremity of fear we sometimes can draw its own antidote. Just as
+with flint and steel you may strike a spark, so danger, striking
+against our heart, brings out the flash that kindles the tinder.
+
+This brief cry for help singularly blends faith and fear. There is
+faith in it, else Peter would not have appealed to Christ to save
+him. There is mortal terror in it, else he would not have felt that
+he needed to cry. But faith is uppermost now, and the very terror
+feeds it. So, by swift transition, our fears may pass into their own
+opposite and become courageous trust. Just as in a coal fire the
+thick black smoke sometimes gets alight and passes into ruddy flame,
+so our fears may catch fire and flash up as confidence and prayer.
+
+Note the merciful swiftness of Christ's answer. 'Immediately He
+caught him,' because another moment would have been too late. There
+will be time to teach him the lessons of his presumption, but when
+the water is all but up to the lips that shrieked for help, there is
+but one thing to do. He must be saved first and talked to afterwards.
+Our cries for deliverance in temporal matters are not always answered
+so quickly, for it is often better for us to be left to struggle with
+the waves and winds. But our appeals for Christ's helping hand in
+soul-peril are always answered without delay. No appreciable time is
+consumed in the passage of the telegram or in flashing back the
+answer. The apostle was not caught by Christ's hand before he knew
+his danger, for it was good for him that he should go down some way,
+but he was caught as soon as he called on the Master, and before he
+had come to any harm. The trial lasted long enough to wash the
+stiffening of self-confidence out of him, and then it had done its
+work--and Christ's strong hand held him up.
+
+The manner of the answer is noteworthy. It is determined by, and
+adapted to, his weak faith. He could not be upheld now as he had
+been a moment ago, before his fear had weighted him, by the exercise
+of Christ's will only. Then Christ could hold him up without
+touching him, but now the palpable grasp of the hand was needed to
+assure the tremulous, doubting heart. So we, too, sometimes need and
+get material and outward signs which make it easier to feel the
+reality of sustaining grace. But whether we do or no, Christ's swift
+help always takes the form best suited to our faith, and He has
+regard to the capacity of our clasping hands in the measure and
+manner of His gifts.
+
+The time and tone of Christ's gentle remonstrance are remarkable.
+Deliverance comes first, and rebuke afterwards. Having first shown
+him, by the fact of safety, that his doubts were irrational, Christ
+then, and not till then, puts His gentle question. Perhaps there was
+a smile on His face, as surely there was love in His voice, that
+softened the rebuke and went to Peter's heart.
+
+What does Christ rebuke him for? Getting out of the boat? No. He
+does not blame him for venturing too much, but for trusting too
+little. He does not blame him for attempting something beyond his
+strength, but for not holding fast the beginning of his confidence
+firm unto the end. And so the lesson for us is, that we cannot
+expect too much if we expect it perseveringly. We cannot set our
+conceptions of Christ's possible help to us too high if only we keep
+at the height to which we once have set them, and are assured that
+He will hold us up when we are down amongst the weltering waves, as
+we fancied ourselves to be when we were sitting in the boat wishing
+to be with Him. That is the question that He will meet us with when
+we get up on the shore yonder; and we shall not have any more to say
+for ourselves, in vindication of our tremulous trust, than Peter,
+silenced for once, had to say on this occasion.
+
+It will be good for us all if, like this apostle, our trials
+consolidate our characters, and out of the shifting, fluctuating,
+impetuous nature that was blown about like sand by every gust of
+emotion there be made, by the pressure of responsibility and trial,
+and experience of our own unreliableness, the 'Rock' of a stable
+character, steadfast and unmovable, with calm resolution and fixed
+faith, on which the Great Architect can build some portion of His
+great temple.
+
+
+
+
+CRUMBS AND THE BREAD
+
+
+    'Then Jesus went thence, and departed into the coasts
+    of Tyre and Sidon. 22. And, behold, a woman of Canaan
+    came out of the same coasts, and cried unto Him,
+    saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David; my
+    daughter is grievously vexed with a devil. 23. But He
+    answered her not a word. And His disciples came and
+    besought Him, saying, Send her away; for she crieth
+    after us. 24. But He answered and said, I am not sent
+    but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
+    25. Then came she and worshipped Him, saying, Lord,
+    help me. 26. But He answered and said, It is not meet
+    to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs.
+    27. And she said, Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the
+    crumbs which fall from their masters' table. 28. Then
+    Jesus answered and said unto her, O woman, great is thy
+    faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt. And her
+    daughter was made whole from that very hour. 29. And
+    Jesus departed from thence, and came nigh unto the sea
+    of Galilee; and went up into a mountain, and sat down
+    there. 30. And great multitudes came unto Him, having
+    with them those that were lame, blind, dumb, maimed,
+    and many others, and cast them down at Jesus' feet;
+    and He healed them: 31. Insomuch that the multitude
+    wondered, when they saw the dumb to speak, the maimed
+    to be whole, the lame to walk, and the blind to see:
+    and they glorified the God of Israel.'--MATT. xv. 21-31.
+
+The King of Israel has passed beyond the bounds of Israel, driven by
+the hostility of those who should have been His subjects. The
+delegates of the priestly party from Jerusalem, who had come down to
+see into this dangerous enthusiasm which was beginning in Galilee,
+have made Christ's withdrawal expedient, and He goes northward, if
+not actually into the territory of Tyre and Sidon, at any rate to
+the border land. The incident of the Syro-Phoenician woman becomes
+more striking if we suppose that it took place on Gentile ground. At
+all events, after it, we learn from Mark that He made a considerable
+circuit, first north and then east, and so came round to the eastern
+side of the sea of Galilee, where the last paragraph of this section
+finds Him. The key to its meaning lies in the contrast between the
+single cure of the woman's demoniac daughter, obtained after so long
+imploring, and the spontaneous abundance of the cures wrought when
+Jesus again had Jewish sufferers to do with, even though it were on
+the half-Gentilised eastern shore of the lake. The contrast is an
+illustration of His parable of the crumbs that fell from the table
+and the plentiful feast that was spread upon it for the children.
+
+The story of the Syro-Phoenician woman naturally falls into four
+parts, each marked by the recurrence of 'He answered.'
+
+I. There is the piteous cry, and the answer of silence. Mark tells
+us that Jesus sought concealment in this journey; but distress has
+quick eyes, and this poor woman found Him. Canaanite as she is, and
+thus a descendant of the ancient race of Israel's enemies, she has
+learned to call Him the Son of David, owning His kingship, which His
+born subjects disowned. She beseeches for that which He delights to
+give, identifying herself with her poor child's suffering, and
+asking as for herself His mercy. As Chrysostom says: 'It was a sight
+to stir pity to behold a woman calling aloud in such distress, and
+that woman a mother, and pleading for a daughter, and that daughter
+in such evil plight.' In her humility she does not bring her child,
+nor ask Him to go to her. In her agony, she has nothing to say but
+to spread her grief before Him, as thinking that He, of whose pity
+she has heard, needs but to know in order to alleviate, and requires
+no motives urged to induce Him to help. In her faith, she thinks
+that His power can heal from afar. What more could He have desired?
+All the more startling, then, is His demeanour. All the conditions
+which He usually required, were present in her; but He, who was wont
+to meet these with swift and joyful over-answers, has no word to say
+to this poor, needy, persevering, humble, and faithful suppliant.
+The fountain seems frozen, from which such streams of blessing were
+wont to flow. His mercy seems clean gone, and His compassion to have
+failed. A Christ silent to a sufferer's cry is a paradox which
+contradicts the whole gospel story, and which, we may be very sure,
+no evangelist would have painted, if he had not been painting from
+the life.
+
+II. There is the disciples' intercession answered by Christ's
+statement of the limitations of His mission. Their petition
+evidently meant, 'Dismiss her by granting her request'; they knew in
+what fashion He was wont to 'send away' such suppliants. They seem,
+then, more pitiful than He is. But their thoughts are more for
+themselves than for her. That 'us' shows the cloven foot. They did
+not like the noise, and they feared it might defeat His purpose of
+secrecy; and so, by their phrase, 'Send her away,' they
+unconsciously betray that what they wanted was not granting the
+prayer, but getting rid of the petitioner. Perhaps, too, they mean,
+'Say something to her; either tell her that Thou wilt or that Thou
+wilt not; break Thy silence somehow.' No doubt, it was intensely
+disagreeable to have a shrieking woman coming after them; and they
+were only doing as most of us would have done, and as so many of us
+do, when we give help without one touch of compassion, in order to
+stop some imploring mouth.
+
+Their apparently compassionate but really selfish intercession was
+put aside by the answer, which explains the paradox of His silence.
+It puts emphasis on two things: His subordination to the divine will
+of the Father, and the restrictions imposed thereby on the scope of
+His beneficent working. He was obeying the divine will in confining
+His ministry to the Jewish people, as we know that He did. Clearly,
+that restriction was necessary. It was a case of concentration in
+order to diffusion. The fire must be gathered on the hearth, if it
+is afterward to warm the chamber. There must be geographical and
+national limits to His life; and the Messiah, who comes last in the
+long series of the kings and prophets, can only be authenticated as
+the world's Messiah, by being first the fulfiller to the children of
+the promises made to the fathers. The same necessity, which required
+that revelation should be made through that nation, required that
+the climax and fulfiller of all revelation should limit His earthly
+ministry to it. This limitation must be regarded as applying only to
+His own personal ministry. It did not limit His sympathies, nor
+interfere with His consciousness of being the Saviour and King of
+the whole world. He had already spoken the parables which claimed it
+all for the area of the development of His kingdom, and in many
+other ways had given utterance to His consciousness of universal
+dominion, and His purpose of universal mercy. But He knew that there
+was an order of development in the kingdom, and that at its then
+stage the surest way to attain the ultimate universality was rigid
+limitation of it to the chosen people. This conviction locked His
+gracious lips against even this poor woman's piteous cry. We may
+well believe that His sympathy outran His commission, and that it
+would have been hard for so much love to be silent in the presence
+of so much sorrow, if He had not felt the solemn pressure of that
+divine necessity which ruled all His life. He was bound by His
+instructions, and therefore He answered her not a word. Individual
+suffering is no reason for transcending the limits of God-appointed
+functions; and he is absolved from the charge of indifference who
+refrains from giving help, which he can only give by overleaping the
+bounds of his activity, which have been set by the Father.
+
+III. We have, next, the persistent suppliant answered by a refusal
+which sounds harsh and hopeless. Christ's former words were probably
+not heard by the woman, who seems to have been behind the group. She
+saw that something was being said to Him, and may have gathered,
+from gestures or looks, that His reply was unfavourable. Perhaps
+there was a short pause in their walk, while they spoke, during
+which she came nearer. Now she falls at His feet, and with
+'beautiful shamelessness,' as Chrysostom calls it, repeats her
+prayer, but this time with pathetic brevity, uttering but the one
+cry, 'Lord, help me!' The intenser the feeling, the fewer the words.
+Heart-prayers are short prayers. She does not now invoke Him as the
+Son of David, nor tell her sorrow over again, but flings herself in
+desperation on His pity, with the artless and unsupported cry, wrung
+from her agony, as she sees the hope of help fading away. Like
+Jacob, in his mysterious struggle, 'she wept, and made supplication
+unto Him.'
+
+As it would seem, her distress touched no chord of sympathy; and
+from the lips accustomed to drop oil and wine into every wound, came
+words like swords, cold, unfeeling, keen-edged, fitted and meant to
+lacerate. We shall not understand them, or Him, if we content
+ourselves with the explanation which jealousy for His honour as
+compassionate and tender has led many to adopt, that He meant all
+the long delay in granting her request, and the words which He
+spoke, only as tests of her faith. His refusal was a real refusal,
+founded on the divine decree, which He was bound to obey. His words
+to her, harsh as they unquestionably sound, are but another way of
+putting the limitation on which He had just insisted in His answer
+to the disciples. The 'bread' is the blessing which He, as the sent
+of God, brings; the 'children' are the 'lost sheep of the house of
+Israel'; the 'dogs' are the Gentile world. The meaning of the whole
+is simply the necessary restriction of His personal activity to the
+chosen nation. It is not meant to wound nor to insult, though, no
+doubt, it is cast in a form which might have been offensive, and
+would have repelled a less determined or less sorrowful heart. The
+form may be partly explained by the intention of trying her
+earnestness, which, though it is not the sole, or even the
+principal, is a subordinate, reason of our Lord's action. But it is
+also to be considered in the light of the woman's quick-witted
+retort, which drew out of it an inference which we cannot suppose
+that Christ did not intend. He uses a diminutive for 'dogs,' which
+shows that He is not thinking of the fierce, unclean animals,
+masterless and starving, that still haunt Eastern cities, and
+deserve their bad character, but of domestic pets, who live with the
+household, and are near the table. In fact, the woman seized His
+intention much better than later critics who find 'national scorn'
+in the words; and the fair inference from them is just that which
+she drew, and which constituted the law of the preaching of the
+Gospel,--'To the Jew first, and also to the Gentile.'
+
+IV. We have the woman's retort, which wrings hope out of apparent
+discouragement, answered by Christ's joyful granting of her request.
+Out of His very words she weaves a plea. 'Yes, Lord; I am one of the
+dogs; then I am not an alien, but belong to the household.' The
+Revised Version does justice to her words by reading 'for even'
+instead of 'yet,' She does not enter a caveat against the analogy,
+but accepts it wholly, and only asks Him to carry out His own
+metaphor. She takes the sword from His hand, or, as Luther says,
+'she catches Him in His own words.' She does not ask a place at the
+table, nor anything taken from those who have a prior claim to a
+more abundant share in His mercies. A crumb is enough for her, which
+they will never miss. In other and colder words, she acquiesces in
+the divine appointment which limits His mission to Israel; but she
+recognises that all nations belong to God's household, and that she
+and her countrymen have a real, though for the time inferior,
+position in it. She pleads that her gain will not be the children's
+loss, nor the answer to her prayers an infraction of the spirit of
+His mission. Perhaps, too, there may be a reference to the fact of
+His being there on Gentile soil, in her words, 'Which fall from the
+children's table.' She does not want the bread to be thrown from the
+table to her. She is not asking Him to transfer His ministry to
+Gentiles; but here He is. A crumb has fallen, in His brief visit.
+May she not eat of that? In this answer faith, humility,
+perseverance, swift perception of His meaning, and hallowed
+ingenuity and boldness, are equally admirable. By admitting that she
+was 'a dog,' and pleading her claim on that footing, she shows that
+she was 'a child.' And therefore, because she has shown herself one
+of the true household, in the fixedness of her faith, in the
+meekness of her humility, in the persistence of her prayers, Christ
+joyfully recognises that here is a case in which He may pass the
+line of ordinary limitation, and that, in doing so, He does not
+exceed His commission. Such faith is entitled to the fullest share
+of His gift. She takes her place beside the Gentile centurion as the
+two recipients of commendation from Him for the greatness of their
+faith. It had seemed as if He would give nothing; but He ends with
+giving all, putting the key of the storehouse into her hand, and
+bidding her take, not a crumb, but 'as thou wilt.' Her daughter is
+healed, by His power working at a distance; but that was not, we may
+be very sure, the last nor the best of the blessings which she took
+from that great treasure of which He made her mistress. Nor can we
+doubt that He rejoiced at the removal of the barrier which dammed
+back His help, as much as she did at the abundance of the stream
+which reached her at last.
+
+V. The final verses of our lesson give us a striking contrast to
+this story. Jesus is again on the shores of the lake, after a tour
+through the Tyrian and Sidonian territory, and then eastwards and
+southwards, to its eastern bank. There He, as on several former
+occasions, seeks seclusion and repose in the hills, which is broken
+in upon by the crowds. The old excitement and rush of people begin
+again. And large numbers of sick, 'lame, blind, dumb, maimed and
+many others,' are brought. They are cast 'down at His feet' in hot
+haste, with small ceremony, and, as would appear, with little
+petitioning for His healing power. But the same grace, for which the
+Canaanitish woman had needed to plead so hard, now seems to flow
+almost unasked. She had, as it were, wrung a drop out; now it gushes
+abundantly. She had not got her 'crumb' without much pleading; these
+get the bread almost without asking. It is this contrast of scant
+and full supplies which the evangelist would have us observe. And he
+points his meaning plainly enough by that expression, 'they
+glorified the God of Israel,' which seems to be Matthew's own, and
+not his quotation of what the crowd said. This abundance of miracle
+witnesses to the pre-eminence of Israel over the Gentile nations,
+and to the special revelation of Himself which God made to them in
+His Son. The crowd may have found in it only fuel for narrow
+national pride and contempt; but it was the divine method for the
+founding of the kingdom none the less; and these two scenes, set
+thus side by side, teach the same truth, that the King of men is
+first the King of Israel.
+
+
+
+
+THE DIVINE CHRIST CONFESSED, THE SUFFERING CHRIST DENIED
+
+
+    'When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Phllippi,
+    He asked His disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I
+    the Son of Man am? 14. And they said, Some say that
+    thou art John the Baptist; some, Elias; and others,
+    Jeremias, or one of the prophets. 15. He saith unto
+    them, But whom say ye that I am? 16. And Simon Peter
+    answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the
+    living God. 17. And Jesus answered and said unto him,
+    Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona: for flesh and blood
+    hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father which is
+    in heaven. 18. And I say also unto thee, That thou art
+    Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and
+    the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. 19. And
+    I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of
+    heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall
+    be hound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on
+    earth shall be loosed in heaven. 20. Then charged He
+    His disciples that they should tell no man that He was
+    Jesus the Christ. 21. From that time forth began Jesus
+    to shew unto His disciples, how that He must go unto
+    Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and
+    chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised
+    again the third day. 22. Then Peter took Him, and began
+    to rebuke Him, saying, Be it far from Thee, Lord: this
+    shall not be unto Thee. 23. But He turned, and said
+    unto Peter, Get thee behind Me, Satan: thou art an
+    offence unto Me: for thou savourest not the things that
+    be of God, but those that be of men. 24. Then said
+    Jesus unto His disciples, If any man will come after
+    Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and
+    follow Me.  25. For whosoever will save his life shall
+    lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for My sake
+    shall find it. 26. For what is a man profited, if he
+    shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or
+    what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? 27. For
+    the Son of Man shall come in the glory of His Father
+    with His angels; and then He shall reward every man
+    according to his works. 28. Verily I say unto you,
+    There be some standing here, which shall not taste of
+    death, till they see the Son of Man coming in His
+    kingdom.'--MATT. xvi. 13-28.
+
+This section is embarrassing from its fulness of material. We can
+but lightly touch points on which volumes might be, and indeed have
+been, written.
+
+I. The first section (vs. 13-20) gives us Peter's great confession
+in the name of the disciples, and Christ's answer to it. The centre
+of this section is the eager avowal of the impetuous apostle, always
+foremost for good or evil. We note the preparation for it, its
+contents, and its results. As to the preparation,--our Lord is
+entering on a new era in His work, and desires to bring clearly into
+His followers' consciousness the sum of His past self-revelation.
+The excitement, which He had checked after the first miraculous
+feeding, had died down. The fickle crowd had gone away from Him, and
+the shadows of the cross were darkening. Amid the seclusion of the
+woods, fountains, and rocks of Caesarea, far away from distracting
+influences, He puts these two momentous questions. Following the
+Revised Version reading, we have a double contrast between the first
+and second. 'Men' answers to 'ye,' and 'the Son of Man' to 'I.' The
+first question is as to the partial and conflicting opinions among
+the multitudes who had heard His name for Himself from His own lips;
+the second, in its use of the 'I,' hints at the fuller unveiling of
+the depths of His gracious personality, which the disciples had
+experienced, and implies, 'Surely you, who have been beside Me, and
+known Me so closely, have reached a deeper understanding.' It has a
+tone of the same wistfulness and wonder as that other question of
+His, 'Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known
+Me?' For their sakes, He seeks to draw out their partly unconscious
+faith, that had been smouldering, fed by their daily experience of
+His beauty and tenderness. Half-recognised convictions float in many
+a heart, which need but a pointed question to crystallise into
+master-truths, to which, henceforward, the whole being is subject.
+Great are the dangers of articulate creeds; but great is the power
+of putting our shadowy beliefs into plain words. 'With the mouth
+confession is made unto salvation.'
+
+Why should this great question have been preceded by the other?
+Probably to make the disciples feel more distinctly the chaotic
+contradictions of the popular judgment, and their own isolation by
+their possession of the clearer light. He wishes them to see the
+gulf opening between them and their fellows, and so to bind them
+more closely to Himself. This is the question the answer to which
+settles everything for a man. It has an intensely sharp point. We
+cannot take refuge from it in the general opinion. Nor does any
+other man's judgment about Him matter one whit to us. This Christ
+has a strange power, after nineteen hundred years, of coming to each
+of us, with the same persistent interrogation on His lips. And to-day,
+as then, all depends on the answer which we give. Many answer by
+exalted estimates of Him, like these varying replies which ascribed
+to Him prophetic authority, but they have not understood His own name
+for Himself, nor drunk in the meaning of His self-revelation, unless
+they can reply with the full-toned confession of the apostle, which
+sets Him far above and apart from the highest and holiest.
+
+As to the contents of the confession, it includes both the human and
+the divine sides of Christ's nature. He is the Messiah, but He is
+more than what a Jew meant by that name; He is 'the Son of the
+living God,' by which we cannot indeed suppose that Peter meant all
+that he afterwards learned it contained, or all that the Church has
+now been taught of its meaning, but which, nevertheless, is not to
+be watered down as if it did not declare His unique filial relation
+to the Father, and so His divine nature. Nathanael had burst into
+rapturous adoration of Jesus as 'the Son of God' at the very
+beginning; and the disciples' glad confidence, which cast out the
+fear of the dim form striding across the sea, had echoed the
+confession; all had heard His words, 'No man knoweth the Father but
+the Son.' So we need not hesitate to interpret this confession as in
+essence and germ containing the whole future doctrine of our Lord's
+divinity. True, the speaker did not know all which lay in His words.
+Do we? Do we not see here an illustration of the method of Christian
+progress in doctrine, which consists not in the winning of new
+truths, but in the penetrating further into the meaning of old and
+initial truths? The conviction which made and makes a Christian, is
+this of Peter's; and Christian growth is into, not away from, it.
+
+As to the results, they are set forth in our Lord's answer, which
+breathes of delight, and we may almost say gratitude. His manhood
+knew the thrill of satisfaction at having some hearts which
+understood though partially, and loved even better than they knew.
+The solemn address to the apostle by his ancestral name, gives
+emphasis to the contrast between his natural weakness and his divine
+illumination and consequent privilege. The name of Peter is not here
+bestowed, but interpreted. Christ does not say 'Thou shalt be,' but
+'Thou art,' and so presupposes the former conferring of the name.
+Unquestionably, the apostle is the rock on which the Church is
+built. The efforts to avoid that conclusion would never have been
+heard of, but for the Roman Catholic controversy; but they are as
+unnecessary as unsuccessful. Is it credible that in the course of an
+address which is wholly occupied with conferring prerogatives on the
+apostle, a clause should come in, which is concerned about an
+altogether different subject from the 'thou' of the preceding and
+the 'thee' of the following clauses, and which yet should take the
+very name of the apostle, slightly modified, for that other subject?
+We do not interpret other books in that fashion. But it was not the
+'flesh and blood' Peter, but Peter as the recipient and faithful
+utterer of the divine inspiration in his confession, who received
+these privileges. Therefore they are not his exclusive property, but
+belong to his faith, which grasped and confessed the divine-human
+Lord; and wherever that faith is, there are these gifts, which are
+its results. They are the 'natural' consequences of the true faith
+in Christ, in that higher region where the supernatural is the
+natural. Peter's grasp of Christ's nature wrought upon his
+character, as pressure does upon sand, and solidified his shifting
+impetuosity into rock-like firmness. So the same faith will tend to
+do in any man. It made him the chief instrument in the establishment
+of the early Church. On souls steadied and made solid by like faith,
+and only on such, can Christ build His Church. Of course, the
+metaphor here regards Jesus, not as the foundation, as the Scripture
+generally does, but as the founder. The names of the twelve apostles
+of the Lamb are on the foundations of the heavenly city; and, in
+historical fact, the name of this apostle is graven on the deepest
+and first laid. In like subordinate sense, all who share that heroic
+faith and proclaim it are used by the Master-builder in the
+foundations of His Church; and Peter himself is eager to share his
+name among his brethren, when he says 'Ye also, as living stones.'
+
+Built on men who hold by that confession, the Church is immortal;
+and the armies who pour out of the gates of the pale kingdoms of the
+unseen world shall not be able to destroy it. Peter, as confessor of
+his Lord's human-divine nature, wields the keys of the kingdom of
+heaven, like a steward of a great house; and that too was fulfilled
+in his apostolic activity in his admitting Jews at Pentecost, and
+Gentiles in the house of Cornelius. But the same power attends all
+who share his faith and avowal, for the preaching of that faith is
+the opening of heaven's door to men. He receives the power of
+binding and loosing, by which is not meant that of forgiving or
+retaining sins, but that of prohibiting or allowing actions, or, in
+other words, of laying down the law of Christian conduct. This
+meaning of the metaphors is made certain by the common Jewish use of
+them. Despotic legislative power is not here committed to the
+apostle, but the great principle is taught that the morality of
+Christianity flows directly from its theology, and that whosoever,
+like Peter, grasps firmly the cardinal truth of Christ's nature, and
+all which flows therefrom, will have his insight so cleared that his
+judgments on what is permitted or forbidden to a Christian man will
+correspond with the decisions of heaven, in the measure of his hold
+upon the truth which underlies all religion and all morality,
+namely, 'Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.' These are
+gifts to Peter indeed, but only as possessor of that faith, and are
+much more truly understood as belonging to all who 'possess like
+precious faith' (as Peter says), than as the prerogative of any
+individual or class.
+
+II. The second section (vs. 21-23) contains the startling new
+revelation of the suffering Messiah, and the disciples' repugnance
+to it. The Gospel has two parts: Jesus is the Christ, and the Christ
+must suffer and enter into His glory. Our Lord has made sure that
+the disciples have learned the first before He leads to the second.
+The very conviction of His dignity and divine nature made that
+second truth the more bewildering, but still the only road to it was
+through the first. Verse 21 covers an indefinite time, during which
+Jesus gradually taught His sufferings. Ordinarily we exaggerate the
+suddenness, and therefore the depth, of Peter's fall, by supposing
+that it took place immediately after his confession; but the
+narrative discountenances the idea, and merely says that Jesus then
+'began' His new teaching. There had been veiled hints of it (such as
+John ii. 19, and Matt. ix. 15, xii. 40), but henceforward it assumed
+prominence, and was taught without veil. It was no new thought to
+Himself, forced on Him by the growing enmity of the nation. The
+cross always cast its shadow on His path. He was no enthusiast,
+beginning with the dream of winning a world to His side, and slowly
+and heroically making up His mind to die a martyr, but His purpose
+in being born was to minister and to die, a ransom for the many. We
+have not here to do with a growing consciousness, but simply with an
+increasing clearness of utterance. Note the detailed accuracy of His
+prevision, which points to Jerusalem as the scene, and to the rulers
+of the nation as the instruments, and to death as the climax, and to
+resurrection as the issue, of His sufferings; the clear setting
+forth of the divine necessity which, as it ruled all His life, ruled
+here also, and is expressed in that solemn 'must'; and the perfectly
+willing acceptance by Him of that necessity, implied in that 'go,'
+and certified by many another word of His. The necessity was no
+external compulsion, driving Him to an unwelcome sacrifice, but one
+imposed alike by filial obedience and by brotherly love. He
+_must_ die because He _would_ save.
+
+How vividly the scene of Peter's rash rejection of the teaching is
+described! The apostle, full of eager love, still, as of old, swift
+to speak, and driven by unexamined impulse, lays his hand on Christ,
+and draws Him a little apart, while he 'begins' to pour out words
+which show that he has forgotten his confession. 'Rebuke' must not
+be softened down into anything less vehement or more respectful. He
+knows better than Jesus what will happen. Perhaps his assurance
+'that this shall never be' means 'We will fight first.' But he is
+not allowed to finish what he began; for the Master, whom he loved
+unwisely but well, turns His back on him, as in horror, and shows by
+the terrible severity of His rebuke how deeply moved He is. He
+repels the hint in almost the same words as He had used to the
+tempter in the wilderness, of whom that Peter, who had so lately
+been the recipient and proclaimer of a divine illumination, has
+become the mouthpiece. So possible is it to fall from sunny heights
+to doleful depths! So little can any divine inspiration be
+permanent, if the man turn away from it to think man's thoughts, and
+set his affections on the things which men desire! So certainly does
+minding these degrade to becoming an organ of Satan! The words are
+full of restrained emotion, which reveal how real a temptation Peter
+had flung in Christ's path. The rock has become a stone of
+stumbling; the man Jesus shrank from the cross with a natural and
+innocent shrinking, which never made His will tremulous, but was
+none the less real; and such words from loving lips did affect him.
+Let us note, on the whole, that the complete truth about Jesus
+Christ must include these two parts,--His divine nature and
+Messiahship, and His death on the cross; and that neither alone is
+the gospel, nor is he a disciple, such as Christ desires, who does
+not cleave to both with mind and heart.
+
+III. In verses 24-28, the law, which ruled the Master's life, is
+extended to the servants. They recoiled from the thought of His
+having to suffer. They had to learn that they must suffer too if
+they would be His. First, the condition of discipleship is set
+before them as being the fellowship of His suffering. 'If any man
+will' gives them the option of withdrawal. A new epoch is beginning,
+and they will have to enlist again, and to do so with open eyes. He
+will have no unwilling soldiers, nor any who have been beguiled into
+the ranks. No doubt, some went away, and walked no more with Him.
+The terms of service are clear. Discipleship means imitation, and
+imitation means self-crucifixion. At that time they would only
+partially understand what taking up their cross was, but they would
+apprehend that a martyred master must needs have for followers men
+ready to be martyrs too. But the requirement goes much deeper than
+this. There is no discipleship without self-denial, both in the
+easier form of starving passions and desires, and in the harder of
+yielding up the will, and letting His will supplant ours. Only so
+can we ever come after Him, and of such sacrifice of self the cross
+is the eminent example. We cannot think too much of it as the
+instrument of our reconciliation and forgiveness, but we may, and
+too often do, think too little of it as the pattern of our lives.
+When Jesus began to teach His death, He immediately presented it as
+His servants' example. Let us not forget that fact.
+
+The ground of the law is next stated in verse 25. The desire to save
+life is the loss of life in the highest sense. If that desire guide
+us, then farewell to enthusiasm, courage, the martyr spirit, and all
+which makes man's life nobler than a beast's. He who is ruled mainly
+by the wish to keep a whole skin, loses the best part of what he is
+so anxious to keep. In a wider application, regard for self as a
+ruling motive is destruction, and selfishness is suicide. On the
+other hand, lives hazarded for Christ are therein truly saved, and
+if they be not only hazarded, but actually lost, such loss is gain;
+and the same law, by which the Master 'must' die and rise again,
+will work in the servant. Verse 26 urges the wisdom of such apparent
+folly, and enforces the requirement by the plain consideration that
+'life' is worth more than anything beside, and that on the two
+grounds, that the world itself would be of no use to a dead man, and
+that, once lost, 'life' cannot be bought back. Therefore the dictate
+of the wisest prudence is that seemingly prodigal flinging away of
+the lower 'life' which puts us in possession of the higher. Note
+that the appeal is here made to a reasonable regard to personal
+advantage, and _that_ in the very act of urging to crucify
+self. So little did Christ think, as some people do, that the desire
+to save one's soul is selfishness.
+
+Verse 27 confirms all the preceding by the solemn announcement of
+the coming of the Son of Man as Judge. Mark the dignity of the
+words. He is to come 'in the glory of the Father.' That ineffable
+and inaccessible light which rays forth from the Father enwraps the
+Son. Their glory is one. The waiting angels are 'His.' He renders to
+every man according to his doing (his actions considered as one
+whole). Thus He claims for Himself universal sway, and the power of
+accurately determining the whole moral character of every life, as
+well as that of awarding precisely graduated retribution. They
+surely shall then find their lives who have followed Him here.
+
+Verse 28 adds, with His solemn 'verily,' a confirmation of this
+announcement of His coming to judge. The question of what event is
+referred to may best be answered by noting that it must be one
+sufficiently far off from the moment of speaking to allow of the
+death of the greater number of His hearers, and sufficiently near to
+allow of the survival of some; that it must also be an event, after
+which these survivors would go the common road into the grave; that
+it is apparently distinguished from His coming 'in the glory of the
+Father,' and yet is of such a nature as to afford convincing proof
+of the establishment of His kingdom on earth, and to be, in some
+sort, a sign of that final act of judgment. All these requirements
+(and they are all the fair inferences from the words) meet only in
+the destruction of Jerusalem, and of the national life of the chosen
+people. That was a crash of which we faintly realise the tremendous
+significance. It swept away the last remnant of the hope that Israel
+was to be the kingdom of the Messiah; and from out of the dust and
+chaos of that fall the Christian Church emerged, manifestly destined
+for world-wide extension. It was a 'great and terrible day of the
+Lord,' and, as such, was a precursor and a prophecy of the day of
+the Lord, when He 'shall come in the glory of the Father,' and
+'render unto every man according to his deeds.'
+
+
+
+
+CHRIST FORESEEING THE CROSS
+
+
+    'From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto His
+    disciples, how that He must go unto Jerusalem, and
+    suffer many things of the elders and chief priests
+    and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the
+    third day.'--MATT. xvi. 21.
+
+The 'time' referred to in the text was probably a little more than
+six months before the Crucifixion, when Jesus was just on the point
+of finally leaving Galilee, and travelling towards Jerusalem. It was
+an epoch in His ministry. The hostility of the priestly party in the
+capital had become more pronounced, and simultaneously the fickle
+enthusiasm of the Galilean crowds, which had been cooled by His
+discouragement, had died down into apathy. He and His followers are
+about to leave familiar scenes and faces, and to plunge into
+perilous and intrude paths. He is resolved that, if they will
+'come after Him,' as He bids them in a subsequent verse, it shall be
+with their eyes open, and as knowing that to come after Him now
+means to cut themselves loose from old moorings, and to put out into
+the storm. They shall be abundantly certified that their journeying
+to Jerusalem is not a triumphal procession to a crown, but a march
+to a cross.
+
+So, this new epoch in His life is attended with a new development of
+His teaching. My text sums up the result of many interviews in
+which, by slow degrees, He sought to put the disciples in possession
+of this unwelcome truth. It was prepared for, by the previous
+conversation in which His question elicited from Peter, as the
+mouthpiece of the apostles, the great confession of His Messiahship
+and Divinity. Settled in their belief of these truths, however
+imperfect their intellectual grasp of them, they might perhaps be
+able to receive the mournful mystery of His passion.
+
+I. We have here set forth in the first place our Lord's anticipation
+of the Cross.
+
+Mark the tone of the language, the minuteness of the detail, the
+absolute certainty of the prevision. That is not the language of a
+man who simply is calculating that the course which he is pursuing
+is likely to end in his martyrdom; but the thing lies there before
+Him, a definite, fixed certainty; every detail known, the scene, the
+instruments, the non-participation of these in the final act of His
+death, His resurrection, and its date,--all manifested and mapped
+out in His sight, and all absolutely certain.
+
+Now this was by no means the first time that the certainty of the
+Cross was plain to Christ. It was not even the first time that it
+had been announced in His teaching. Veiled hints; allusions, brief
+but pregnant, had been scattered through His earlier ministry--such,
+for instance, as the enigmatical word at its very beginning,
+'Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up'; or as
+the profound word to the rabbi that sought Him by night, 'As Moses
+lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be
+lifted up'; or as the passing hint, dropped to the people, in
+symbolical language, about the 'sign of the prophet Jonas'; or as
+the grief foreshadowed dimly to the apostles, of the withdrawal of
+the Bridegroom, and their 'fasting in those days.' These hints, and
+no doubt others unrecorded, had cropped to the surface before; and
+what we have to do with here, is neither the dawning of an
+expectation in Christ, nor the first utterance of the certainty of
+the Cross, but simply the beginning of a continuous and
+unenigmatical teaching of it, as an element in His instructions to
+His disciples.
+
+So then, we have to recognise the fact that our Lord's prevision of
+the end--shone, I was going to say, perhaps it might be truer to
+say, darkened,--all the path along which He had to travel.
+
+I think that people dogmatise a great deal too glibly as to what
+they know very little about, the interaction of the divine and the
+human elements in Christ, and on the one side are far too certain in
+their affirmation that His humanity possessed in some reflected
+fashion the divine gift of omniscience; and on the other hand, that
+His manhood, passing through the process of human development, and
+increasing in wisdom, was necessarily in its earlier stages void of
+the consciousness of His Messianic mission. I dare not affirm either
+'yes' or 'no' about that matter; but this I am sure of, that if ever
+there was a time in the development of the Manhood of Jesus Christ
+when He began to know Himself as the Messias, at that same time He
+began to be certain of the Cross. For His Messianic work required
+the Cross, and the divine thing that was in Him was born into the
+world for a double purpose, to minister and to die.
+
+So, dear friends, putting aside mere metaphysics, which are
+superficial after all, we have to recognise this as the fact, that
+all through His career there arose before our Lord the certainty of
+that death, and that it did not assume to Him the aspect which such
+a prospect might have assumed to others as a possible result of a
+mission that failed, but it assumed to Him the aspect of the certain
+result of a work that was accomplished. He began His career with no
+illusions, such as other teachers, reformers, philanthropists, men
+that have moved society, have always begun with. Moses might
+'suppose his brethren would have understood how that God by His hand
+would deliver them,' but Christ had no such illusion. He knew from
+the beginning that He came to be rejected and to die. And so He
+'trod life's common way,' with that grim certainty rising ever
+before Him. I suppose that He did not, as you and I do, forget the
+death that awaits us, and find the non-remembrance of it the
+condition of much of our energy, but that it was perpetually in His
+sight.
+
+Now I do not think that we sufficiently dwell upon that fact as an
+element in the human experience of our Lord. What beauty it gives to
+His gentleness, to the leisureliness of heart with which He was ready
+to make everybody's sorrow His own, and to lay a healing and a loving
+finger upon every wound! With this certainty before Him, there was
+yet no strain manifest upon His spirit, no self-absorption, no
+shutting Himself out from other people's burdens because He had so
+heavy ones of His own to carry; but He was ready for every joy, ready
+for all sympathy, ready for every help; and if we cannot say that,
+'in cheerful godliness,' as I think we may, at least we can say that
+with solemn joy and untroubled readiness, He journeyed towards that
+Cross. This Isaac was under no illusions as to who the Lamb for the
+offering was, but knowing it, He patiently carried the wood and
+climbed the hill, ready for the Father's will.
+
+II. That brings me to notice the second point here, our Lord's
+recognition of the necessity of His suffering.
+
+Mark that He does not say that He _shall_ suffer. Certainty is
+not all that He proclaims here, however absolute that certainty
+might be, but it is '_He must_.' He is speaking not only of the
+historical fact, but of the need, deep in the nature of things, for
+His sufferings that were to follow.
+
+And though these were wrought out by His own willing submission on
+the one hand, and by the unfettered play of the evil passions of the
+worst of men on the other, yet over all that apparent chaos of
+unbridled devildom there ruled the unalterable purpose of God; and
+the 'must' was wrought out through the passions of evil-doers and
+the voluntary submission of the innocent sufferer; thus setting
+before us, in the central fact of the history of humanity, viz. the
+Cross and passion of Jesus Christ, the eminent example of that great
+mystery how the absolute freedom of the human will, and the
+responsibility of the guilt of human wrong-doers, are congruous with
+the fixed purpose of an all-determining and all-ruling Providence.
+
+But that is apart from my purpose. Mark then, that our Lord's
+recognition of this necessity for His suffering is, on the first and
+plainest aspect of it, His recognition that His suffering was
+necessary on the ground of filial obedience. All through His life we
+hear that 'must' echoing, and His whole spirit bowed to it. As He
+says Himself, 'The Son can do nothing of Himself.' As was said for
+Him of old: 'Lo, I come. In the volume of the book it is written of
+Me, I delight to do Thy will, and Thy law is within My heart.' So
+the Father's will is the Son's law; and the Father's 'Thou shalt' is
+answered by the Son's 'I must.'
+
+But yet that necessity grounded on filial obedience was no mere
+external necessity determined solely by the divine will. God so
+willed it, because it must be so; that it must be so was not because
+God so willed it. That is to say, the work to which Christ had set
+His hand was a work that demanded the Cross, nor could it be
+accomplished without it. For it was the work of redeeming the world,
+and required more than a beautiful life, more than a divine
+gentleness of heart, more than the homely and yet deep wisdom of His
+teachings, it required the sacrifice that He offered on the Cross.
+
+So, dear friends, Christ's 'must' is but this: 'My work is not
+accomplished except I die.' And remember that the connection between
+our Lord's work and our Lord's death is not that which subsists
+between the works and the deaths of great teachers, or heroic
+martyrs, or philanthropists and benefactors, who will gladly pay the
+price of life in order to carry out their loving or their wise
+designs. It is no mere appendage to His work, nor the price that He
+paid for having done it, but it is His very work in its vital
+centre.
+
+I pray you to consider if there is any theory of the meaning and power
+of the death of Jesus Christ which adequately explains this 'must,'
+except the one that He died a sacrifice for the sins of the world. On
+any other hypothesis, as it seems to me, of what His death meant, it
+is surplusage, over and above His work: not adding much, either to His
+teaching or to the beauty of His example, and having no absolute
+stringent necessity impressed upon it. There is one doctrine--that
+when He died He bare the sins of the whole world--which makes His
+death a necessity; and I ask you, Is there any other doctrine which
+does? Take care of a Christianity which would not be much impoverished
+if the Cross were struck out of it altogether.
+
+There is a deeper question, on which, as I believe, it does not
+become us to enter, and that is, What is the necessity for the
+necessity? Why must it be that He, who is the Redeemer of the world,
+must needs be the Sacrifice for the world? We do not know enough
+about the depths of the divine nature and the divine government to
+speak very wisely or reverently upon that subject, and I, for one,
+abjure the attempt, which seems to me to be presumptuous--the
+attempt to explain why there was needed a sacrifice for sin in order
+to the forgiveness of sin. If I knew all about God, I could tell
+you; and nobody, that does not, can. But we can see, as far as
+concerns us, that, as the history of all religions tells us, for the
+forgiveness and acceptance of sinful men a pure sacrifice is needed;
+and that for teaching us the love of God, the hideousness and wages
+of sin, for our emancipation from evil, for the quieting of our
+consciences, for a foothold for faith, for an adequate motive of
+self-surrender and obedience, his sacrificial death is needful. The
+life and death of Jesus Christ, regarded as God's sacrifice for the
+world's sin, _does_ all this. The life and death of Jesus
+Christ, regarded in any other aspect, does not do this. Historically
+speaking, mutilated forms of Christianity, which have not known what
+to do with the Cross of Christ, have lost their constraining,
+purifying, and aggressive power. For us sinful men, if we are to be
+delivered from evil and become sons of God, He _must_ suffer
+many things, and be killed, and rise again the third day.
+
+III. Now note further, how we have here also our Lord's willing
+acceptance of the necessity.
+
+It is one thing to recognise, and another thing to accept, a needs-be.
+This 'must' was no unwelcome obligation laid upon Him against His will,
+but one to which His whole nature responded and which He accepted. No
+doubt there was in Him the innocent instinctive physical shrinking
+from death. No doubt the Cross, in so far, was pain and suffering. No
+doubt we are to trace the reality of a temptation in Peter's rash words
+which follow, as indicated to us by the severity and almost vehemence
+of the action with which Christ puts it away. No doubt there is a
+profound meaning in that answer of His, 'Thou art a _stumbling-block_
+to Me.' The 'Rock' is turned into a stone of stumbling, and Peter's
+suggestion appeals to something in Him which responded to it.
+
+That shrinking might be a shrinking of nature, but it was not a
+recoil of will. The ship may toss in dreadful billows, but the
+needle points to the pole. The train may rock upon the line, but it
+never leaves the rails. Christ felt that the Cross was an evil, but
+that feeling never made Him falter in His determination to bear it.
+His willing acceptance of the necessity was owing to His full
+resolve to save the world. He must die because He would redeem, and
+He would redeem because He could not but love. 'He saved others,'
+and therefore 'Himself He cannot save.' So the 'must' was not an
+iron chain that fastened Him to His Cross. Like some of the heroic
+martyrs of old, who refused to be bound to the funeral pile, He
+stood there chained to it by nothing but His own will and loving
+purpose to save the world.
+
+And, brethren, in that loving purpose, each of us may be sure that
+we had an individual and a personal share. Whatever the interaction
+between the divinity and the humanity, this at all events is
+certain, that every soul of man has his distinct and definite place
+in Christ's knowledge and in Christ's love. Each of us all may be
+sure that one strand of the cords of love which fastened Him to the
+Cross was His love for me; and each of us may say--He must die,
+because 'He loved me, and gave Himself for me.'
+
+IV. Lastly, notice here our Lord's teaching the necessity of His
+death.
+
+This announcement was preceded, as I remarked, by that conversation
+which led to the crystallising of the half-formed convictions of the
+apostles in a definite creed, 'Thou art the Christ, the Son of the
+living God.' But that was not all that they needed to know and
+believe and trust to. That was the first volume of their lesson-book.
+The second volume was this, that 'Christ must suffer.' And so let us
+learn the central place which the Cross holds in Christ's teaching.
+They tell us that the doctrine of Christ as the Sacrifice for the
+world is not in the Gospels. Where are the eyes that read the Gospels
+and do not see it? The theory of it is not there; the announcements
+of it are. And in this latest section of our Lord's ministry, they
+are fuller and more frequent than in the earlier, for the plain
+reason which is implied by the preparation through which He passed
+these disciples, ere He ventured to communicate the mournful and the
+bewildering fact. There must be, first, the grasp of His Messiahship,
+and some recognition that He is the Son of God, ere it is possible
+to go on to speak of the Cross, the full message concerning which
+could not be spoken until after the Resurrection and the Ascension.
+
+But note, you do not understand Christ's Cross unless you bring to
+it the faith in Christ's Messiahship and the belief in some measure
+that He is the Son of God. Neither the pathos nor the power of His
+death is intelligible if it be simply like other deaths--the dying
+of a man who is born subject to the law of mortality, and who yields
+to it by natural process. Unless you and I take upon our lips,
+though with far deeper meaning, the words with which the heathen
+centurion gazed upon the dying Christ, and say, 'Truly this was the
+Son of God!' His Cross is common and trivial and insignificant; but
+if we can thus speak, then it stands before us as the crown of all
+God's manifestations in the world,' the wisdom of God and the power
+of God.'
+
+And then note, still further, how, without the Cross, these other
+truths are not the whole gospel. There were disciples then, as there
+have been disciples since, and as there are to-day, who were willing
+to accept, 'Thou art the Christ'; and willing in some sense to say
+'Thou art the Son of God,' but stumbled when He said, 'The Son of
+Man must suffer.' Brethren, I venture to urge that the gospel of the
+Incarnation, precious as it is, is not the whole gospel, and that
+the full-orbed truth about Jesus Christ is that He is the Christ,
+and that He died for our sins, and rose again to live for ever, our
+Priest and King.
+
+We need a whole Christ. For our soul's salvation, for the quieting
+of our consciences, the forgiveness of our sins, for new life, for
+peace, purity, obedience, love, joy, hope, our faith must grasp
+'Christ, and Him crucified.' A half Christ is no Christ, and unless
+we have as sinful men laid hold of the one Sacrifice for sins for
+ever, which He offered, we do not understand even the preciousness
+of the half Christ whom we perceive, nor know the full beauty of His
+example, the depth of His teaching, nor the tenderness of His heart.
+
+I beseech you, ask yourselves, _What_ Christ can do for me the
+things which I need to have done, except 'the Christ that died, yea,
+rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God,
+who also maketh intercession for us'?
+
+
+
+
+THE KING IN HIS BEAUTY
+
+
+    'And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John
+    his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain
+    apart, 2. And was transfigured before them: and His
+    face did shine as the sun, and His raiment was white as
+    the light. 3. And, behold, there appeared unto them
+    Moses and Elias talking with Him. 4. Then answered
+    Peter, and said unto Jesus. Lord, it is good for us
+    to be here: if Thou wilt, let us make here three
+    tabernacles; one for Thee, and one for Moses, and one
+    for Elias. 5. While he yet spake, behold, a bright
+    cloud overshadowed them: and behold a voice out of the
+    cloud, which said, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am
+    well pleased; hear ye Him. 6. And when the disciples
+    heard it, they fell on their face, and were sore afraid.
+    7. And Jesus came and touched them, and said, Arise,
+    and be not afraid. 8. And when they had lifted up their
+    eyes, they saw no man, save Jesus only. 9. And as they
+    came down from the mountain, Jesus charged them, saying,
+    Tell the vision to no man, until the Son of Man be risen
+    again from the dead. 10. And His disciples asked Him,
+    saying, Why then say the scribes that Elias must first
+    come? 11. And Jesus answered and said unto them, Elias
+    truly shall first come, and restore all things. 12. But
+    I say unto you, That Elias is come already, and they
+    knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they
+    listed. Likewise shall also the Son of Man suffer of
+    them. 13. Then the disciples understood that He spake
+    unto them of John the Baptist.'--MATT. xvii. 1-13.
+
+The early guess at Tabor as the scene of the Transfiguration must be
+given up as untenable. Some one of the many peaks of Hermon rising
+right over Caesarea is a far more likely place. But the silence of
+all the accounts as to the locality surely teaches us the
+unimportance of knowledge on the point. The dangers of knowing would
+more than outweigh the advantages. A similar indefiniteness attaches
+to the _when_. Are we to think of it as occurring by night, or
+by day? Perhaps the former is slightly the more probable, from the
+fact of the descent being made 'the next day' (Luke). Our conception
+of the scene will be very different, as we think of that lustre from
+His face, and that bright cloud, as outshining the blaze of a Syrian
+sun, or as filling the night with glory. But we cannot settle which
+view is correct.
+
+There are three distinct parts in the whole incident: the
+Transfiguration proper; the appearance of Moses and Elijah; and the
+cloud with the voice from it.
+
+I. The Transfiguration proper.
+
+The general statement that Jesus 'was transfigured before them' is
+immediately followed out into explanatory details. These are
+twofold--the radiance of His face, and the gleaming whiteness of His
+raiment, which shone like the snow on Hermon when it is smitten by
+the sunshine. Probably we are to think of the whole body as giving
+forth the same mysterious light, which made itself visible even
+through the white robe He wore. This would give beautiful accuracy and
+appropriateness to the distinction drawn in the two metaphors,--that
+His face was 'as the sun,' in which the undiluted glory was seen; and
+His garments 'as the light,' which is sunshine diffused and weakened.
+There is no hint of any external source of the brightness. It does not
+seem to have been a reflection from the visible symbol of the divine
+presence, as was the fading radiance on the face of Moses. That symbol
+does not come into view till the last stage of the incident. We are
+then to think of the brightness as rising from within, not cast from
+without. We cannot tell whether it was voluntary or involuntary. Luke
+gives a pregnant hint, in connecting it with Christ's praying, as if
+the calm ecstasy of communion with the Father brought to the surface
+the hidden glory of the Son. Can it be that such glory always
+accompanied His prayers, and that its presence may have been one
+reason for the sedulous privacy of these, except on this one occasion,
+when He desired that His faithful three should be 'eye-witnesses of
+His majesty'? However that may be, we have probably to regard the
+Transfiguration as the transient making visible, in the natural,
+symbolic form of light, of the indwelling divine glory, which dwelt
+in Him as in a shrine, and then shone through the veil of His flesh.
+John explains the event, though His words go far beyond it, when he
+says, 'We beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the
+Father.'
+
+What was the purpose of the Transfiguration? Matthew seems to tell
+us in that 'before them.' It was for their sakes, not for His, as
+indeed follows from the belief that it was the irradiation from
+within of the indwelling light. The new epoch of His life, in which
+they were to have a share of trial and cross-bearing, needed some
+great encouragement poured into their tremulous hearts; and so, for
+once, He deigned to let them look on His face shining as the sun,
+for a remembrance when they saw it covered with 'shame and spitting'
+and His brow bleeding from the thorns. But perhaps we may venture a
+step farther, and see here some prophecy of that body of His glory
+in which He now reigns. Speculations as to the difference between
+the earthly body of our Lord and ours are fascinating but
+unsubstantial. It was a true human body, susceptible of hunger,
+pain, weariness; but we are not taught that it carried in it the
+necessity of death. It may have been more pliable to the spirit's
+behests, and more transparent to its light, than ours. There may
+have been in that hour of radiance some approximation to the perfect
+harmony between the perfect spirit and the body, which is its fit
+organ, which we know is His now, and to which we also know that He
+will conform the body of our humiliation. Then His face 'shone as
+the sun'; when one of these three saw Him in His glory, 'His
+countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength'; and His own
+promise to us is that we too 'shall shine forth as the sun.' Then
+His garments were white as the light; His promise is that they who
+are worthy shall 'walk with Him in white.' The Transfiguration was a
+revelation and a prophecy.
+
+II. The appearance of Moses and Elijah.
+
+While the three are gazing with dazzled eyes, suddenly, as if shaped
+out of air, there stand by Jesus two mighty forms, evidently men,
+and yet, according to Luke, encompassed in the white radiance,
+walking with the Son of Man in a better furnace. What a stound of
+awe and wonder must have touched the gazers as the conviction who
+these were filled their minds, and they recognised, we know not how,
+the mighty lineaments of the lawgiver and the prophet! Did the three
+mortals understand the meaning of the words of the heavenly three?
+We cannot tell. Nor does Matthew tell us what was the theme of that
+wondrous colloquy. These two might have asked, 'Why hast Thou
+disquieted us to bring us up?' What is the answer? Wherefore were
+they there? To tell Jesus that He was to die? No, for that lay plain
+before Him. To learn from Him the mystery of His passion, that they
+might be His heralds, the one in Paradise, the other in the pale
+kingdoms of Hades? Perhaps, but, more probably, they came to
+minister to Him strength for His conflict, even as women did of
+their substance, and an angel did in Gethsemane. Perhaps the
+strength came to Jesus from seeing how they yearned for the
+fulfilment of the typified redemption; perhaps it came from His
+being able to speak to them as He could not to any on earth. At all
+events, surely Moses and Elijah were not brought there for their own
+sakes alone, nor for the sake of the witnesses, but also for His
+sake who was prepared by that converse for His cross.
+
+Further, their appearance set forth Christ's death, which was their
+theme, as the climax of revelation. The Law with its requirement and
+its sacrifices, and Prophecy with its forward-looking gaze, stand
+there, in their representatives, and bear witness that their
+converging lines meet in Jesus. The finger that wrote the law, and
+the finger that smote and parted Jordan, are each lifted to point to
+Him. The stern voices that spoke the commandments and that hurled
+threatenings at the unworthy occupants of David's throne, both
+proclaim, 'Behold the Lamb of God, the perfect Fulfiller of law, the
+true King of Israel.' Their presence and their speech were the
+acknowledgment that this was He whom they had seen from afar; their
+disappearance proclaims that their work is done when they have
+pointed to Him.
+
+Their presence also teaches us that Jesus is the life of all the
+living dead. Of course, care must be exercised in drawing dogmatic
+conclusions from a manifestly abnormal incident, but some plain
+truths do result from it. Of these two, one had died, though mystery
+hung round his death and burial; the other had passed into the
+heavens by another gate than that of death; and here they both stand
+with lives undiminished by their mysterious changes, in fulness of
+power and of consciousness, bathed in glory, which was as their
+native air now. They are witnesses of an immortal life, and proofs
+that His yet unpierced hands held the keys of life and death. He
+opened the gate which moves backwards to no hand but His, and
+summoned them; and they come, with no napkins about their heads, and
+no trailing grave-clothes entangling their feet, and own Him as the
+King of life.
+
+They speak too of the eager onward gaze which the Old Testament
+believers turned to the coming Deliverer. In silent anticipation,
+through all these centuries, good men had lain down to die, saying,
+'I wait for Thy salvation,' and after death their spirits had lived
+expectant and crying, like the souls under the altar, 'How long, O
+Lord, how long?' Now these two are brought from their hopeful
+repose, perchance to learn how near their deliverance was; and
+behind them we seem to discern a dim crowd of holy men and women,
+who had died in faith, not having received the promises, and who
+throng the portals of the unseen world, waiting for the near advent
+of the better Samson to bear away the gates to the city on the hill,
+and lead thither their ransomed train.
+
+Peter's bewildered words need not long detain us. He is half dazed,
+but, true to his rash nature, thinks that he must say something, and
+that to do something will relieve the tension of his spirit. His
+proposal, so ridiculous as it is, shows that he had not really
+understood what he saw. It also expresses his feeling that it is
+much better to be there than to be travelling to a cross--and so may
+stand as an instance of a very real temptation for us all, that of
+avoiding unwelcome duties and shrinking from rough work, on the plea
+of holding sweet communion with Jesus on the mountain. It was
+_not_ 'good' to stay there, and leave demoniacs uncured in the
+plain.
+
+III. The cloud and the witnessing voice.
+
+Peter's words receive no answer, for, while he is speaking, another
+solemn and silencing wonder has place. Suddenly a strange cloud
+forms in the cloudless sky. It is 'bright' with no reflection caught
+from the sun; it is borne along by no wind; slowly it settles down
+upon them, like a roof, and, bright though it is, casts a strange
+shadow. According to one reading of Luke's account, Christ and the
+two heavenly witnesses pass within its folds, leaving the disciples
+without, and that separation seems confirmed by Matthew's saying
+that the voice 'came out of the cloud.' Our evangelist points to its
+brightness as singular. It was not merely bright, as if smitten by
+the sunlight, but its whole substance was luminous. It is almost a
+contradiction to speak of a cloud of light, and the anomalous
+expression points to something beyond nature. We cannot but remember
+the pillar which had a heart of fire, and glowed in the darkness
+over the sleeping camp, and the cloud which filled the house, and
+drove the priests from the sanctuary by its brightness. Nor should
+we forget that at His Ascension Jesus was not lost to sight in the
+blue; but while He was yet visible in the act of blessing, 'a cloud
+received Him out of their sight.' It is, in fact, the familiar
+symbol of the divine presence, which had long been absent from the
+temple, and now reappears. We may note the beauty and felicity of
+the emblem. It blends light and darkness, so suggesting how the very
+same 'attributes' of God are both; and how His revelation of Himself
+reveals Him as unrevealable. The manifestation of His power is also
+the 'hiding of His power.' The inaccessible light is also thick
+darkness. The same characteristics of His nature are light and joy
+to some, and blackness and woe to others.
+
+We may note, too, Christ's passage into the cloud. Moses and Elijah,
+being purged from mortal weakness, could pass thither. But Jesus,
+alone of men, could pass in the flesh into that brightness, and be
+hid in its fiery heart, unshrinking and unconsumed. 'Who among us
+shall dwell with everlasting burnings? His entrance into it is but
+the witness to the purity of His nature, and the absence in Him of
+all fuel for fire. That bright cloud was 'His own calm home, His
+habitation from eternity,' and where no man, compassed with flesh
+and sin, could live, He enters as the Son into the bosom of the
+Father.
+
+Then comes the articulate witness to the Son. The solemnity and
+force of the attestation are increased, if we conceive of the
+disciples as outside the cloud, and parted from Jesus. This word is
+meant for them only, and so is distinguished from the similar voice
+at the baptism, and has added the imperative 'Hear him.' The voice
+bears witness to the mystery of our Lord's person. It points to the
+contrast between His two attendants and Him. They are servants,
+'this is the Son.' It sets forth His supernaturally born humanity,
+and, deeper still, His true and proper divinity, which John unfolds,
+in his Gospel, as the deepest meaning of the name. It testifies to
+the unbroken union of love between the Father and Him, and therein
+to the absolute perfection of our Lord's character. He is the
+adequate object of the eternal, divine love. As He has been from the
+timeless depths of old, He is, in His human life, the object of the
+ever-unruffled divine complacency, in whom the Father can glass
+Himself as in a pure mirror. It enjoins obedient listening. God's
+voice bids us hear Christ's voice. If He is the beloved Son,
+listening to Him is listening to God. This is the purpose of the
+whole, so far as we are concerned. We are to hear Him, when He
+declares God; when He witnesses of Himself, of His love, His work,
+His death, His judgeship; when He invites us to come to Him, and
+find rest; when He commands and when He promises. Amid the Babel of
+this day, let us listen to that voice, low and gentle, pleading and
+soft, authoritative, majestic, and sovereign. It will one day shake
+'not the earth only, but also the heaven.' But, as yet, it calls us
+with strange sweetness, and the music of love in every tone. Well
+for us if our hearts answer, 'Speak, Lord; for Thy servant heareth.'
+
+Matthew tells us that this voice from the cloud completely unmanned
+the disciples, who fell on their faces, and lay there, we know not
+how long, till Jesus came and laid a loving hand on them, bidding
+them arise, and not fear. So when they staggered to their feet, and
+looked around, they saw nothing but the grey stones of the hillside
+and the blue sky. 'That dread voice was past,' and the silence was
+broken only by the hum of insects or the twitter of a far-off bird.
+The strange guests have gone; the radiance has faded from the
+Master's face, and all is as it used to be. 'They saw no one, save
+Jesus only.' It is the summing up of revelation; all others vanish,
+He abides. It is the summing up of the world's history. Thickening
+folds of oblivion wrap the past, and all its mighty names become
+forgotten; but His figure stands out, solitary against the
+background of the past, as some great mountain, which travellers see
+long after the lower summits are sunk beneath the horizon. Let us
+make this the summing up of our lives. We can venture to take Him
+for our sole helper, pattern, love, and aim, because He, in His
+singleness, is enough for our hearts. There are many fragmentary
+precious things, but there is only one pearl of great price. And
+then this will be a prophecy of our deaths--a brief darkness, a
+passing dread, and then His touch and His voice saying, 'Arise, be
+not afraid.' So we shall lift up our eyes, and find earth faded, and
+its voices fallen dim, and see 'no one any more, save Jesus only.'
+
+
+
+
+THE SECRET OF POWER
+
+
+    'Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, Why
+    could not we cast him out? 20. And Jesus said unto them,
+    Because of your unbelief.'--MATT. xvii. 19, 20.
+
+'And when He had called unto Him His twelve disciples, He gave them
+power against unclean spirits to cast them out.' That same power was
+bestowed, too, on the wider circle of the seventy who returned again
+with joy, saying, 'Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through
+Thy name.' The ground of it was laid in the solemn words with which
+Christ met their wonder at their own strength, and told how He
+'beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.' Therefore had they
+triumphed, showing the fruits of their Master's victory; and
+therefore had He a right to renew the gift, in the still more
+comprehensive promise, 'I give unto you power--over all the power of
+the enemy.'
+
+What a commentary on such words this story affords! What has become
+of the disciples' supernatural might? Has it ebbed away as suddenly
+as it flowed? Is their Lord's endowment a shadow or His assurances
+delusion? Has He taken back what He gave? Not so. And yet His
+servants are ignominiously beaten. One poor devil-ridden boy brings
+all their resources to nothing. He stands before them writhing in
+the gripe of his tormentor, but they cannot set him free. The
+importunity of the father's prayers is vain, and the tension of
+expectancy in his eager face relaxes into the old hopeless languor
+as he slowly droops to the conviction that 'they could not cast him
+out.' The malicious scorn in the eyes of the Scribes, those hostile
+critics who 'knew that it would be so,' helps to produce the failure
+which they anticipated. The curious crowd buzz about them, and in
+the midst of it all stand the little knot of baffled disciples,
+possessors of power which seems to leave them when they need it
+most, with the unavailing spells dying half spoken on their lips,
+and their faint hearts longing that their Master would come down
+from the mount, and cover their weakness with His own great
+strength.
+
+No wonder that, as soon as Christ and they are alone, they wish to
+know how their mortifying defeat has come about. And they get an
+answer which they little expected, for the last place where men look
+for the explanation of their failures is within; but they will
+ascend into the heavens, and descend into the deeps for remote and
+recondite reasons, before they listen to the voice which says, 'The
+fault is nigh thee, in thy heart.' Christ's reply distinctly implies
+that the cause of their impotence lay wholly in themselves, not in
+any defect or withdrawal of power, but solely in that in them which
+grasped the power. They little expected, too, to be told that they
+had failed because they had not been sure they would succeed. They
+had thought that they believed in their ability to cast out the
+demon. They had tried to do so, with some kind of anticipation that
+they could. They had been surprised when they found that they could
+not. They had wonderingly asked why. And now Christ tells them that
+all along they had had no real faith in Him and in the reality of
+His gift. So subtly may unbelief steal into the heart, even while we
+fancy that we are working in faith. And a further portion of our
+Lord's reply points them to the great means by which this conquering
+faith can be maintained--namely, prayer and fasting. If, then, we
+put all these things together, we get a series of considerations,
+very simple and commonplace indeed, but all the better and truer
+therefor, which I venture to submit to you, as having a very
+important bearing on all our Christian work, and especially on the
+missionary work of the Church. The principles which the text
+suggests touch the perpetual possession of the power which conquers;
+the condition of its victorious exercise by us, as being our faith;
+the subtle danger of unsuspected unbelief to which we are exposed;
+and the great means of preserving our faith pure and strong. I ask
+your attention to a few considerations on these points in their
+order.
+
+But first, let me say very briefly, that I would not be understood
+as, by the selection of such a text, desiring to suggest that we
+have failed in our work. Thank God! we can point to results far, far
+greater than we have deserved, far greater than we have expected,
+however they may be beneath our desires, and still further below
+what the gospel was meant to accomplish. It may suit observers who
+have never done anything themselves, and have not particularly clear
+eyes for appreciating spiritual work, to talk of Christian missions
+as failures; but it would ill become us to assent to the lie.
+Failures indeed! with half a million of converts, with new forms of
+Christian life budding in all the wilderness of the peoples, with
+the consciousness of coming doom creeping about the heart of every
+system of idolatry! Is the green life in the hedges and in the sweet
+pastures starred with rathe primroses, and in the hidden copses blue
+with hyacinths, a failure, because the east wind bites shrewdly, and
+'the tender ash delays to clothe herself with green'? No! no, we
+have not failed. Enough has been done to vindicate the enterprise,
+more than enough to fill our lips with thanksgiving, enough to
+entitle us to say to all would-be critics--Do you the same with your
+enchantments. But, on the other hand, we have to confess that the
+success has been slow and small, chequered and interrupted, that
+often we have been foiled, that we have confronted many a demon whom
+we could not cast out, and that at home and abroad the masses of
+evil seem to close in around us, and we make but little impression
+on their serried ranks. We have had success enough to assure us that
+we possess the treasure, and failures enough to make us feel how
+weak are the earthen vessels which hold it.
+
+And now let us turn to the principles which flow from this text.
+
+I. We have an unvarying power.
+
+No doubt the explanation of their defeat which most naturally suggested
+itself to these disciples would be that somehow or other--perhaps
+because of Christ's absence--they had lost the gift which they knew
+that they once had. And the same way of accounting for later want of
+success lingers among Christian people still. You will sometimes hear
+it said: 'God sends forth His Spirit in special fulness at special
+times, according to His own sovereign will; and till then we can only
+wait and pray.' Or, 'The miraculous powers which dwelt in the early
+Church have been withdrawn, and therefore the progress is slow.' The
+strong imaginative tendency to make an ideal perfect in the past
+leads us to think of the primitive age of the Church as golden, in
+opposition to the plain facts of the case. We fancy that because
+apostles were its teachers, and the Cross within its memory, the
+infant society was stronger, wiser, better than any age since, and had
+gifts which we have lost. What had it which we do not possess? The
+power of working miracles. What have we which it did not possess? A
+completed Bible, and the experience of nineteen centuries to teach us
+to understand it, and to confirm by facts our confidence that Christ's
+gospel is for all time and every land. What have we in common with it?
+The same mission to fulfil, the same wants in our brethren to meet, the
+same gospel, the same spirit, the same immortal Lord. All that any age
+has possessed to fit it for the task of witnessing for Christ we too
+possess. The Church has in it a power which is ever adequate to the
+conquest of the world; and that power is constant through all time,
+whether we consider it as recorded in an unvarying gospel, or as
+energised by an abiding spirit, or as flowing from and centred in an
+unchangeable Lord.
+
+We have a gospel which never can grow old. Its adaptation to the
+deepest needs of men's souls remains constant with these needs.
+These vary not from age to age. No matter what may be the superficial
+differences of dress, the same human heart beats beneath every robe.
+The great primal wants of men's spirits abide, as the great primal
+wants of their bodily life abide. Food and shelter for the one,--a
+loving, pardoning God, to know and love, for the other--else they
+perish. Wherever men go they carry with them a conscience which needs
+cleansing, a sense of separation from God joined with a dim knowledge
+that union with Him is life, a will which is burdened with its own
+selfhood, an imagination which paints the misty walls of this earthly
+prison with awful shapes that terrify and faint hopes that mock, a
+heart that hungers for love, and a reason which pines in atrophy
+without light. And all these the gospel which is lodged in our hands
+meets. It addresses itself to nothing in men that is not in man.
+Surface differences of position, culture, clime, age, and the like,
+it brushes aside as unimportant, and it goes straight to the universal
+wants. People tell us it has done its work, and much confident dogmatism
+proclaims that the world has outgrown it. We have a right to be
+confident also, with a confidence born of our knowledge, that it has
+met and satisfied for us the wants which are ours and every man's, and
+to believe that as long as men live by bread, so long will this word
+which proceedeth out of the mouth of God be the food of their souls.
+Areopagus and Piccadilly, Benares and Oxford, need the same message
+and will find the same response to all their wants in the same word.
+
+Many of the institutions in which Christendom has embodied its
+conceptions of God's truth will crumble away. Many of the
+conceptions will have to be modified, neglected truths will grow, to
+the dislocation of much systematic theology, and the Word better
+understood will clear away many a portentous error with which the
+Church has darkened the Word. Be it so. Let us be glad when 'the
+things which can be shaken are removed,' like mean huts built
+against the wall of some cathedral, masking and marring the
+completeness of its beauty; 'that the things which cannot be shaken
+may remain,' and all the clustered shafts, and deep-arched recesses,
+and sweet tracery may stand forth freed from the excrescences which
+hid them.
+
+'The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away. But the
+word of the Lord endureth for ever.'
+
+We have an abiding Spirit, the Giver to us of a power without
+variableness or the shadow of turning, 'I will pray the Father, and
+He shall give you another Paraclete, that He may abide with you for
+ever.' The manner of His operations may vary, but the reality of His
+energy abides. The 'works' of wonder which Jesus did on earth may no
+more be done, but the greater works than these are still the sign of
+_His_ presence, without whom no spiritual life is possible.
+Prophecies may fail, tongues may cease, but the more excellent gifts
+are poured out now as richly as ever. We are apt to look back to
+Pentecost and think that that marked a height to which the tide has
+never reached since, and therefore we are stranded amidst the ooze
+and mud. But the river which proceeds from the throne of God and of
+the Lamb is not like one of our streams on earth, that leaps to the
+light and dashes rejoicingly down the hillside, but creeps along
+sluggish in its level course, and dies away at last in the sands. It
+pours along the ages the same full volume with which it gushed forth
+at first. Rather, the source goes with the Church in all ages, and
+we drink not of water that came forth long ago in the history of the
+world, and has reached us through the centuries, but of that which
+wells out fresh every moment from the Rock that follows us. The
+Giver of all power is with us.
+
+We have a Lord, the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever. 'Lo, I
+am with you alway, even to the end of the world.' We have not merely
+to look back to the life and death of Christ in history, and
+recognise there the work, the efficacy of which shall endure for
+ever. But whilst we do this, we have also to think of the Christ
+'that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also
+maketh intercession for us.' And the one thought, as the other,
+should strengthen our confidence in our possession of all the might
+that we need for bringing the world back to our Lord.
+
+A work in the past which can never be exhausted or lose its power is
+the theme of our message. The mists of gathering ages wrap in slowly
+thickening folds of forgetfulness all other men and events in
+history, and make them ghostlike and shadowy; but no distance has
+yet dimmed or will ever dim that human form divine. Other names are
+like those stars that blaze out for a while, and then smoulder down
+into almost complete invisibility; but He is the very Light itself,
+that burns and is not consumed. Other landmarks sink below the
+horizon as the tribes of men pursue their solemn march through the
+centuries, but the Cross on Calvary 'shall stand for an ensign of
+the people, and to it shall the Gentiles seek.' To proclaim that
+accomplished salvation, once for all lodged in the heart of the
+world's history, and henceforth for ever valid, is our unalterable
+duty. The message carries in itself its own immortal strength.
+
+A living Saviour in the present, who works with us, confirming the
+word with signs following, is the source of our power. Not till He is
+impotent shall we be weak. The unmeasurable measure of the gift of
+Christ defines the degree, and the unending duration of His life who
+continueth for ever sets the period, of our possession of the grace
+which is given to every one of us. He is ever bestowing. He never
+withdraws what He once gives. The fountain sinks not a hairs-breadth,
+though nineteen centuries have drawn from it. Modern astronomy begins
+to believe that the sun itself by long expense of light will be shorn
+of its beams and wander darkling in space, circled no more by its
+daughter planets. But this Sun of our souls rays out for ever the
+energies of life and light and love, and after all communication
+possesses the infinite fulness of them all. 'His name shall be
+continued as long as the sun; all nations shall call Him blessed.'
+
+Here then, brethren, are the perpetual elements of our constant
+power, an eternal Word, an abiding Spirit, an unchanging Lord.
+
+II. The condition of exercising this power is Faith.
+
+With such a force at our command--a force that could shake the
+mountains and break the rocks--how come we ever to fail? So the
+disciples asked, and Christ's answer cuts to the very heart of the
+matter. Why could you not cast him out? For one reason only, because
+you had lost your hold of My strength, and therefore had lost your
+confidence in your own derived power, or had forgotten that it was
+derived, and essayed to wield it as if it were your own. You did not
+trust Me, so you did not believe that you could cast him out; or you
+believed that you could by your own might, therefore you failed. He
+throws them back decisively on themselves as solely responsible.
+Nowhere else, in heaven or in earth or hell, but only in us, does
+the reason lie for our breakdown, if we have broken down. Not in
+God, who is ever with us, ready to make all grace abound in us,
+whose will is that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge
+of the truth; not in the gospel which we preach, for 'it is the
+power of God unto salvation'; not in the demon might which has
+overcome us, for 'greater is He that is in us than he that is in the
+world.' We are driven from all other explanations to the bitterest
+and yet the most hopeful of all, that we only are to blame.
+
+And what in us is to blame? Some of us will answer--Our modes of
+working; they have not been free enough, or not orderly enough, or
+in some way or other not wisely adapted to our ends. Some will
+answer--Our forms of presenting the truth; they have not been
+flexible enough, or not fixed enough; they have been too much a
+reproduction of the old; they have been too licentious a departure
+from the old. Some will answer--Our ecclesiastical arrangements;
+they have been too democratic; they have been too priestly. Some
+will answer--Our intellectual culture; it has been too great,
+obscuring the simplicity that is in Christ; it has been too small,
+sending poorly furnished men into the field to fight with ordered
+systems of idolatry which rest upon a philosophical basis, and can
+only be overturned by undermining that. It is no part of my present
+duty to discuss these varying answers. No doubt there is room for
+improvement in all the fields which they indicate. But does not the
+spirit of our Lord's words here beckon us away from these purely
+secondary subjects to fix our self-examination on the depth and
+strength of our faith, as incomparably the most important element in
+the conditions which determine our success or our failure? I do not
+undervalue the worth of wise methods of action, but the history of
+the Church tells us that pretty nearly any methods of action are
+fruitful in the right hands, and that without living faith the best
+of them become like the heavy armour which half-smothered a feeble
+man. I do not pretend to that sublime indifference to dogma which is
+the modern form of supreme devotion to truth, but experience has
+taught us that wherever the name of Christ, as the Saviour of the
+world, has been lovingly proclaimed, there devils have been cast
+out, whatever private and sectional doctrines the exerciser has
+added to it. I do not disparage organisation, but courage is more
+than drill; and there is such a thing as the very perfection of
+arrangement without life, like cabinets in a museum, where all the
+specimens are duly classified, and dead. I believe, with the old
+preacher, that if God does not need our learning, He needs our
+ignorance still less, but it is of comparatively little importance
+whether the draught of living water be brought to thirsty lips in an
+earthen cup or a golden vase.
+
+  'The main thing is, does it hold good measure?
+   Heaven soon sets right all other matters.'
+
+And therefore, while leaving full scope for all improvements in
+these subordinate conditions, let me urge upon you that the main
+thing which makes us strong for our Christian work is the grasp of
+living faith, which holds fast the strength of God. There is no need
+to plunge into the jungle of metaphysical theology here. Is it not a
+fact that the might with which the power of God has wrought for
+men's salvation has corresponded with the strength of the Church's
+desire and the purity of its trust in His power? Is it not a truth
+plainly spoken in Scripture and confirmed by experience, that we
+have the awful prerogative of limiting the Holy One of Israel, and
+quenching the Spirit? Was there not a time in Christ's life on earth
+when He could do no mighty works because of their unbelief? We
+receive all spiritual gifts in proportion to our capacity, and the
+chief factor in settling the measure of our capacity is our faith.
+Here on the one hand is the boundless ocean of the divine strength,
+unfathomable in its depth, full after all draughts, tideless and
+calm, in all its movement never troubled, in all its repose never
+stagnating; and on the other side is the empty aridity of our poor
+weak natures. Faith opens these to the influx of that great sea, and
+'according to our faith,' in the exact measure of our receptivity,
+does it enter our hearts. In itself the gift is boundless. It has no
+limit except the infinite fulness of the power which worketh in us.
+But in reference to our possession it is bounded by our capacity,
+and though that capacity enlarges by the very fact of being filled,
+and so every moment becomes greater through fruition, yet at each
+moment it is the measure of our possession, and our faith is the
+measure of our capacity. Our power is God's power in us, and our
+faith is the power with which we grasp God's power and make it ours.
+So then, in regard to God, our faith is the condition of our being
+strengthened with might by His Spirit.
+
+Consider, too, how the same faith has a natural operation on ourselves
+which tends to fit us for casting out the evil spirits. Given a man
+full of faith, you will have a man tenacious in purpose, absorbed in
+one grand object, simple in his motives, in whom selfishness has been
+driven out by the power of a mightier love, and indolence stirred into
+unwearied energy. Such a man will be made wise to devise, gentle to
+attract, bold to rebuke, fertile in expedients, and ready to be
+anything that may help the aim of his life. Fear will be dead in him,
+for faith is the true anaesthesia of the soul; and the knife may cut
+into the quivering flesh, and the spirit be scarce conscious of a pang.
+Love, ambition, and all the swarm of distracting desires will be
+driven from the soul in which the lamp of faith burns bright. Ordinary
+human motives will appeal in vain to the ears which have heard the
+tones of the heavenly music, and all the pomps of life will show poor
+and tawdry to the sight that has gazed on the vision of the great
+white throne and the crystal sea. The most ignorant and erroneous
+'religious sentiment'--to use a modern phrase--is mightier than all
+other forces in the world's history. It is like some of those terrible
+compounds of modern chemistry, an inert, innocuous-looking drop of
+liquid. Shake it, and it flames heaven high, shattering the rocks and
+ploughing up the soil. Put even an adulterated and carnalised faith
+into the hearts of a mob of wild Arabs, and in a century they will
+stream from their deserts, and blaze from the mountains of Spain to
+the plains of Bengal. Put a living faith in Christ and a heroic
+confidence in the power of His Gospel to reclaim the worst sinners
+into a man's heart, and he will out of weakness be made strong, and
+plough his way through obstacles with the compact force and crashing
+directness of lightning. There have been men of all sorts who have
+been honoured to do much in this world for Christ. Wise and foolish,
+learned and ignorant, differing in tone, temper, creed, forms of
+thought, and manner of working, in every conceivable degree; but one
+thing, and perhaps one thing only, they have all had--a passion of
+enthusiastic personal devotion to their Lord, a profound and living
+faith in Him and in His salvation. All in which they differed is but
+the gay gilding on the soldier's coat. That in which they were alike
+is as the strong arm which grasps the sword, and has its muscles
+braced by the very clutch. Faith is itself a source of strength, as
+well as the condition of drawing might from heaven.
+
+Consider, too, how faith has power over men who see it. The
+exhibition of our own personal convictions has more to do in
+spreading them than all the arguments which we use. There is a
+magnetism and a contagious energy in the sight of a brother's faith
+which few men can wholly resist. If you wish me to weep, your own
+tears must flow; and if you would have me believe, let me see your
+soul heaving under the emotion which you desire me to feel. The
+arrow may be keen and true, the shaft rounded and straight, the bow
+strong, and the arm sinewy; but unless the steel be winged it will
+fall to the ground long before it strikes the butt. Your arrows must
+be winged with faith, else orthodoxy, and wise arrangements, and
+force and zeal, will avail nothing. No man will believe in, and no
+demon will obey, spells which the would-be exorcist only half
+believes himself. Even if he speak the name of Christ, unless he
+speak it with unfaltering confidence, all the answer he will get
+will only be the fierce and taunting question, 'Jesus I know, and
+Paul I know, but who are ye?' Brethren, let us give heed to the
+solemn rebuke which our Master lovingly reads to us in these words,
+and while we aim at the utmost possible perfection in all
+subordinate matters, let us remember that they all without faith are
+weak, as an empty suit of armour with no life beneath the corselet;
+and that faith without them all is strong, like the knight of old,
+who rode into the bloody field in simple silken vest, and conquered.
+That which determines our success or failure in the work of our Lord
+is our faith.
+
+III. Our faith is ever threatened by subtle unbelief.
+
+It would appear that the disciples were ignorant of the unbelief
+that had made them weak. They fancied that they had confidence in
+their Christ-given power, and they certainly had in some dull kind
+of fashion expected to succeed in their attempt. But He who sees the
+heart knew that there was no real living confidence in their souls;
+and His words are a solemn warning to us all, of how possible it is
+for us to have our faith all honeycombed by gnawing doubt while we
+suspect it not, like some piece of wood apparently sound, the whole
+substance of which has been eaten away by hidden worms. We may be
+going on with Christian work, and may even be looking for spiritual
+results. We may fancy ourselves faithful stewards of the gospel, and
+all the while there may be an utter absence of the one thing which
+makes our words more than so much wind whistling through an archway.
+The shorn Samson went out 'to shake himself as at other times,' and
+knew not that the Spirit of the Lord had departed from him. Who
+among us is not exposed to the assaults of that pestilence that
+walketh in darkness? and, alas! who among us can say that he has
+repelled the contagion? Subtly it creeps over us all, the stealthy
+intangible vapour, unfelt till it has quenched the lamp which alone
+lights the darkness of the mine, and clogged to suffocation the
+labouring lungs.
+
+I will not now speak of the general sources of danger to our faith,
+which are always in operation with a retarding force as constant as
+friction, as certain as the gravitation which pulls the pendulum to
+rest at its lowest point. But I may very briefly particularise two
+of the enemies of that faith, which have a special bearing on our
+missionary work, and may be illustrated from the narrative before
+us.
+
+First, all our activity in spreading the Gospel, whether by personal
+effort or by our gifts, like every form of outward action, tends to
+become mechanical, and to lose its connection with the motive which
+originated it. Of course it is also true, on the other side, that
+all outward action also tends to strengthen the motive from which it
+flows. But our Christian work will not do so, unless it be carefully
+watched, and pains be taken to keep it from slipping off its
+original foundation, and so altering its whole character. We may
+very easily become so occupied with the mere external occupation as
+to be quite unconscious that it has ceased to be faithful work, and
+has become routine, dull mechanism, or the result of confidence, not
+in Christ, whose power once flowed through us, but in ourselves the
+doers. So these disciples may have thought, 'We can cast out this
+devil, for we have done the like already,' and have forgotten that
+it was not they, but Christ in them, who had done it.
+
+How widely this foe to our faith operates amid the multiplied
+activities of this busy age, one trembles to think. We see all
+around us a Church toiling with unexampled expenditure of wealth,
+and effort, and time. It is difficult to repress the suspicion that
+the work is out of proportion to the life. Ah, brethren, how much of
+all this energy of effort, so admirable in many respects, will He
+whose fan is in His hand accept as true service--how much of it will
+be wheat for the garner, how much chaff for the fire? It is not for
+us to divide between the two, but it is for us to remember that it
+is not impossible to make of our labours the most dangerous enemy to
+the depth of our still life hidden with Christ in God, and that
+every deed of apparent service which is not the real issue of living
+faith is powerless for good to others, and heavy with hurt to
+ourselves. Brethren and fathers in the ministry! how many of us know
+what it is to talk and toil away our early devotion; and all at once
+to discover that for years perhaps we have been preaching and
+labouring from mere habit and routine, like corpses galvanised into
+some ghastly and transient caricature of life. Christian men and
+women, beware lest this great enterprise of missions, which our
+fathers began from the holiest motives and in the simplest faith,
+should in our hand be wrenched away from its only true basis, and be
+done with languid expectation and more languid desires of success,
+from no higher motive than that we found it in existence, and have
+become accustomed to carry it on. If that be our reason, then we
+harm ourselves, and mask from our own sight our own unbelief. If
+that be the case the work may go on for a while, like a clock
+ticking with fainter and fainter beats for a minute after it has run
+down; but it will soon cease, and neither heaven nor earth will be
+much the poorer for its ending.
+
+Again, the atmosphere of scornful disbelief which surrounded the
+disciples made their faith falter. It was too weak to sustain itself
+in the face of the consciousness that not a man in all that crowd
+believed in their power; and it melted away before the contempt of
+the scribes and the incredulous curiosity of the bystanders, without
+any reason except the subtle influence which the opinions and
+characters of those around us have on us all.
+
+And, brethren, are not we in danger to-day of losing the firmness of
+our grasp on Christ, as our Saviour and the world's, from a
+precisely similar cause? We live in an atmosphere of hesitancy and
+doubt, of scornful rejection of His claims, of contemptuous
+disbelief in anything which a scalpel cannot cut. We cannot but be
+conscious that to hold by Jesus Christ as the Incarnate God, the
+supernatural Beginning of a new life, the sole Hope of the world, is
+to expose ourselves to the contempt of so-called advanced and
+liberal thinkers, and to be out of harmony with the prevailing set
+of opinions. The current of educated thought runs strongly against
+such beliefs, and I suppose that every thoughtful man among us feels
+that a great danger to our faith to-day comes from the force with
+which that current swings us round, and threatens to make some of us
+drag our anchors, and drift, and strike and go to pieces on the
+sands. For one man who is led by the sheer force of reason to yield
+to the intellectual grounds on which modern unbelief reposes, there
+are twenty who simply catch the infection in the atmosphere. They
+find that their early convictions have evaporated, they know not
+how; only that once the fleece was wet with dew and now it is dry.
+For unbelief has a contagious energy wholly independent of reason,
+no less than has faith, and affects multitudes who know nothing of
+its grounds, as the iceberg chills the summer air for leagues, and
+makes the sailors shiver long before they see its barren peaks.
+
+Therefore, brethren, let us all take heed to ourselves, lest we
+suffer our grasp of our dear Lord's hand to relax for no better
+reason than because so many have left His side. To us all His
+pleading love, which knows how much we are moulded by the example of
+others, is saying, in view of the fashion of unbelief, 'Will ye also
+go away?' Let us answer, with a clasp that clings the tighter for
+our danger of being sucked in by the strong current, 'Lord, to whom
+shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.' We cannot help
+seeing that the creeping paralysis of hesitancy and doubt about even
+the power of Christ's name is stealing over portions of the Church,
+and stiffening the arm of its activity. Lips that once spoke with
+full confidence the words that cast out devils, mutter them now
+languidly with half-belief. Hearts that were once full of sympathy
+with the great purpose for which Christ died are growing cold to the
+work of preaching the Gospel to the heathen, because they are
+growing to doubt whether, after all, there is any Gospel at all.
+This icy breath, dear brethren, is blowing over our Churches and
+over our hearts. And wherever it reaches, there labour for Jesus and
+for men languishes, and we recoil baffled with unavailing exorcisms
+dying in our throats, and the rod of our power broken in our hands.
+'Why could not we cast him out? Because of your unbelief.'
+
+IV. Our faith can only be maintained by constant devotion and rigid
+self-denial.
+
+I can touch but very lightly on that solemn thought in which our Lord
+sets forth the condition of our faith, and therefore of our power.
+This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting. The discipline
+then which nurtures faith is mainly moral and spiritual--not as a
+substitute for, or to the exclusion of, the intellectual discipline,
+which is presupposed, not neglected, in these words.
+
+The first condition of the freshness and energy of faith is constant
+devotion. The attrition of the world wears it thin, the distractions
+of life draw it from its clinging hold on Christ, the very toil for
+Him is apt to entice our thoughts from out of the secret place of
+the most High into the busy arena of our strife. Therefore we have
+ever need to refresh the drooping flowers of the chaplet by bathing
+them in the Fountain of Life, to rise above all the fevered toil of
+earth to the calm heights where God dwells, and in still communion
+with Him to replenish our emptied vessels and fill our dimly burning
+lamps with His golden oil. The sister of the cumbered Martha is the
+contemplative Mary, who sits in silence at the Master's feet and
+lets His words sink into her soul; the closest friend of Peter the
+apostle of action is John the apostle of love. If our work is to be
+worthy, it must ever be freshened anew by our gaze into His face; if
+our communion with Him is to be deep, it must never be parted from
+outward service. Our Master has left us the example, in that, when
+the night fell and every man went to his own home, Jesus went to the
+Mount of Olives; and thence, after His night of prayer, came very
+early in the morning to the temple, and taught. The stream that is
+to flow broad and life-giving through many lands must have its
+hidden source high among the pure snows that cap the mount of God.
+The man that would work for God must live with God. It was from the
+height of transfiguration that _He_ came, before whom the demon
+that baffled the disciples quailed and slunk away like a whipped
+hound. This kind goeth not out but by prayer.
+
+The second condition is rigid self-denial. Fasting is the expression
+of the purpose to control the lower life, and to abstain from its
+delights in order that the life of the spirit may be strengthened.
+As to the outward fact, it is nothing--it may be practised or not.
+If it be, it will be valuable only in so far as it flows from and
+strengthens that purpose. And such vigorous subordination of all
+the lower powers, and abstinence from many an inferior good, both
+material and immaterial, is absolutely necessary if we are to have
+any wholesome strength of faith in our souls. In the recoil from
+the false asceticism of Roman Catholicism and Puritanism, has not
+this generation of the Church gone too far in the opposite
+direction? and in the true belief that Christianity can sanctify
+all joys, and ensure the harmonious development of all our powers,
+have we not been forgetting that hand and foot may cause us to
+stumble, and that we had better live maimed than die with all our
+limbs? There is a true asceticism, a discipline--a 'gymnastic unto
+godliness,' as Paul calls it. And if our faith is to grow high and
+bear rich clusters on the topmost boughs that look up to the sky,
+we must keep the wild lower shoots close nipped. Without rigid
+self-control and self-limitation, no vigorous faith.
+
+And without them no effectual work! It is no holiday task to cast
+out devils. Self-indulgent men will never do it. Loose-braced, easy
+souls, that lie open to all the pleasurable influences of ordinary
+life, are no more fit for God's weapons than a reed for a lance, or
+a bit of flexible lead for a spear-point. The wood must be tough and
+compact, the metal hard and close-grained, out of which God makes
+His shafts. The brand that is to guide men through the darkness to
+their Father's home must glow with a pallor of consuming flame that
+purges its whole substance into light. This kind goeth not out but
+by prayer and fasting.
+
+Dear brethren, what solemn rebuke these words have for us all! How
+they winnow our works of Christian activity! How they show us the
+hollowness of our services, the self-indulgence of our lives, the
+coldness of our devotion, the cowardice of our faith! How marvellous
+they make the fruits which God's great goodness has permitted us to
+see even from our doubting service! Let us turn to Him with fresh
+thankfulness that unto us, who are 'less than the least of all
+saints, is this grace given, that we should preach among the nations
+the unsearchable riches of Christ.' Let us not be driven from our
+confidence that we have a gospel to preach for all the world; but
+strong in the faith which rests on impregnable historical grounds,
+on our own experience of what Christ has done for us, and on
+nineteen centuries of growing power and unfolding wisdom, let us
+thankfully welcome all that modern thought may supply for the
+correction of errors in belief, in organisation, and in life, that
+may have gathered round His perfect and eternal gospel--being
+assured, as we have a right to be, that all will but lift higher the
+Name which is above every name, and set forth more plainly that
+Cross which is the true tree of life to all the families of men. Let
+us cast ourselves before Him with penitent confession, and say,--O
+Lord, our strength! we have not wrought any deliverance on earth; we
+have been weak when all Thy power was at our command; we have spoken
+Thy word as if it were an experiment and a peradventure whether it
+had might; we have let go Thy hand and lost Thy garment's hem from
+our slack grasp; we have been prayerless and self-indulgent.
+Therefore Thou hast put us to shame before our foes, and 'our
+enemies laugh among themselves. Thou that dwellest between the
+cherubim, shine forth; stir up Thy strength and come and save us!'
+Then will the last words that He spoke on earth ring out again from
+the throne: 'All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth. Go
+ye therefore and teach all nations; and lo, I am with you alway,
+even unto the end of the world.'
+
+
+
+
+THE COIN IN THE FISH'S MOUTH
+
+
+    'And when he was come into the house, Jesus prevented
+    him, saying, What thinkest them, Simon? of whom do the
+    kings of the earth take custom or tribute? of their own
+    children, or of strangers? 26. Peter saith unto Him, Of
+    strangers. Jesus saith unto him, Then are the children
+    free.'--MATT. xvii. 25, 26.
+
+All our Lord's miracles are 'signs' as well as 'wonders.' They have
+a meaning. They not only authenticate His teaching, but they are
+themselves no inconsiderable portion of the teaching. They are not
+only 'the great bell before His sermon,' but they are also a portion
+of the sermon.
+
+That doctrinal or dogmatic purpose characterises all the miracles in
+varying degrees. It is the only purpose of the one before us. This
+singular miracle of finding the coin in the fish's mouth and giving
+it for the tribute-money is unlike our Lord's other works in several
+particulars. It is the only miracle--with the exception of the
+cursing of the barren fig-tree, and the episode of the unclean
+spirits entering into the swine--in which there is no message of
+love or blessing for man's sorrow and pain. It is the only miracle
+in which our Lord uses His power for His own service or help, and it
+is like the whole brood of legendary miracles, and unlike all the
+rest of Christ's in that, at first sight, it seems done for a very
+trivial end--the providing of some three shillings of our money.
+
+Now, if we put all these things together, the absence of any
+alleviation of man's sorrow, the presence of a personal end, and the
+apparent triviality of the result secured, I think we shall see that
+the only explanation of the miracle is given by regarding it as
+being what I may call a teaching one, full of instruction with
+regard to our Lord's character, person, and work. It is a parable as
+well as a miracle, and it is in that aspect that I wish to look at
+it now, and try to bring out its lessons.
+
+I. We have here, first, the freedom of the Son.
+
+The whole point of the story depends upon the fact that this
+tribute-money was not a civil, but an ecclesiastical impost. It had
+originally been levied in the Wilderness, at the time of the
+numbering of the people, and was enjoined to be repeated at each
+census, when every male Israelite was to pay half a shekel for 'a
+ransom for his soul,' an acknowledgment that his life was forfeited
+by sin. In later years it came to be levied as an annual payment for
+the support of the temple and its ceremonial. It was never
+compulsory, there was no power to exact it. The question of the
+collectors, 'Doth not your Master pay tribute?' does not sound like
+the imperative demand which a 'publican' would have made for payment
+of an impost due to the Roman Government. It was an 'optional
+church-rate,' and the very fact that it was so, would make Jews who
+were, or wished to be considered, patriotic or religious, the more
+punctilious in paying it.
+
+The question put to Peter possibly implies a doubt whether this
+Rabbi, who held lax views on so many points of Pharisaical
+righteousness, would be likely to recognise the obligation of the
+tax. Peter's quick answer seems to be prompted by zeal for his
+Master's honour, on which the question appears to him to cast a
+slur. It was perhaps too quick, but the apostle has been too much
+blamed for his answer, which was in fact correct, and for which our
+Lord does not blame him. When he comes to Christ to tell what has
+happened, before he can speak, Christ puts to him this little
+parable which I have taken as part of my text: 'How thinkest thou?
+Do kings of this world take custom?'--meaning thereby not imports or
+exports, but taxes of all kinds of things,--'or tribute,'--meaning
+thereby taxes on persons--'from their own children, or from subjects
+who are not their children?' The answer, of course, is, 'From the
+latter.' So the answer comes, 'Then are the children free.'
+
+Christ then here claims in some sense, Sonship to Him to whom the
+tribute is paid, that is, to God, and therefore freedom from the
+obligation to pay the tribute. But notice, for this is an important
+point in the explanation of the words, that the plural in our Lord's
+words, 'Then are the children free,' is not intended to include
+Peter and the others in the same category as Himself. The only
+question in hand is as to His obligation to pay a certain tax; and
+to include any one else would have been irrelevant, as well as
+erroneous. The plural belongs to the illustration, not to its
+application, and corresponds with the plural in the question, 'Of
+whom do the _kings_ of the earth take custom?' The kings of the
+earth are contrasted with the one King of the heavens, the supreme
+and sole Sovereign; and the children of the kings of the earth are
+contrasted with the only begotten Son of the only King of kings and
+Lord of lords.
+
+So that here there is no mixing up of Himself with others, or of
+others with Himself, but the claiming of an unique position,
+singular and sole, belonging to Him only, in which He stands as the
+Son of the mighty Monarch to whom the tribute is paid. He claims to
+have the divine nature, the divine prerogatives, to bear a specific
+relationship to God Himself, and to be, as other words in Scripture
+put it, 'the brightness of the Father's glory and the express image
+of His person.'
+
+If there is anything certain about Jesus Christ's teaching, this is
+certain about it, that He proclaimed Himself to be the Son of God,
+in such a sense as no man shared with Him, and in such a sense as
+vindicated the attitude which He took up, the demands which He made,
+and the gifts which He offered to men.
+
+What a deduction must be made from the wisdom of His teaching, and
+from the meekness of His Spirit, if that claim was an illusion! What
+shall we say of the sanity of a man who poses himself before the
+whole race, claiming to be the Son of God, and whose continual
+teaching to them therefore is, _not_, 'Believe in goodness';
+'Believe in virtue'; 'Believe in truth'; 'Believe in My word'; but
+'Believe in Me'? Was there ever anywhere else a religious teacher,
+all of whose words were gracious and wise and sweet, but who--
+
+  'Make the important stumble,
+   Of saying that he, the sage and humble,
+   Was likewise--one with the Creator'?
+
+But now what is the freedom based on sonship which our Lord here
+claims?
+
+I have said that this tax was levied with a double meaning; first,
+it was an atonement or ransom for the soul; second, it was devoted
+to the temple and its worship. And now, mark, that in both these
+aspects our Lord alleges His true sonship as the reason why He is
+exempt from it.
+
+That is to say, first, Jesus Christ claims to have no need of a
+ransom for His soul. Never one word dropped from His lips which
+indicated the smallest consciousness of flaw or failure, of defect
+or imperfection, still less of actual transgression. He takes His
+position outside the circle of sinful men which includes all others.
+It is a strange characteristic in a religious teacher, very unlike
+the usual tone of devout men. And stranger still is the fact that
+the absence of this consciousness of evil has never been felt to be
+itself evil and a blot. Think of a David's agony of penitence. Think
+of a Paul's, 'Of whom I am chief!' Think of the long wail of an
+Augustine's confessions. Think of the stormy self-accusations of a
+Luther; and then think that He who inspired them all, never, by word
+or deed, betrayed the slightest consciousness that in Himself there
+was the smallest deflection from the perfect line of right, the
+least speck or stain on the perfect gold of His purity. And
+remember, too, that when He challenges the world with, 'Which of you
+convinceth Me of sin?' with the exception of half a dozen men, of
+whom we can scarcely say whether their want of spiritual insight or
+their arrogance of self-importance is the most flagrant, who, in the
+course of nineteen centuries, have ventured to fling their little
+handfuls of mud at Him, the whole world has answered, 'Thou art
+fairer than the children of men; grace is poured into Thy lips.'
+
+The Son needs no 'ransom for His soul,' which, being translated, is
+but this: the purity and the innocence of Jesus Christ, which is a
+manifest fact in His biography, is only explicable when we believe
+that we have before us the Incarnate God, and therefore the Perfect
+Man. And the Son needs no temple for His worship. His whole life, as
+human, was a life of communion and prayer with His Father in heaven.
+And just because He 'dwelt in' God's 'bosom all the year,' for Him
+ritual and temple were nought. Sense-bound men needed them; He
+needed them not. 'In this place,' said He, 'is one greater than the
+temple.' He was all which the temple symbolised. Was it the
+dwelling-place of God, the place of sacrifice, the meeting-place of
+man with God, the place of divine manifestation? 'The temple of His
+body' was in deepest reality all these. In it dwelt the whole
+fulness of the Godhead. It was at once sacrifice and place of
+sacrifice, even as He is the true everlasting Priest. In Him men see
+God, and meet with God. He is greater than the temple because He is
+the true temple, and He is the true temple because He is the Son.
+And because He is the Son, therefore He is free from all dependence
+upon, and connection with, the outward worship of ceremony and
+sacrifice and priest and ritual.
+
+Now, dear brethren, let me pause for one moment to press upon you
+and upon myself this question: Do I welcome that Christ with the
+full conviction that He is the Son of God? It seems to me that, in
+this generation, the question of questions, as far as religion is
+concerned, is the old one which Christ asked of His disciples by the
+fountains and woods of Caesarea Philippi: 'Whom say ye that I, the
+Son of Man, am?' Can you lift up your face to meet His clear and
+all-searching eye, and say: 'Thou art the Christ, the Son of the
+living God'? If you can, you are on the way to understanding Him and
+His work; if you cannot, His life and work are all wrapped in
+darkness for you, His death robbed of its truest power, and your
+life deprived of its surest anchor.
+
+II. Now, there is a second lesson that I would gather from this
+miracle--the voluntary submission of the Son to the bonds from which
+He is free.
+
+He bids His disciple pay the tribute for Him, for a specific reason:
+'Lest we should offend them.' That, of course, is simply a piece of
+practical wisdom, to prevent any narrow or purblind souls from
+stumbling at His teaching, by reason of His neglect of this trivial
+matter. The question of how far religious teachers or any others are
+at liberty, when they are not actuated by personal motives, to
+render compliance with ceremonies which are of no value to them, is
+a wide one, which I have no need to dwell upon here. But, turning
+from that specific aspect of the incident, I think we may look upon
+it as being an illustration, in regard to a very small matter, of
+what is really the essence of our Lord's relation to the whole world
+and ourselves--His voluntary taking upon Himself of bonds from which
+He is free.
+
+Is it not a symbol of the very heart of the meaning of His
+Incarnation? 'For as much as the children are partakers of flesh and
+blood He also Himself likewise takes part of the same.' 'He is found
+in fashion as a man.' He chooses to enter within the limits and the
+obligations of humanity. Round the radiant glories of the divinity,
+He gathers the folds of the veil of human flesh. He immerses the
+pillar of fire in a cloud of smoke. He comes amongst us, taking on
+His own wrists the fetters that bind us, suffering Himself to be
+'cribbed, cabined, and confined' within the narrow limits of our
+manhood, in order that by His voluntary acceptance of it we may be
+redeemed from our corruption.
+
+Is it not a parable of His life and lowly obedience? He proclaimed
+the same principle as the guide for all His conduct, when, sinless,
+He presented Himself to John for the 'baptism of repentance,' and
+overcame the baptiser's scruples with the words, 'Thus it becometh
+us to fulfil all righteousness.' He comes under the law. Bound to no
+such service, He binds Himself to all human duties that He may
+hallow the bonds which He has worn, may set us the pattern of
+perfect obedience, and may know a servant's heart.
+
+The Prince is free, but King's Son though He be, He goes among His
+Father's poor subjects, lives their squalid lives, makes experience
+of their poverty, and hardens His hands by labouring like them.
+Sympathy He 'learned in huts where poor men lie.'
+
+Is it not the rehearsal in parable of His death? He was free from
+the bonds of mortality, and He took upon Him our human flesh. He was
+free from the necessity of death, even after He had taken our flesh
+upon Him. But, being free from the necessity, He submitted to the
+actuality, and laid down His life of Himself, because of His loving
+will, to save and help each of us. Oh, dear friends! we never can
+understand the meaning and the beauty, either of the life or of the
+death of our Master, unless we look at each from this point of view,
+that it is His willing acceptance of the bonds that bind us. His own
+loving will brought Him here; His own loving will kept Him here; His
+own loving will impelled Him along the path of life, though at every
+step of it He trod as with naked feet upon burning iron; His own
+loving Will brought Him to the Cross; His own loving will, and not
+the Roman soldiers' nails, fastened Him to it. Let us look, then, to
+Him with thankfulness, and recognise in that death His thorough
+identification with all the bonds and miseries of our condition. He
+'took part of the same that through death He might deliver them that
+by fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.'
+
+III. Then there is another lesson which I think we may fairly gather
+from this miracle, viz. that we have here the supernatural glory
+which ever accompanies the humiliation of the Son.
+
+The miracle, at first sight, appears to be for a very trivial end.
+Men have made merry with it by reason of that very triviality. But
+the miracle is vindicated, peculiar as it is, by a deep divine
+congruity and decorum. He will submit, Son though He be, to this
+complete identification of Himself with us. But He will so submit
+as, even in submitting, to assert His divine dignity. As has been
+well said, 'In the midst of the act of submission majesty flashes
+forth.' A multiform miracle--containing many miracles in one--a
+miracle of omniscience, and a miracle of influence over the lower
+creatures is wrought. The first fish that rises carries in its mouth
+the exact sum needed.
+
+Here, therefore, we have another illustration of that remarkable
+blending of humiliation and glory, which is a characteristic of our
+Lord's life. These two strands are always twined together, like a
+twisted line of gold and black. At each moment of special abasement
+there is some special coruscation of the brightness of His glory.
+Whensoever He stoops there is something accompanying the stooping,
+to tell how great and how merciful He is who bows. Out of the
+deepest darkness there flashes some light. So at His cradle, which
+seems to be the identifying of Him with humanity in its most
+helpless and lowest condition, there shall be angels, and the stars
+in their courses shall bow and move to guide wise men from afar with
+offerings to His feet. And at His Cross, where He sounds the very
+bass string and touches the lowest point of humiliation and defeat,
+a clearer vision sees in that humiliation the highest glory.
+
+And thus, here, He will not only identify Himself with sinful men
+who need a ransom, and with sense-bound men who need a sacrifice and
+a temple, but He will so identify Himself with them as that He shall
+send His power into the recesses of the lake, where His knowledge
+sees, as clearly as our eyes see the men that stand beside us, and
+obedient to an unconscious impulse from Him, the dumb creature that
+had swallowed, as it sunk, the shining _stater_ that had
+dropped out of the girdle of some fisherman, shall rise first to the
+hook; in token that not only in His Father's house does He rule as a
+Son over His own house, but that He 'doeth as He hath pleased, in
+all deep places,' and that in Him the ancient hope is fulfilled of a
+Son of Man who 'hath dominion over the fish of the sea, and
+whatsoever passeth through the paths of the sea.' The miracle was
+for a trivial end in appearance, but it was a demonstration, though
+to one man only at first, yet through him to all the world, that
+this Christ, in His lowliness, is the Everlasting Son of the Father.
+
+IV. And so, lastly, we have here also the lesson of the sufficiency
+for us all of what He provides.
+
+'That take, and give unto them for Me and for thee. He does not say
+'_For us._' He and Peter do not stand on the game level. He has
+chosen to submit Himself to the obligations, Peter was necessarily
+under them. That which is found by miracle in the fish's mouth is
+precisely the amount required for both the one and the other. It is
+rendered, as the original has it, _'Instead of_ thee and Me,'
+putting emphasis upon the characteristic of the tribute as being
+ransom, or payment, for a man's soul.
+
+And so, although this thought is not part of the original purpose of
+the miracle, and, therefore, is different from those which I have
+already been dwelling on, which are part of that purpose, I think we
+may fairly see here this great truth,--that that which Christ brings
+to us by supernatural act, far greater than the miracle here, is
+enough for all the claims and obligations that God, or man, or law,
+or conscience have upon any of us. His perfect obedience and
+stainless life discharged for Himself all the obligations to law and
+righteousness under which He came as a Man; His perfect life and His
+mighty death are for us the full discharge of all that can be
+brought against us.
+
+There are many and solemn claims and claimants upon each of us. Law
+and duty, that awful 'ought' which should rule our lives and which
+we have broken thousands of times, come to each of us in many an
+hour of clear vision, and take us by the throat, and say, 'Pay us
+what thou owest!' And there is a Judgment Day before all of us;
+which is no mere bugbear to frighten children, but will be a fact of
+experience in our case. Friend! how are you going to meet your
+obligations? You owe God all your love, all your heart, will,
+strength, service. What an awful score of unpaid debts, with
+accumulated interest, there stands against each of our names! Think
+of some bankrupt sitting in his counting-house with a balance-sheet
+before him that shows his hopeless insolvency. He sits and broods,
+and broods, and does not know what in the world he is going to do.
+The door opens--a messenger enters and gives him an envelope. He
+tears it open, and there flutters out a cheque that more than pays
+it all. The illustration is a very low one; it does not cover the
+whole ground of Christ's work for you. It puts a possibly commercial
+aspect into it, which we have to take care of lest it become the
+exclusive one; but it is true for all that. You are the bankrupt.
+What have you to pay? Oh, behold that precious treasure of gold
+tried in the fire, which is Christ's righteousness and Christ's
+death; and by faith in Him, '_that_ take and give' and all the
+debt will be discharged, and you will be set free and made a son by
+that Son who has taken upon Himself all our bonds, and so has broken
+them; who has taken upon Himself all our debts, and so has cancelled
+them every one.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE
+
+ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D., Litt. D.
+
+
+ST. MATTHEW
+
+_Chaps. XVIII to XXVIII_
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+THE LAW OF PRECEDENCE IN THE KINGDOM (Matt. xviii. 1-14)
+
+SELF-MUTILATION FOR SELF-PRESERVATION (Matt. xviii. 8, R.V.)
+
+THE LOST SHEEP AND THE SEEKING SHEPHERD (Matt. xviii. 12)
+
+THE PERSISTENCE OF THWARTED LOVE (Matt. xviii. 13; Luke xv. 4)
+
+FORGIVEN AND UNFORGIVING (Matt. xviii. 22)
+
+THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE KING (Matt. xix. 16-26)
+
+NEAREST TO CHRIST (Matt. xx. 23)
+
+THE SERVANT-LORD AND HIS SERVANTS (Matt. xx. 28)
+
+WHAT THE HISTORIC CHRIST TAUGHT ABOUT HIS DEATH (Matt. xx. 28)
+
+THE COMING OF THE KING TO HIS PALACE (Matt. xxi. 1-16)
+
+A NEW KIND OF KING (Matt. xxi. 4, 5)
+
+THE VINEYARD AND ITS KEEPERS (Matt. xxi. 33-46)
+
+THE STONE OF STUMBLING (Matt. xxi. 44)
+
+TWO WAYS OF DESPISING GOD'S FEAST (Matt. xxii. 1-14)
+
+THE TABLES TURNED: THE QUESTIONERS QUESTIONED (Matt. xxii. 34-46)
+
+THE KING'S FAREWELL (Matt. xxiii. 27-39)
+
+TWO FORMS OF ONE SAYING (Matt. xxiv. 13, R.V.; Luke xxi. 19)
+
+THE CARRION AND THE VULTURES (Matt. xxiv. 28)
+
+WATCHING FOR THE KING (Matt. xxiv. 42-51)
+
+THE WAITING MAIDENS (Matt. xxv. 1-13)
+
+DYING LAMPS (Matt. xxv. 8)
+
+'THEY THAT WERE READY' (Matt. xxv. 10)
+
+TRADERS FOR THE MASTER (Matt. xxv. 14-30)
+
+WHY THE TALENT WAS BURIED (Matt. xxv. 24, 25)
+
+THE KING ON HIS JUDGMENT THRONE (Matt. xxv. 31-46)
+
+THB DEFENCE OF UNCALCULATING LOVE (Matt. xxvi. 6-16)
+
+THE NEW PASSOVER (Matt. xxvi. 17-30)
+
+'IS IT I?' (Matt. xxvi. 22, 25; John xiii. 25)
+
+'THIS CUP' (Matt. xxvi. 27, 28)
+
+'UNTIL THAT DAY' (Matt. xxvi. 29)
+
+GETHSEMANE, THE OIL-PRESS (Matt. xxvi. 36-46)
+
+THE LAST PLEADING OF LOVE (Matt. xxvi. 50)
+
+THE REAL HIGH PRIEST AND HIS COUNTERFEIT (Matt. xxvi. 57-68)
+
+JESUS CHARGED WITH BLASPHEMY (Matt. xxvi. 35)
+
+'SEE THOU TO THAT!' (Matt. xxvii. 4, 24)
+
+THE SENTENCE WHICH CONDEMNED THE JUDGES (Matt. xxvii. 11-26)
+
+THE CRUCIFIXION (Matt. xxvii. 33-50)
+
+THE BLIND WATCHERS AT THE CROSS (MATT. xxvii. 36)
+
+TAUNTS TURNING TO TESTIMONIES (Matt. xxvii. 41-43)
+
+THE VEIL RENT (Matt. xxvii. 51)
+
+THE PRINCE OF LIFE (Matt. xxviii. 1-15)
+
+THE RISEN LORD'S GREETINGS AND GIFTS (Matt. xxviii. 9; John xx. 19)
+
+ON THE MOUNTAIN (Matt. xxviii, 16, 17; 1 Cor. xv. 6)
+
+
+
+
+THE LAW OF PRECEDENCE IN THE KINGDOM
+
+
+    'At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus,
+    saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?
+    2. And Jesus called a little child unto Him, and set
+    him in the midst of them, 3. And said, Verily I say
+    unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little
+    children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.
+    4. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this
+    little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of
+    heaven. 5. And whoso shall receive one such little
+    child in My name receiveth Me. 6. But whoso shall
+    offend one of these little ones which believe in Me,
+    it were better for him that a millstone were hanged
+    about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth
+    of the sea. 7. Woe unto the world because of offences!
+    for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to
+    that man by whom the offence cometh! 8. Wherefore if
+    thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and
+    cast them from thee; it is better for thee to enter
+    into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands
+    or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. 9. And
+    if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it
+    from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life
+    with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast
+    into hell fire. 10. Take heed that ye despise not one
+    of these little ones; for I say unto you, That in
+    heaven their angels do always behold the face of My
+    Father which is in heaven. 11. For the Son of Man is
+    come to save that which was lost. 12. How think ye? if
+    a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone
+    astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and
+    goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is
+    gone astray? 13. And if so be that he find it, verily
+    I say unto you, he rejoiceth more of that sheep, than
+    of the ninety and nine which went not astray. 14. Even
+    so it is not the will of your Father which is in
+    heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.'
+    --MATT. xviii. 1-14.
+
+Mark tells us that the disciples, as they journeyed, had been
+squabbling about pre-eminence in the kingdom, and that this
+conversation was brought on by our Lord's question as to the subject
+of their dispute. It seems at first sight to argue singular
+insensibility that the first effect of His reiterated announcement
+of His sufferings should have been their quarrelling for the lead;
+but their behaviour is intelligible if we suppose that they regarded
+the half-understood prophecies of His passion as indicating the
+commencement of the short conflict which was to end in His Messianic
+reign. So it was time for them to be getting ready and settling
+precedence. The form of their question, in Matthew, connects it with
+the miracle of the coin in the fish's mouth, in which there was a
+very plain assertion of Christ's royal dignity, and a distinguishing
+honour given to Peter. Probably the 'then' of the question means,
+Since Peter is thus selected, are we to look to him as foremost?
+Their conception of the kingdom and of rank in it is frankly and
+entirely earthly. There are to be graded dignities, and these are to
+depend on His mere will. Our Lord not only answers the letter of
+their question, but cuts at the root of the temper which inspired
+it.
+
+I. He shows the conditions of entrance into and eminence in His
+kingdom by a living example. There were always children at hand
+round Him, when He wanted them. Their quick instinct for pure and
+loving souls drew them to Him; and this little one was not afraid to
+be taken by the hand, and to be afterwards caught up in His arms,
+and pressed to His heart. One does not wonder that the legend that
+he was Ignatius the martyr should have been current; for surely the
+remembrance of that tender clasping arm and gentle breast would not
+fade nor be fruitless. The disciples had made very sure that they
+were to be in the kingdom, and that the only question concerning
+them was how high up in it they were each to be. Christ's answer is
+like a dash of cold water to that confidence. It is, in effect,
+'Greatest in the kingdom! Make sure that you go in at all, first;
+which you will never do, so long as you keep your present ambitious
+minds.'
+
+Verse 3 lays down the condition of entrance into the kingdom, from
+which necessarily follows the condition of supremacy in it. What a
+child is naturally, and without effort or merit, by reason of age
+and position, we must become, if we are to pass the narrow portal
+which admits into the large room. That 'becoming' is impossible
+without a revolution in us. 'Be converted' is corrected, in the
+Revised Version, into 'turn,' and rightly; for there is in the word
+a distinct reference to the temper of the disciples as displayed by
+their question. As long as they cherished it they could not even get
+inside, to say nothing of winning promotion to dignities in the
+kingdom. Their very question condemned them as incapable of
+entrance. So there must be a radical change, not unaccompanied, of
+course, with repentance, but mainly consisting in the substitution
+of the child's temper for theirs. What is the temper thus enjoined?
+We are to see here neither the entirely modern and shallow
+sentimental way of looking at childhood, in which popular writers
+indulge, nor the doctrine of its innocence. It is not Christ's
+teaching, either that children are innocent, or that men enter the
+kingdom by making themselves so. But the child is, by its very
+position, lowly and modest, and makes no claims, and lives by
+instinctive confidence, and does not care about honours, and has
+these qualities which in us are virtues, and is not puffed up by
+possessing them. That is the ideal which is realised more generally
+in the child than analogous ideals are in mature manhood. Such
+simplicity, modesty, humility, must be ours. We must be made small
+ere we can enter that door. And as is the requirement for entrance,
+so is it for eminence. The child does not humble himself, but is
+humble by nature; but we must humble ourselves if we would be great.
+
+Christ implies that there are degrees in the kingdom. It has a
+nobility, but of such a kind that there may be many greatest; for
+the principle of rank there is lowliness. We rise by sinking. The
+deeper our consciousness of our own unworthiness and weakness, the
+more capable are we of receiving the divine gifts, and therefore the
+more fully shall we receive them. Rivers run in the hollows; the
+mountain-tops are dry. God works with broken reeds, and the princes
+in His realm are beggars taken from the dunghill. A lowliness which
+made itself lowly for the sake of eminence would miss its aim, for
+it would not be lowliness. The desire to be foremost must be cast
+out, in order that it may be fulfilled.
+
+II. The question has been answered, and our Lord passes to other
+thoughts rising out of His answer. Verses 5 and 6 set forth
+antithetically our duties to His little ones. He is not now speaking
+of the child who served as a living parable to answer the question,
+but of men who have made themselves like the child, as is plain from
+the emphatic 'one _such_ child,' and from verse 6 ('which
+_believe_ on Me').
+
+The subject, then, of these verses is the blessedness of recognising
+and welcoming Christlike lowly believers, and the fatal effect of
+the opposite conduct. To 'receive one such little child in My name'
+is just to have a sympathetic appreciation of, and to be ready to
+welcome to heart and home, those who are lowly in their own and in
+the world's estimate, but princes of Christ's court and kingdom.
+Such welcome and furtherance will only be given by one who himself
+has the same type of character in some degree. He who honours and
+admires a certain kind of excellence has the roots of it in himself.
+A possible artist lies in him who thrills at the sight or hearing of
+fair things painted or sung. Our admiration is an index of our
+aspiration, and our aspiration is a prophecy of our attainment. So
+it will be a little one's heart which will welcome the little ones,
+and a lover of Christ who receives them in His name. The reception
+includes all forms of sympathy and aid. 'In My name' is equivalent
+to 'for the sake of My revealed character,' and refers both to the
+receiver and to the received. The blessedness of such reception, so
+far as the receiver is concerned, is not merely that he thereby
+comes into happy relations with Christ's foremost servants, but that
+he gets Christ Himself into his heart. If with true appreciation of
+the beauty of such a childlike disposition, I open my heart or my
+hand to its possessor, I do thereby enlarge my capacity for my own
+possession of Christ, who dwells in His child, and who comes with
+him where He is welcomed. There is no surer way of securing Him for
+our own than the loving reception of His children. Whoso lodges the
+King's favourites will not be left unvisited by the King. To
+recognise and reverence the greatest in the kingdom is to be oneself
+a member of their company, and a sharer in their prerogatives.
+
+On the other hand, the antithesis of 'receiving' is 'causing to
+stumble,' by which is meant giving occasion for moral fall. That
+would be done by contests about pre-eminence, by arrogance, by
+non-recognition. The atmosphere of carnality and selfishness in
+which the disciples were moving, as their question showed, would
+stifle the tender life of any lowly believer who found himself in
+it; and they were not only injuring themselves, but becoming
+stumbling-blocks to others, by their ambition. How much of the
+present life of average Christians is condemned on the same
+ground! It is a good test of our Christian character to ask--would
+it help or hinder a lowly believer to live beside us? How many
+professing Christians are really, though unconsciously, doing
+their utmost to pull down their more Christlike brethren to their
+own low level! The worldliness and selfish ambitions of the Church
+are responsible for the stumbling of many who would else have been
+of Christ's 'little ones.' But perhaps we are rather to think of
+deliberate and consciously laid stumbling-blocks. Knowingly to try
+to make a good man fall, or to stain a more than usually pure
+Christian character, is surely the very height of malice, and
+presupposes such a deadly hatred of goodness and of Christ that no
+fate can be worse than the possession of such a temper. To be
+flung into the sea, like a dog, with a stone round his neck, would
+be better for a man than to live to do such a thing. The deed
+itself, apart from any other future retribution, is its own
+punishment; yet our Lord's solemn words not only point to such a
+future retribution, which is infinitely more terrible than the
+miserable fate described would be for the body, but to the
+consequences of the act, as so bad in its blind hatred of the
+highest type of character, and in its conscious preference of evil,
+as well as so fatal in its consequences, that it were better to die
+drowned than to live so.
+
+III. Verses 10-14 set forth the honour and dignity of Christ's
+'little ones.' Clearly the application of the designation in these
+closing verses is exclusively to His lowly followers. The warning
+not to despise them is needed at all times, and, perhaps, seldom
+more, even by Christians, than now, when so many causes induce a far
+too high estimate of the world's great ones, and modest, humble
+godliness looks as dull and sober as some russet-coated little bird
+among gorgeous cockatoos and birds of paradise. The world's standard
+is only too current in the Church; and it needs a spirit kept in
+harmony with Christ's spirit, and some degree of the child-nature in
+ourselves, to preserve us from overlooking the delicate hidden
+beauties and unworldly greatness of His truest disciples.
+
+The exhortation is enforced by two considerations,--a glimpse into
+heaven, and a parable. Fair interpretation can scarcely deny that
+Christ here teaches that His children are under angel-guardianship.
+We should neither busy ourselves in curious inferences from His
+reticent words, nor try to blink their plain meaning, but rather
+mark their connection and purpose here. He has been teaching that
+pre-eminence belongs to the childlike spirit. He here opens a door
+into the court of the heavenly King, and shows us that, as the
+little ones are foremost in the kingdom of heaven, so the angels who
+watch over them are nearest the throne in heaven itself. The
+representation is moulded on the usages of Eastern courts, and
+similar language in the Old Testament describes the principal
+courtiers as 'the men who see the King's face continually.' So high
+is the honour in which the little ones are held, that the highest
+angels are set to guard them, and whatever may be thought of them on
+earth, the loftiest of creatures are glad to serve and keep them.
+
+Following the Revised Version we omit verse 11. If it were genuine,
+the connection would be that such despising contradicted the purpose
+of Christ's mission; and the 'for' would refer back to the
+injunction, not to the glimpse into heaven which enforced it.
+
+The exhortation is further confirmed by the parable of the ninety
+and nine, which is found, slightly modified in form and in another
+connection, in Luke xv. Its point here is to show the importance of
+the little ones as the objects of the seeking love of God, and as so
+precious to Him that their recovery rejoices His heart. Of course,
+if verse 11 be genuine, the Shepherd is Christ; but, if we omit it,
+the application of the parable in verse 14 as illustrating the
+loving will of God becomes more direct. In that case God is the
+owner of the sheep. Christ does not emphasise His own love or share
+in the work, reference to which was not relevant to His purpose,
+but, leaving that in shadow, casts all the light on the loving
+divine will, which counts the little ones as so precious that, if
+even one of them wanders, all heaven's powers are sent forth to find
+and recover it. The reference does not seem to be so much to the one
+great act by which, in Christ's incarnation and sacrifice, a sinful
+world has been sought and redeemed, as to the numberless acts by
+which God, in His providence and grace, restores the souls of those
+humble ones if ever they go astray. For the connection requires that
+the wandering sheep here should, when it wanders, be 'one of these
+little ones'; and the parable is introduced to illustrate the truth
+that, because they belong to that number, the least of them is too
+precious to God to be allowed to wander away and be lost. They have
+for their keepers the angels of the presence; they have God Himself,
+in His yearning love and manifold methods of restoration, to look
+for them, if ever they are lost, and to bring them back to the fold.
+Therefore, 'see that ye despise not one of these little ones,' each
+of whom is held by the divine will in the grasp of an individualising
+love which nothing can loosen.
+
+
+
+
+SELF-MUTILATION FOR SELF-PRESERVATION
+
+
+    'If thy hand or thy foot causeth thee to stumble, cut
+    it off, and  cast it from  thee.'-MATT. xviii. 8, R.V.
+
+No person or thing can do our characters as much harm as we
+ourselves can do. Indeed, none can do them any harm but ourselves.
+For men may put stumbling-blocks in our way, but it is we who make
+them stumbling-blocks. The obstacle in the path would do us no hurt
+if it were not for the erring foot, nor the attractive prize if it
+were not for the hand that itched to lay hold of it, nor the
+glittering bauble if it were not for the eye that kindled at the
+sight of it. So our Lord here, having been speaking of the men that
+put stumbling-blocks in the way of His little ones, draws the net
+closer and bids us look at home. A solemn woe of divine judgment is
+denounced on those who cause His followers to stumble; let us leave
+God to execute that, and be sure that we have no share in their
+guilt, but let us ourselves be the executioners of the judgment upon
+the things in ourselves which alone give the stumbling-blocks, which
+others put before us, their fatal power.
+
+There is extraordinary energy in these words. Solemnly they are
+repeated twice here, verbatim; solemnly they are repeated verbatim
+three times in Mark's edition. The urgent stringency of the command,
+the terrible plainness of the alternative put forth by the lips that
+could say nothing harsh, and the fact that the very same injunction
+appears in a wholly different connection in the Sermon on the Mount,
+show us how profoundly important our Lord felt the principle to be
+which He was here laying down.
+
+We mark these three points. First, the case supposed, 'If thy hand
+or thy foot cause thee to stumble.' Then the sharp, prompt remedy
+enjoined, 'Cut them off and cast them from thee.' Then the solemn
+motive by which it is enforced, 'It is better for thee to enter into
+life maimed than, being a whole man, to be cast into hell-fire.'
+
+I. First, then, as to the case supposed.
+
+Hand and foot and eye are, of course, regarded as organs of the
+inward self, and symbols of its tastes and capacities. We may
+perhaps see in them the familiar distinction between the practical
+and the theoretical:--hand and foot being instruments of action, and
+the eye the organ of perception. Our Lord takes an extreme case. If
+members of the body are to be amputated and plucked out should they
+cause us to stumble, much more are associations to be abandoned and
+occupations to be relinquished and pleasures to be forsaken, if
+these draw us away. But it is to be noticed that the whole stringency
+of the commandment rests upon that _if_. '_If_ they cause thee
+to stumble,' then, and not else, amputate. The powers are natural,
+the operation of them is perfectly innocent, but a man may be ruined
+by innocent things. And, says Christ, if that process is begun, then,
+and only then, does My exhortation come into force.
+
+Now, all that solemn thought of a possible injurious issue of
+innocent occupations, rests upon the principles that our nature has
+an ideal order, so as that some parts of it are to be suppressed and
+some are to rule, and that there are degrees of importance in men's
+pursuits, and that where the lower interfere and clog the operations
+of the higher, there they are harmful. And so the only wisdom is to
+excise and cut them off.
+
+We see illustrations in abundance every day. There are many people
+who are being ruined in regard to the highest purposes of their
+lives, simply by an over-indulgence in lower occupations which in
+themselves may be perfectly right. Here is a young woman that spends
+so much of her day in reading novels that she has no time to look
+after the house and help her mother. Here is a young man so given to
+athletics that his studies are neglected--and so you may go all
+round the circle, and find instances of the way in which innocent
+things, and the excessive or unwise exercise of natural faculties,
+are destroying men. And much more is that the case in regard to
+religion, which is the highest object of pursuit, and in regard to
+those capacities and powers by which we lay hold of God. These are
+to be ministered to by the rest, and if there be in my nature or in
+the order of my life something which is drawing away to itself the
+energy that ought to go in that other direction, then, howsoever
+innocent it may be, _per se_, it is harming me. It is a wen
+that is sucking all the vital force into itself, and turning it into
+poison. And there is only one cure for it, and that is the knife.
+
+Then there is another point to be observed in this case supposed,
+and that is that the whole matter is left to the determination of
+personal experience. No one else has the right to decide for you
+what it is safe and wise for you to do in regard to things which are
+not in themselves wrong. If they are wrong in themselves, of course
+the consideration of consequences is out of place altogether; but if
+they be not wrong in themselves, then it is you that must settle
+whether they are legitimate for you or not. Do not let your
+Christian liberty be interfered with by other people's dictation in
+regard to this matter. How often you hear people say, _'I_
+could not do it'; meaning thereby, 'therefore _he_ ought not to
+do it!' But that inference is altogether illegitimate. True, there
+are limitations of our Christian liberty in regard to things
+indifferent and innocent. Paul lays down the most important of these
+in three sentences. 'All things are lawful for me, but all things
+are not expedient.' 'All things are lawful for me, but all things
+edify not';--you must think of your brethren as well as of yourself.
+'All things are lawful for me, yet will I not be brought under the
+power of any'; keep master of them, and rather abstain altogether
+than become their slave. But these three limitations being observed,
+then, in regard to all such matters, nobody else can prescribe for
+you or me. 'To his own Master he standeth or falleth.'
+
+But, on the other hand, do not you be led away into things that
+damage you, because some other man does them, as he supposes,
+without injury. 'Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that
+thing which he alloweth.' There are some Christian people who are
+simply very unscrupulous and think themselves very strong; and whose
+consciences are not more enlightened, but less sensitive, than those
+of the 'narrow-minded brethren' upon whom they look askance.
+
+And so, dear friend, you ought to take the world--to inhale it, if I
+may so say, as patients do chloroform; only you must be your own
+doctor and keep your own fingers on your pulse, and watch the first
+sign of failure there, and take no more. When the safety lamps begin
+to burn blue you may be quite sure there is choke-damp about; and
+when Christian men and women begin to find prayer wearisome, and
+religious thoughts dull, and the remembrance of God an effort or a
+pain, then, whatever anybody else may do, it is time for them to
+pull up. 'If thy hand offend thee,' never mind though your brother's
+hand is not offending him, do the necessary thing for your health,
+'cut it off and cast it from you.'
+
+But of course there must be caution and common-sense in the
+application of such a principle. It does not mean that we are to
+abandon all things that are susceptible of abuse, for everything is
+so; and if we are to regulate our conduct by such a rule, it is not
+the amputation of a hand that will be sufficient. We may as well cut
+off our heads at once, and go out of the world altogether; for
+everything is capable of being thus abused.
+
+Nor does the injunction mean that unconditionally we are to abandon
+all occupations in which there is danger. It can never be a duty to
+shirk a duty because it is dangerous. And sometimes it is as much a
+Christian man's duty to go into, and to stand in, positions that are
+full of temptation and danger, as it is a fireman's business to go
+into a burning house at the risk of suffocation. There were saints
+in Caesar's household, flowers that grew on a dunghill, and they
+were not bidden to abandon their place because it was full of
+possible danger to their souls. Sometimes Christ sets His sentinels
+in places where the bullets fly very thick; and if we are posted in
+such a place--and we all are so some time or other in our lives--the
+only course for us is to stand our ground until the relieving guard
+comes, and to trust that He said a truth that was always to be true,
+when He sent out His servants to their dangerous work, with the
+assurance that if they drank any deadly thing it should not hurt
+them.
+
+II. So much, then, for the first of the points here. Now a word, in
+the second place, as to the sharp remedy enjoined.
+
+'Cut it off and cast it from thee.' Entire excision is the only
+safety. I myself am to be the operator in that surgery. I am to lay
+my hand upon the block, and with the other hand to grasp the axe and
+strike. That is to say, we are to suppress capacities, to abandon
+pursuits, to break with associates, when we find that they are
+damaging our spiritual life and hindering our likeness to Jesus
+Christ.
+
+That is plain common-sense. In regard to physical intoxication, it
+is a great deal easier to abstain altogether than to take a very
+little and then stop. The very fumes of alcohol will sometimes drive
+a reclaimed drunkard into a bout of dissipation that will last for
+weeks; therefore, the only safety is in entire abstinence. The rule
+holds in regard to everyday life. Every man has to give up a great
+many things if he means to succeed in one, and has to be a man of
+one pursuit if anything worth doing is to be done. Christian men
+especially have to adopt that principle, and shear off a great deal
+that is perfectly legitimate, in order that they may keep a reserve
+of strength for the highest things.
+
+True, all forms of life are capable of being made Christian service
+and Christian discipline, but in practice we shall find that if we
+are earnestly seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness, not
+only shall we lose our taste for a great deal that is innocent, but
+we shall have, whether we lose our taste for them or not--and more
+imperatively if we have not lost our taste for them than if we have--to
+give up allowable things in order that with all our heart, and soul,
+and strength, and mind, we may love and serve our Master. There are no
+half-measures to be kept; the only thing to do with the viper is to
+shake it off into the fire and let it burn there. We have to empty our
+hands of earth's trivialities if we would grasp Christ with them. We
+have to turn away our eyes from earth if we would behold the Master,
+and rigidly to apply this principle of excision in order that we may
+advance in the divine life. It is the only way to ensure progress.
+There is no such certain method of securing an adequate flow of sap
+up the trunk as to cut off all the suckers. If you wish to have a
+current going down the main bed of the stream, sufficient to keep it
+clear, you must dam up all the side channels.
+
+But it is not to be forgotten that this commandment, stringent and
+necessary as it is, is second best. The man is maimed, although it
+was for Christ's sake that he cut off his hand, or put out his eye.
+His hand was given him that with it he might serve God, and the
+highest thing would have been that in hand and foot and eye he
+should have been anointed, like the priests of old, for the service
+of his Master. But until he is strong enough to use the faculty for
+God, the wisest thing is not to use it at all. Abandon the outworks
+to keep the citadel. And just as men pull down the pretty houses on
+the outskirts of a fortified city when a siege is impending, in order
+that they may afford no cover to the enemy, so we have to sweep away
+a great deal in our lives that is innocent and fair, in order that
+the foes of our spirit may find no lodgment there. It is second best,
+but for all that it is absolutely needful. We must lay 'aside every
+_weight_,' as well as 'the _sin_ which so easily besets us.' We
+must run lightly if we would run well. We must cast aside all burdens,
+even though they be burdens of treasure and delights, if we would 'run
+with patience the race that is set before us.' 'If thy foot offend
+thee,' do not hesitate, do not adopt half-measures, do not try
+moderation, do not seek to sanctify the use of the peccant member;
+all these may be possible and right in time, but for the present there
+is only one thing to do--down with it on the block, and off with it!
+'Cut it off and cast it from thee.'
+
+III. And now, lastly, a word as to the solemn exhortation by which
+this injunction is enforced.
+
+Christ rests His command of self-denial and self-mutilation upon the
+highest ground of self-interest. 'It is better for thee.' We are
+told nowadays that this is a very low motive to appeal to, that
+Christianity is a religion of selfishness, because it says to men,
+'Your life or your death depends upon your faith and your conduct.'
+Well, I think it will be time for us to listen to fantastic
+objections of this sort when the men that urge them refuse to turn
+down another street, if they are warned that in the road on which
+they are going they will meet their death. As long as they admit
+that it is a wise and a kind thing to say to a man, 'Do not go that
+way or your life will be endangered,' I think we may listen to our
+Master saying to us, 'Do not do that lest thou perish; do this, that
+thou may'st enter into life.'
+
+And then, notice that a maimed man may enter into life, and a
+complete man may perish. The first may be a very poor creature, very
+ignorant, with a limited nature, undeveloped capacities, intellect
+and the like all but dormant in him, artistic sensibilities quite
+atrophied, and yet he may have got hold of Jesus Christ and His
+love, and be trying to love Him back again and serve Him, and so be
+entering into life even here, and be sure of a life more perfect
+yonder. And the complete man, cultured all round, with all his
+faculties polished and exercised to the full, may have one side of
+his nature undeveloped--that which connects him with God in Christ.
+And so he may be like some fair tree that stands out there in the
+open, on all sides extending its equal beauty, with its stem
+symmetrical, cylindrical, perfect in its green cloud of foliage, yet
+there may be a worm at the root of it, and it may be given up to
+rottenness and destruction. Cultivated men may perish, and
+uncultured men may have the life. The maimed man may touch Christ
+with his stump, and so receive life, and the complete man may lay
+hold of the world and the flesh and the devil with his hands, and so
+share in their destruction.
+
+Ay! and in that case the maimed man has the best of it. It is a very
+plain axiom of the rudest common-sense, this of my text: 'It is
+better for thee to enter into life maimed, than to go into hell-fire
+with both thy hands.' That is to say, it is better to live maimed
+than to die whole. A man comes into a hospital with gangrene in his
+leg; the doctor says it must come off; the man says, 'It shall not,'
+and he is dead to-morrow. Who is the fool--the man that says, 'Here,
+then, cut away; better life than limb,' or the man that says, 'I
+will keep it and I will die'?
+
+'Better to enter into life maimed,' because you will not always be
+maimed. The life will overcome the maiming. There is a wonderful
+restoration of capacities and powers that have been sacrificed for
+Christ's sake, a restoration even here. As crustaceans will develop
+a new claw in place of one that they have thrown off in their peril
+to save their lives, so we, if we have for Christ's sake maimed
+ourselves, will find that in a large measure the suppression will be
+recompensed even here on earth.
+
+And hereafter, as the Rabbis used to say, 'No man will rise from the
+grave a cripple.' All the limitations which we have imposed upon
+ourselves, for Christ's sake, will be removed then. 'Then shall the
+eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf be unstopped;
+then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb
+shall sing.' 'Verily I say unto thee, there is no man that hath left
+any' of his possessions, affections, tastes, capacities, 'for My
+sake but he shall receive a hundredfold more in this life, and in
+the world to come, life everlasting.' No man is a loser by giving up
+anything for Jesus Christ.
+
+And, on the other hand, the complete man, complete in everything
+except his spiritual nature, is a fragment in all his completeness;
+and yonder, there will for him be a solemn process of stripping.
+'Take it from him, and give it to him that hath ten talents.' Ah!
+how much of that for which some of you are flinging away Jesus
+Christ will fade from you when you go yonder. 'His glory shall not
+descend after him'; 'as he came, so shall he go.' 'Tongues, they
+shall cease; knowledge, it shall vanish away'; gifts will fail,
+capacities will disappear when the opportunities for the exercise of
+them in a material world are at an end, and there will be little
+left to the man who _would_ carry hands and feet and eyes all
+into the fire and forgot the 'one thing needful,' but a thin thread,
+if I may so say, of personality quivering with the sense of
+responsibility, and preyed upon by the gnawing worm of a too-late
+remorse.
+
+My brother, the lips of Incarnate Love spoke those solemn words of
+my text, which it becomes not me to repeat to you as if they were
+mine; but I ask you to weigh this, His urgent commandment, and to
+listen to His solemn assurance, by which He enforces the wisdom of
+the self-suppression: 'It is better for thee to enter into life
+maimed, than having two hands, to be cast into hell-fire.'
+
+Give your hearts to Jesus Christ, and set the following in His
+footsteps and the keeping of His commandments high above all other
+aims. You will have to suppress much and give up much, but such
+suppression is the shortest road to becoming perfect men, complete
+in Him, and such surrender is the surest way to possess all things.
+'He that loseth his life'--which is more than hand or eye--for
+Christ's sake,' the same shall find it.'
+
+
+
+
+THE LOST SHEEP AND THE SEEKING SHEPHERD
+
+
+    If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone
+    astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and
+    goeth Into the mountains, and seeketh that which is
+    gone astray!--MATT. xviii. 12.
+
+We find this simple parable, or germ of a parable, in a somewhat more
+expanded form, as the first of the incomparable three in the fifteenth
+chapter of Luke's Gospel. Perhaps our Lord repeated the parable more
+than once. It is an unveiling of His inmost heart, and therein a
+revelation of the very heart of God. It touches the deepest things in
+His relation to men, and sets forth thoughts of Him, such as man never
+dared to dream. It does all this by the homeliest image and by an
+appeal to the simplest instincts. The most prosaic shepherd looks for
+lost sheep, and everybody has peculiar joy over lost things found.
+They may not be nearly so valuable as things that were not lost. The
+unstrayed may he many, and the strayed be but one. Still there is a
+keener joy in the recovery of the one than in the unbroken possession
+of the ninety-and-nine. That feeling in a man may be only selfishness,
+but homely as it is--when the loser is God, and the lost are men, it
+becomes the means of uttering and illustrating that truth concerning
+God which no religion but that of the Cross has ever been bold enough
+to proclaim, that He cares most for the wanderers, and rejoices over the
+return of the one that went astray more than over the ninety-and-nine
+who never wandered.
+
+There are some significant differences between this edition of the
+parable and the form which it assumes in the Gospel according to
+Luke. There it is spoken in vindication of Christ's consorting with
+publicans and sinners; here it is spoken in order to point the
+lesson of not despising the least and most insignificant of the sons
+of men. There the seeking Shepherd is obviously Christ; here the
+seeking Shepherd is rather the Divine Father; as appears by the
+words of the next verse: 'For it is not the will of your Father
+which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.'
+There the sheep is lost; here the sheep goes astray. There the
+Shepherd seeks till He find, here the Shepherd, perhaps, fails to
+find; for our Lord says, '_If so be_ that he find it.'
+
+But I am not about to venture on all the thoughts which this parable
+suggests, nor even to deal with the main lesson which it teaches. I
+wish merely to look at the two figures--the wanderer and the seeker.
+
+I. First, then, let us look at that figure of the one wanderer.
+
+Of course I need scarcely remind you that in the immediate
+application of the parable in Luke's Gospel, the ninety-and-nine
+were the respectable people who thought the publicans and harlots
+altogether too dirty to touch, and regarded it as very doubtful
+conduct on the part of this young Rabbi from Nazareth to be mixed up
+with persons whom no one with a proper regard for whited sepulchres
+would have anything to do with. To them He answers, in effect--I am
+a shepherd; that is my vindication. Of course a shepherd goes after
+and cares for the lost sheep. He does not ask about its worth, or
+anything else. He simply follows the lost because it is lost. It may
+be a poor little creature after all, but it is lost, and that is
+enough. And so He vindicates Himself to the ninety-and-nine: 'You do
+not need Me, you are found. I take you on your own estimation of
+yourselves, and tell you that My mission is to the wanderers.'
+
+I do not suppose, however, that any of us have need to be reminded
+that upon a closer and deeper examination of the facts of the case,
+every hoof of the ninety-and-nine belonged to a stray sheep too; and
+that in the wider application of the parable _all_ men are
+wanderers. Remembering, then, this universal application, I would
+point out two or three things about the condition of these strayed
+sheep, which include the whole race. The ninety-and-nine may shadow
+for us a number of beings, in unfallen worlds, immensely greater
+than even the multitudes of wandering souls that have lived here
+through weary ages of sin and tears, but that does not concern us
+now.
+
+The first thought I gather from the parable is that all men are
+Christ's sheep. That sounds a strange thing to say. What? all these
+men and women who, having run away from Him, are plunged in sin,
+like sheep mired in a black bog, the scoundrels and the profligates,
+the scum and the outcasts of great cities; people with narrow
+foreheads, and blighted, blasted lives, the despair of our modern
+civilisation--are they all His? And in those great wide-lying
+heathen lands where men know nothing of His name and of His love,
+are they all His too? Let Him answer, 'Other sheep I have'--though
+they look like goats to-day--'which are not of this fold, them also
+must I bring, and they shall hear My voice.' All men are Christ's,
+because He has been the Agent of divine creation, and the grand
+words of the hundredth Psalm are true about Him. 'It is He that hath
+made us, and we are His. We are His people and the sheep of His
+pasture.' They are His, because His sacrifice has bought them for
+His. Erring, straying, lost, they still belong to the Shepherd.
+
+Notice next, the picture of the sheep as wandering. The word is,
+literally, 'which _goeth_ astray,' not 'which is gone astray.'
+It pictures the process of wandering, not the result as accomplished.
+We see the sheep, poor, silly creature, not going anywhere in
+particular, only there is a sweet tuft of grass here, and it crops
+that; and here is a bit of ground where there is soft walking, and it
+goes there; and so, step by step, not meaning anything, not knowing
+where it is going, or that it _is_ going anywhere; it goes, and
+goes, and goes, and at last it finds out that it is away from its
+beat on the hillside--for sheep keep to one bit of hillside generally,
+as any shepherd will tell you--and then it begins to bleat, and most
+helpless of creatures, fluttering and excited, rushes about amongst
+the thorns and brambles, or gets mired in some quag or other, and it
+will never find its way back of itself until some one comes for it.
+
+'So,' says Christ to us, 'there are a great many of you who do not
+mean to go wrong; you are not going anywhere in particular, you do
+not start on your course with any intentions either way, of doing
+right or wrong, of keeping near God, or going away from Him, but you
+simply go where the grass is sweetest, or the walking easiest. But
+look at the end of it; where you have got to. You have got away from
+Him.'
+
+Now, if you take that series of parables in Luke xv., and note the
+metaphors there, you will see three different sides given of the
+process by which men's hearts stray away from God. There is the
+sheep that wanders. That is partly conscious, and voluntary, but in
+a large measure simply yielding to inclination and temptation. Then
+there is the coin that trundles away under some piece of furniture,
+and is lost--that is a picture of the manner in which a man, without
+volition, almost mechanically sometimes, slides into sins and
+disappears as it were, and gets covered over with the dust of evil.
+And then there is the worst of all, the lad that had full knowledge
+of what he was doing. 'I am going into a far-off country; I cannot
+stand this any longer--all restraint and no liberty, and no power of
+doing what I like with my own; and always obliged to obey and be
+dependent on my father for my pocket-money! Give me what belongs to
+me, for good and all, and let me go!' That is the picture of the
+worst kind of wandering, when a man knows what he is about, and
+looks at the merciful restraint of the law of God, and says: 'No! I
+had rather be far away; and my own master, and not always be
+"cribbed, cabined, and confined" with these limitations.'
+
+The straying of the half-conscious sheep may seem more innocent, but
+it carries the poor creature away from the shepherd as completely as
+if it had been wholly intelligent and voluntary. Let us learn the
+lesson. In a world like this, if a man does not know very clearly
+where he is going, he is sure to go wrong. If you do not exercise a
+distinct determination to do God's will, and to follow in His
+footsteps who has set us an example; and if your main purpose is to
+get succulent grass to eat and soft places to walk in, you are
+certain before long to wander tragically from all that is right and
+noble and pure. It is no excuse for you to say: 'I never meant it';
+'I did not intend any harm, I only followed my own inclinations.'
+'More mischief is wrought'--to the man himself, as well as to other
+people--'from want of thought than is wrought by' an evil will. And
+the sheep has strayed as effectually, though, when it set out on its
+journey, it never thought of straying. Young men and women beginning
+life, remember! and take this lesson.
+
+But then there is another point that I must touch for a moment. In
+the Revised Version you will find a very tiny alteration in the
+words of my text, which, yet, makes a large difference in the sense.
+The last clause of my text, as it stands in our Bible, is, 'And
+seeketh that which is _gone_ astray'; the Revised Version more
+correctly reads, 'And seeketh that which _is going_ astray.'
+Now, look at the difference in these two renderings. In the former
+the process is represented as finished, in the correct rendering it
+is represented as going on. And that is what I would press on you,
+the awful, solemn, necessarily progressive character of our
+wanderings from God. A man never gets to the end of the distance
+that separates between him and the Father, if his face is turned
+away from God. Every moment the separation is increasing. Two lines
+start from each other at the acutest angle and diverge more the
+further they are produced, until at last the one may be away up by
+the side of God's throne, and the other away down in the deepest
+depths of hell. So accordingly my text carries with solemn pathos,
+in a syllable, the tremendous lesson: 'The sheep is not gone, but
+_going_ astray.' Ah! there are some of my hearers who are daily
+and hourly increasing the distance between themselves and their
+merciful Father.
+
+Now the last thing here in this picture is the contrast between the
+description given of the wandering sheep in our text, and that in
+St. Luke. Here it is represented as wandering, there it is
+represented as lost. That is very beautiful and has a meaning often
+not noticed by hasty readers. Who is it that has lost it? We talk
+about the lost soul and the lost man, as if it were the man that had
+lost _himself_, and that is true, and a dreadful truth it is.
+But that is not the truth that is taught in this parable, and meant
+by us to be gathered from it. Who is it that has lost it? He to whom
+it belonged.
+
+That is to say, wherever a heart gets ensnared and entangled with
+the love of the treasures and pleasures of this life, and so departs
+in allegiance and confidence and friendship from the living God,
+there God the Father regards Himself as the poorer by the loss of
+one of His children, by the loss of one of His sheep. He does not
+care to possess you by the hold of mere creation and supremacy and
+rule. He desires you to love Him, and then He deems that He has you.
+And if you do not love Him, He deems that He has lost you. There is
+something in the divine heart that goes out after His lost property.
+We touch here upon deep things that we cannot speak of intelligently;
+only remember this, that what looks like self-regard in man is the
+purest love in God, and that there is nothing in the whole revelation
+which Christianity makes of the character of God more wonderful than
+this, that He judges that He has lost His child when His child has
+forgotten to love Him.
+
+II. So much, then, for one of the great pictures in this text. I can
+spare but a sentence or two for the other--the picture of the
+Seeker.
+
+I said that in the one form of the parable it was more distinctly
+the Father, and in the other more distinctly the Son, who is
+represented as seeking the sheep. But these two do still coincide in
+substance, inasmuch as God's chief way of seeking us poor wandering
+sheep is through the work of His dear Son Jesus, and the coming of
+Christ is the Father's searching for His sheep in the 'cloudy and
+dark day.'
+
+According to my text God leaves the ninety-and-nine and goes into
+the mountains where the wanderer is, and seeks him. And this,
+couched in veiled form, is the great mystery of the divine love, the
+incarnation and sacrifice of Jesus Christ our Lord. Here is the
+answer by anticipation to the sarcasm that is often levelled at
+evangelical Christianity: 'You must think a good deal of human
+nature, and must have a very arrogant notion of the inhabitant of
+this little speck that floats in the great sea of the heavens, if
+you suppose that with all these millions of orbs he is so important
+that the divine Nature came down upon this little tiny molehill, and
+took his nature and died.'
+
+'Yes!' says Christ, 'not because man was so great, not because man
+was so valuable in comparison with the rest of creation--he was but
+one amongst ninety-nine unfallen and unsinful--but because he was so
+wretched, because he was so small, because he had gone so far away
+from God; _therefore_, the seeking love came after him, and
+would draw him to itself.' That, I think, is answer enough to the
+cavil.
+
+And then, there is a difference between these two versions of the
+Parable in respect to their representation of the end of the seeking.
+The one says 'seeks until He finds.' Oh! the patient, incredible
+inexhaustibleness of the divine love. God's long-suffering, if I may
+take such a metaphor, like a sleuth-hound, will follow the object
+of its search through all its windings and doublings, until it comes
+up to it. So that great seeking Shepherd follows us through all the
+devious courses of our wayward, wandering footsteps doubling back
+upon themselves, until He finds us. Though the sheep may increase its
+distance, the Shepherd follows. The further away we get the more
+tender His appeal; the more we stop our ears the louder the voice
+with which He calls. You cannot wear out Jesus Christ, you cannot
+exhaust the resources of His bounteousness, of His tenderness.
+However we may have been going wrong, however far we may have
+been wandering, however vehemently we may be increasing, at every
+moment, our distance from Him, He is coming after us, serene, loving,
+long-suffering, and will not be put away.
+
+Dear friend! would you only believe that a loving, living Person is
+really seeking you, seeking you by my poor words now, seeking you by
+many a providence, seeking you by His Gospel, by His Spirit; and
+will never be satisfied till He has found you in your finding Him
+and turning your soul to Him!
+
+But, I beseech you, do not forget the solemn lesson drawn from the
+other form of the parable which is given in my text: _If so be
+that He find it_. There is a possibility of failure. What an
+awful power you have of burying yourself in the sepulchre, as it
+were, of your own self-will, and hiding yourself in the darkness of
+your own unbelief! You can frustrate the seeking love of God. Some
+of you have done so--some of you have done so all your lives. Some
+of you, perhaps at this moment, are trying to do so, and consciously
+endeavouring to steel your hearts against some softening that may
+have been creeping over them whilst I have been speaking. Are you
+yielding to His seeking love, or wandering further and further from
+Him? He has come to find you. Let Him not seek in vain, but let the
+Good Shepherd draw you to Himself, where, lifted on the Cross, He
+'giveth His life for the sheep.' He will restore your soul and carry
+you back on His strong shoulder, or in His bosom near His loving
+heart, to the green pastures and the safe fold. There will be joy in
+His heart, more than over those who have never wandered; and there
+will be joy in the heart of the returning wanderer, such as they who
+had not strayed and learned the misery could never know, for, as the
+profound Jewish saying has it, 'In the place where the penitents
+stand, the perfectly righteous cannot stand.'
+
+
+
+
+PERSISTENCE OF THWARTED LOVE
+
+
+    'If so be that he find it.'--MATT. xviii. 13.
+
+    'Until he find it.'--LUKE xv. 4.
+
+Like other teachers, Jesus seems to have had favourite points of
+view and utterances which came naturally to His lips. There are
+several instances in the gospels of His repeating the same sayings
+in entirely different connections and with different applications.
+One of these habitual points of view seems to have been the thought
+of men as wandering sheep, and of Himself as the Shepherd. The
+metaphor has become so familiar that we need a moment's reflection
+to grasp the mingled tenderness, sadness, and majesty of it. He
+thought habitually of all humanity as a flock of lost sheep, and of
+Himself as high above them, unparticipant of their evil, and having
+one errand--to bring them back.
+
+And not only does He frequently refer to this symbol, but we have
+the two editions, from which my texts are respectively taken, of the
+Parable of the Lost Sheep. I say two editions, because it seems to
+me a great deal more probable that Jesus should have repeated
+Himself than that either of the Evangelists should have ventured to
+take this gem and set it in an alien setting. The two versions
+differ slightly in some unimportant expressions, and Matthew's is
+the more condensed of the two. But the most important variation is
+the one which is brought to light by the two fragments which I have
+ventured to isolate as texts. '_If_ He find' implies the
+possible failure of the Shepherd's search; '_till_ He find'
+implies His unwearied persistence in the teeth of all failure. And,
+taken in conjunction, they suggest some very blessed and solemn
+considerations, which I pray for strength to lay upon your minds and
+hearts now.
+
+I. But first let me say a word or two upon the more general thought
+brought out in both these clauses--of the Shepherd's search.
+
+Now, beautiful and heart-touching as that picture is, of the
+Shepherd away amongst the barren mountains searching minutely in
+every ravine and thicket, it wants a little explanation in order to
+be brought into correspondence with the fact which it expresses. For
+His search for His lost property is not in ignorance of where it is,
+and His finding of it is not His discovery of His sheep, but its
+discovery of its Shepherd. We have to remember wherein consists the
+loss before we can understand wherein consists the search.
+
+Now, if we ask ourselves that question first, we get a flood of
+light on the whole matter. The great hundredth Psalm, according to
+its true rendering, says, 'It is He that hath made us, _and we are
+His_;  ... we are ... the sheep of His pasture.' But God's true
+possession of man is not simply the possession inherent in the act
+of creation. For there is only one way in which spirit can own
+spirit, or heart can possess heart, and that is through the
+voluntary yielding and love of the one to the other. So Jesus
+Christ, who, in all His seeking after us men, is the voice and hand
+of Almighty Love, does not count that He has found a man until the
+man has learned to love Him. For He loses us when we are alienated
+from Him, when we cease to trust Him, when we refuse to obey Him,
+when we will not yield to Him, but put Him far away from us.
+Therefore the search which, as being Christ's is God's in Christ, is
+for our love, our trust, our obedience; and in reality it consists
+of all the energies by which Jesus Christ, as God's embodiment and
+representative, seeks to woo and win you and me back to Himself,
+that He may truly possess us.
+
+If the Shepherd's seeking is but a tender metaphor for the whole
+aggregate of the ways by which the love that is divine and human in
+Jesus Christ moves round about our closed hearts, as water may feel
+round some hermetically sealed vessel, seeking for an entrance, then
+surely the first and chiefest of them, which makes its appeal to each
+of us as directly as to any man that ever lived, is that great mystery
+that Jesus Christ, the eternal Word of God, left the ninety-and-nine
+that were safe on the high pastures of the mountains of God, and came
+down among us, out into the wilderness, 'to seek and to save that
+which was lost.'
+
+And, brother, that method of winning--I was going to say, of
+_earning_--our love comes straight in its appeal to every
+single soul on the face of the earth. Do not say that thou wert not
+in Christ's heart and mind when He willed to be born and willed to
+die. Thou, and thou, and thou, and every single unit of humanity
+were there clear before Him in their individuality; and He died for
+thee, and for me, and for _every_ man. And, in one aspect, that
+is more than to say that He died for _all_ men. There was a
+specific intention in regard to each of us in the mission of Jesus
+Christ; and when He went to the Cross the Shepherd was not giving
+His life for a confused flock of which He knew not the units, but
+for sheep the face of each of whom He knows, and each of whom He
+loves. There was His first seeking; there is His chief seeking.
+There is the seeking which ought to appeal to every soul of man, and
+which, ever since you were children, has been making its appeal to
+you. Has it done so in vain? Dear friend, let not your heart still
+be hard.
+
+He seeks us by every record of that mighty love that died for us,
+even when it is being spoken as poorly, and with as many limitations
+and imperfections, as I am speaking it now. 'As though God did
+beseech you by us, pray you in Christ's stead.' It is not arrogance,
+God forbid! it is simple truth when I say, Never mind about me; but
+my word, in so far as it is true and tender, is Christ's word to
+you. And here, in our midst, that unseen Form is passing along these
+pews and speaking to these hearts, and the Shepherd is seeking His
+sheep.
+
+He seeks each of us by the inner voices and emotions in our hearts
+and minds, by those strange whisperings which sometimes we hear, by
+the suddenly upstarting convictions of duty and truth which sometimes,
+without manifest occasion, flash across our hearts. These voices are
+Christ's voice, for, in a far deeper sense than most men superficially
+believe, 'He is the true Light that lighteth every man coming into
+the world.'
+
+He is seeking us by our unrest, by our yearnings after we know not
+what, by our dim dissatisfaction which insists upon making itself
+felt in the midst of joys and delights, and which the world fails to
+satisfy as much as it fails to interpret. There is a cry in every
+heart, little as the bearer of the heart translates it into its true
+meaning--a cry after God, even the living God. And by all your
+unrests, your disappointments, your hopes unfulfilled, your hopes
+fulfilled and blasted in the fulfilment, your desires that perish
+unfruited; by all the mystic movements of the spirit that yearns for
+something beyond the material and the visible, Jesus Christ is
+seeking His sheep.
+
+He seeks us by the discipline of life, for I believe that Christ is
+the active Providence of God, and that the hands that were pierced
+on the Cross do move the wheels of the history of the world, and
+mould the destinies of individual spirits.
+
+The deepest meaning of all life is that we should be won to seek Him
+who in it all is seeking us, and led to venture our hopes, and fling
+the anchor of our faith beyond the bounds of the visible, that it
+may fasten in the Eternal, even in Christ Himself, 'the same
+yesterday and to-day and for ever' when earth and its training are
+done with. Brethren, it is a blessed thing to live, when we
+interpret life's smallnesses aright as the voice of the Master, who,
+by them all--our sadness and our gladness, the unrest of our hearts
+and the yearnings and longings of our spirits, by the ministry of
+His word, by the record of His sufferings--is echoing the invitation
+of the Cross itself, 'Come unto Me, all ye ... and I will give you
+rest!' So much for the Shepherd's search.
+
+II. And now, in the second place, a word as to the possible
+thwarting of the search.
+
+'If so be that He find.' That is an awful _if_, when we think
+of what lies below it. The thing seems an absurdity when it is
+spoken, and yet it is a grim fact in many a life--viz. that Christ's
+effort can fail and be thwarted. Not that His search is perfunctory
+or careless, but that we shroud ourselves in darkness through which
+that love can find no way. It is we, not He, that are at fault when
+He fails to find that which He seeks. There is nothing more certain
+than that God, and Christ the image of God, desire the rescue of
+every man, woman, and child of the human race. Let no teaching blur
+that sunlight fact. There is nothing more certain than that Jesus
+Christ has done, and is doing, all that He can do to secure that
+purpose. If He could make every man love Him, and so find every man,
+be sure that He would do it. But He cannot. For here is the central
+mystery of creation, which if we could solve there would be few
+knots that would resist our fingers, that a finite will like yours
+or mine can lift itself up against God, and that, having the
+capacity, it has the desire. He says, 'Come!' We say, 'I will not.'
+That door of the heart opens from within, and He never breaks it
+open. He stands at the door and knocks. And then the same solemn
+_if_ comes--'If any man opens, I will come in'; if any man
+keeps it shut, and holds on to prevent its being opened, I will stop
+out.
+
+Brethren, I seek to press upon you now the one plain truth, that if
+you are not saved men and women, there is no person in heaven or
+earth or hell that has any blame in the matter but yourself alone.
+God appeals to us, and says, 'What more _could_ have been done
+to My vineyard that I have not done unto it?' His hands are clean,
+and the infinite love of Christ is free from all blame, and all the
+blame lies at our own doors.
+
+I must not dwell upon the various reasons which lead so many men
+among us--as, alas! the utmost charity cannot but see that there
+are--to turn away from Christ's appeals, and to be unwilling to
+'have this Man' either 'to reign over' them or to save them. There
+are many such, I am sure, in my audience now; and I would fain, if I
+could, draw them to that Lord in whom alone they have life, and
+rest, and holiness, and heaven.
+
+One great reason is because you do not believe that you need Him.
+There is an awful inadequacy in most men's conceptions--and still
+more in their feelings--as to their sin. Oh dear friends, if you
+would only submit your consciences for one meditative half-hour to
+the light of God's highest law, I think you would find out something
+more than many of you know, as to what you are and what your sin is.
+Many of us do not much believe that we are in any danger. I have
+seen a sheep comfortably cropping the short grass on a down over the
+sea, with one foot out in the air, and a precipice of five hundred
+feet below it, and at the bottom the crawling water. It did not know
+that there was any danger of going over. That is like some of us. If
+you believed what is true--that 'sin when it is finished, bringeth
+forth death,' and understood what 'death' meant, you would feel the
+mercy of the Shepherd seeking you. Some of us think we are in the
+flock when we are not. Some of us do not like submission. Some of us
+have no inclination for the sweet pastures that He provides, and
+would rather stay where we are, and have the fare that is going
+there.
+
+We do not need to _do_ anything to put Him away. I have no
+doubt that some of us, as soon as my voice ceases, will plunge again
+into worldly talk and thoughts before they are down the chapel
+steps, and so blot out, as well as they can, any vagrant and
+superficial impression that may have been made. Dear brethren, it is
+a very easy matter to turn away from the Shepherd's voice. 'I
+called, and ye refused. I stretched out My hands, and _no man
+regarded_.' That is all! That is what you do, and that is enough.
+
+III. So, lastly, the thwarted search prolonged.
+
+'Till He find'--that is a wonderful and a merciful word. It
+indicates the infinitude of Christ's patient forgiveness and
+perseverance. _We_ tire of searching. 'Can a mother forget' or
+abandon her seeking after a lost child? Yes! if it has gone on for
+so long as to show that further search is hopeless, she will go home
+and nurse her sorrow in her heart. Or, perhaps, like some poor
+mothers and wives, it will turn her brain, and one sign of her
+madness will be that, long years after grief should have been calm
+because hope was dead, she will still be looking for the little one
+so long lost. But Jesus Christ stands at the closed door, as a great
+modern picture shows, though it has been so long undisturbedly
+closed that the hinges are brown with rust, and weeds grow high
+against it. He stands there in the night, with the dew on His hair,
+unheeded or repelled, like some stranger in a hostile village
+seeking for a night's shelter. He will not be put away; but, after
+all refusals, still with gracious finger, knocks upon the door, and
+speaks into the heart. Some of you have refused Him all your lives,
+and perhaps you have grey hairs upon you now. And He is speaking to
+you still. He 'suffereth long, is not easily provoked, is not soon
+angry; hopeth all things,' even of the obstinate rejecters.
+
+For that is another truth that this word 'till' preaches to us--viz.
+the possibility of bringing back those that have gone furthest away
+and have been longest away. The world has a great deal to say about
+incurable cases of moral obliquity and deformity. Christ knows
+nothing about 'incurable cases.' If there is a worst man in the
+world--and perhaps there is--there is nothing but his own
+disinclination to prevent his being brought back, and made as pure
+as an angel.
+
+But do not let us deal with generalities; let us bring the truths to
+ourselves. Dear brethren, I know nothing about the most of you. I
+should not know you again if I met you five minutes after we part
+now. I have never spoken to many of you, and probably never shall,
+except in this public way; but I know that _you_ need Christ,
+and that Christ wants _you_. And I know that, however far you
+have gone, you have not gone so far but that His love feels out
+through the remoteness to grasp you, and would fain draw you to
+itself.
+
+I dare say you have seen upon some dreary moor, or at the foot of
+some 'scaur' on the hillside, the bleached bones of a sheep, lying
+white and grim among the purple heather. It strayed, unthinking of
+danger, tempted by the sweet herbage; it fell; it vainly bleated; it
+died. But what if it had heard the shepherd's call, and had
+preferred to lie where it fell, and to die where it lay? We talk
+about 'silly sheep.' Are there any of them so foolish as men and
+women listening to me now, who will not answer the Shepherd's voice
+when they hear it, with, 'Lord, here am I, come and help me out of
+this miry clay, and bring me back.' He is saying to each of you,
+'Turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die?' May He not have to say at last
+of any of us, 'Ye would not come to Me, that ye might have life!'
+
+
+
+
+FORGIVEN AND UNFORGIVING
+
+
+    'Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until
+     seven times; but, Until seventy times seven.'
+     --MATT. xviii. 22.
+
+The disciples had been squabbling about pre-eminence in the kingdom
+which they thought was presently to appear. They had ventured to
+refer their selfish and ambitious dispute to Christ's arbitrament.
+He answered by telling them the qualifications of 'the greatest in
+the kingdom'--that they are to be humble like little children; that
+they are to be placable; that they are to use all means to reclaim
+offenders; and that, even if the offence is against themselves, they
+are to ignore the personal element, and to regard the offender, not
+so much as having done them harm, as having harmed himself by his
+evil-doing.
+
+Peter evidently feels that that is a very hard commandment for a man
+of his temperament, and so he goes to Jesus Christ for a little
+further direction, and proposes a question as to the limits of this
+disposition: 'How often shall my brother sin?' The very question
+betrays that he does not understand what forgiveness means; for it
+is not real, if the 'forgiven' sin is stowed away safely in the
+memory. 'I can forgive, but I cannot forget,' generally means, 'I do
+not _quite_ forgive.' We are not to take the pardoned offence,
+and carry it to a kind of 'suspense account,' to be revived if
+another is committed, but we are to blot it out altogether. Peter
+thought that he had given a very wide allowance when he said 'seven
+times.' Christ's answer lifts the whole subject out of the realm of
+hard and fast lines and limits, for He takes the two perfect numbers
+'ten' and 'seven,' and multiplies them together, and then He
+multiplies that by 'seven' once more; and the product is _not_
+four hundred and ninety, but is innumerableness. He does not mean
+that the four hundred and ninety-first offence is outside the pale,
+but He suggests indefiniteness, endlessness. So, as I say, He lifts
+the question out of the region in which Peter was keeping it,
+thereby betraying that he did not understand what he was talking
+about, and tells us that there are no limits to the obligation.
+
+The parable which follows, and follows with a 'therefore,' does not
+deal so much with Peter's question as to the limits of the
+disposition, but sets forth its grounds and the nature of its
+manifestations. If we understand why we ought to forgive, and what
+forgiveness is, we shall not say, 'How often?' The question will
+have answered itself.
+
+I turn to the parable rather than the words which I have read as our
+starting-point, to seek to bring out the lessons which it contains
+in regard to our relations to God, and to one another. There are
+three sections in it: the king and his debtor; the forgiven debtor
+and _his_ debtor; and the forgiven debtor unforgiven because
+unforgiving. And if we look at these three points I think we shall
+get the lessons intended.
+
+I. The king and his debtor.
+
+A certain king has servants, whom he gathers together to give in
+their reckoning. And one of them is brought that owes him ten
+thousand talents. Now, it is to be noticed at the very outset that
+the analogy between debt and sin, though real, is extremely
+imperfect. No metaphor of that sort goes on all fours, and there has
+been a great deal of harm done to theology and to evangelical
+religion by carrying out too completely the analogy between money
+debts and our sins against God. But although the analogy is
+imperfect, it is very real. The first point that is to be brought
+out in this first part of the parable is the immense magnitude of
+every man's transgressions against God. Numismatists and
+arithmeticians may jangle about the precise amount represented by
+the thousand talents. It differs according to the talent which is
+taken as the basis of the calculation. There were several talents in
+use in the currency of ancient days. But the very point of the
+expression is not the specification of an exact amount, but the use
+of a round number which is to suggest an undefined magnitude. 'Ten
+thousand talents,' according to one estimate, is some two millions
+and a quarter of pounds sterling.
+
+But I would point out that the amount is stated in terms of talents,
+and _any_ talent is a large sum; and there are ten thousand of
+these; and the reason why the account is made out in terms of
+talents, the largest denomination in the currency of the period, is
+because every sin against God is a great sin. He being what He is,
+and we being what we are, and sin being what it is, every sin is
+large, although the deed which embodies it may be, when measured by
+the world's foot-rule, very small. For the essence of sin is
+rebellion against God and the enthroning of self as His victorious
+rival; and all rebellion is rebellion, whether it is found in arms
+in the field, or whether it is simply sulkily refusing obedience and
+cherishing thoughts of treason. We are always apt to go wrong in our
+estimate of the great and small in human actions, and, although the
+terms of magnitude do not apply properly to moral questions at all,
+there is no more conspicuous misuse of language than when we speak
+of anything which has in it the virus of rebellion against God, and
+the breach of His law, as being a small sin. It may be a small act;
+it is a great sin. Little rattlesnakes are snakes; they have rattles
+and poison fangs as really as the most monstrous of the brood that
+coils and hisses in some cave. So the account is made out in terms
+of talents, because every sin is a great one. I need not dwell upon
+the numerousness that is suggested. 'Ten thousand' is the natural
+current expression for a number that is not innumerable, but is only
+known to be very great. The psalmist says: 'They are more than the
+hairs of my head.' How many hairs had you in your head, David? Do
+you know? 'No!' And how many sins have you committed? Do you know?
+'No!' The number is beyond count by us, though it may be counted by
+Him against whom they are done. Do you believe that about yourself,
+my friend, that the debit side of your account has filled all the
+page and has to be carried forward on to another? Do we any of us
+realise, as we all of us ought to do, the infinite number, and the
+transcendent greatness, of our transgressions against the Father?
+
+But the next point to be noticed is the stern legal right of the
+creditor. It sounds harsh, cruel, almost brutal, that the man and
+his wife and his children should be sold into slavery, and all that
+he had should be taken from him, in order to go some little way
+towards the reduction of the enormous debt that he owed. Christ puts
+in that harsh and apparently cruel conduct in the story, not to
+suggest that it was harsh and cruel, but because it was according to
+the law of the time. A recognised legal right was exercised by the
+creditor when he said, 'Take him; sell him for a slave, and bring me
+what he fetches in the open markets.' So that we have here suggested
+the solemn thought of the right that divine justice, acting
+according to strict retributive law, has over each of us. Our own
+consciences attest it as perfectly within the scope of the divine
+retributive justice that our enormous sin should bring down a
+tremendous punishment.
+
+I said that the analogy between sin and debt was a very imperfect
+one. It is imperfect in regard to one point--viz. the implication of
+other people in the consequences of the man's evil; for although it
+is quite true that 'the evil that men do lives after them, and
+spreads far beyond their sight, and involves many people, no other
+is amenable to divine justice for the sinner's debt. It is quite
+true that, when we do an evil action, we never can tell how far its
+wind-borne seeds may be carried, or where they may alight, or what
+sort of unwholesome fruit they may bear, or who may be poisoned by
+them; but, on the other hand, we, and we only, are responsible for
+our individual transgressions against God. 'If thou be wise, thou
+shalt be wise for thyself; and if thou scornest, thou alone shalt
+bear it.'
+
+The same imperfection in the analogy applies to the next point in the
+parable--viz. the bankrupt debtor's prayer, 'Have patience with me,
+and I will pay thee all.' Easy to promise! I wonder how long it would
+have taken a penniless bankrupt to scrape together two and a quarter
+millions of pounds? He said a great deal more than he could make good.
+But the language of his prayer is by no means the language that
+becomes a penitent at God's throne. We have not to offer to make
+future satisfaction. No! that is impossible. 'What I have written I
+have written,' and the page, with all its smudges and blots and
+misshapen letters, cannot be made other than it is by any future
+pages fairly written. No future righteousness has any power to affect
+the guilt of past sin. There is one thing that does _discharge_ the
+writing from the page. Do you remember Paul's words, 'blotting out
+the handwriting that was against us--nailing it to His Cross'? You
+sometimes dip your pens into red ink, and run a couple of lines
+across the page of an account that is done with. Jesus Christ does
+the same across our account, and the debt is non-existent, because
+He has died.
+
+But the prayer is the expression, if not of penitence yet of
+petition, and all the stern rigour of the law's requirement at once
+melts away, and the king who, in the former words, seemed so harsh,
+now is almost incredibly merciful. For he not only cancels the debt,
+but sets the man free. 'Thy ways are not as our ways; ... as the
+heavens are higher than the earth, so great is His mercy toward' the
+sinful soul.
+
+II. So much, then, for the first part of this parable. Now a word as
+to the second, the forgiven debtor and his debt.
+
+Our Lord uses in the 27th and 28th verses of our text the same
+expression very significantly and emphatically. 'The lord of _that
+servant_ was moved with compassion.' And then again, in the 28th
+verse, 'But that _servant_ went out and found one of his
+fellow-servants.' The repetition of the same phrase hooks the two
+halves together, emphasises the identity of the man, and the
+difference of his demeanour, on the two occasions.
+
+The conduct described is almost impossibly disgusting and truculent.
+'He found his fellow-servant, who owed him a hundred pence'--some
+three pounds, ten shillings--and with the hands that a minute before
+had been wrung in agony, and extended in entreaty, he throttled him;
+and with the voice that had been plaintively pleading for mercy a
+minute before, he gruffly growled, 'Pay me that thou owest.' He had
+just come through an agony of experience that might have made him
+tender. He had just received a blessing that might have made his
+heart glow. But even the repetition of his own petition does not
+touch him, and when the poor fellow-servant, with his paltry debt,
+says, 'Have patience with me, and I will pay thee all,' it avails
+nothing. He durst not sell his fellow-servant. God's rights over a
+man are more than any man's over another. But he does what he can.
+He will not do much towards recouping himself of his loan by
+flinging the poor debtor into prison, but if he cannot get his
+ducats he will gloat over his 'pound of flesh.' So he hurries him
+off to gaol.
+
+Could a man have done like that? Ah! brethren, the things that would
+be monstrous in our relations to one another are common in our
+relations to God. Every day we see, and, alas! do, the very same
+thing, in our measure and degree. Do you never treasure up somebody's
+slights? Do you never put away in a pigeon-hole for safe-keeping,
+endorsed with the doer's name on the back of it, the record of some
+trivial offence against you? It is but as a penny against a talent,
+for the worst that any of us can do to another is nothing as compared
+with what many of us have been doing all our lives toward God. I dare
+say that some of us will go out from this place, and the next man that
+we meet that 'rubs us the wrong way,' or does us any harm, we shall
+score down his act against him with as implacable and unmerciful an
+unforgivingness as that of this servant in the parable. Do not believe
+that he was a monster of iniquity. He was just like us. We all of us
+have one human heart, and this man's crime is but too natural to us
+all. The essence of it was that having been forgiven, he did not
+forgive.
+
+So, then, our Lord here implies the principle that God's mercy to us
+is to set the example to which our dealings with others is to be
+conformed. 'Even as I had mercy on thee' plainly proposes that
+miracle of divine forgiveness as our pattern as well as our hope.
+The world's morality recognises the duty of forgiveness. Christ
+shows us God's forgiveness as at once the model which is the perfect
+realisation of the idea in its completeness and inexhaustibleness,
+and also the motive which, brought into our experience, inclines and
+enables us to forgive.
+
+III. And now I come to the last point of the text--the debtor who
+had been forgiven falling back into the ranks of the unforgiven,
+because he does not forgive.
+
+The fellow-servants were very much disgusted, no doubt. Our
+consciences work a great deal more rapidly, and rigidly, about other
+people's faults than they do about our own. And nine out of ten of
+these fellow-servants that were very sorry, and ran and told the
+king, would have done exactly the same thing themselves. The king,
+for the first time, is wroth. We do not read that he was so before,
+when the debt only was in question; but such unforgiving harshness,
+after the experience of such merciful forgiveness, rouses his
+righteous indignation. The unmercifulness of Christian people is a
+worse sin than many a deed that goes by very ugly names amongst men.
+And so the judgment that falls upon this evil-doer, who, by his
+truculence to his fellow-servant, had betrayed the baseness of his
+nature and the ingratitude of his heart, is, 'Put him back where he
+was! Tie the two and a quarter millions round his neck again! Let us
+see what he will do by way of discharging it now!'
+
+Now, do not let any theological systems prevent you from recognising
+the solemn truth that underlies that representation, that there may
+be things in the hearts and conduct of forgiven Christians which may
+cancel the cancelling of their debt, and bring it all back again. No
+man can cherish the malicious disposition that treasures up offences
+against himself, and at the same moment feel that the divine love is
+wrapping him round in its warm folds. If we are to retain our
+consciousness of having been forgiven by God, and received into the
+amplitude of His heart, we must, in our measure and degree, imitate
+that on which we trust, and be mirrors of the divine mercy which we
+say has saved us.
+
+Our parable lays equal stress on two things. First, that the
+foundation of all real mercifulness in men is the reception of
+forgiving mercy from God. We must have experienced it before we can
+exercise it. And, second, we must exercise it, if we desire to
+continue to experience it. 'Blessed are the merciful, for they shall
+obtain mercy.' That applies to Christian people. But behind that
+there lies the other truth, that in order to be merciful we must
+first of all have received the initial mercy of cancelled
+transgression.
+
+So, dear friends, here are the two lessons for every one of us.
+First, to recognise our debt, and go to Him in whom God is well
+pleased, for its abolishment and forgiveness; and then to go out
+into the world, and live like Him, and show to others love kindled
+by and kindred to that to which we trust for our own salvation. 'Be
+ye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in
+love, as God also hath loved us.'
+
+
+
+
+THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE KING
+
+
+    'And, behold, one came and said unto Him, Good Master,
+    what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal
+    life? 17. And He said unto him, Why callest thou Me
+    good? there is none good but One, that is, God: but
+    if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.
+    18. He saith unto Him, Which? Jesus said, Thou shalt
+    do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou
+    shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness,
+    19. Honour thy father and thy mother: and, Thou shalt
+    love thy neighbour as thyself. 20. The young man saith
+    unto Him, All these things have I kept from my youth
+    up: what lack I yet? 21. Jesus said unto him, If thou
+    wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give
+    to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven:
+    and come and follow Me. 22. But when the young man
+    heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had
+    great possessions. 23. Then said Jesus unto His
+    disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall
+    hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. 24. And again
+    I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through
+    the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into
+    the kingdom of God. 25. When His disciples heard it,
+    they were exceedingly amazed, saying, Who then can be
+    saved? 26. But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them,
+    With men this is impossible; but with God all things
+    are possible.'--MATT. xix. 16-26.
+
+We have here one of the saddest stories in the gospels. It is a true
+soul's tragedy. The young man is in earnest, but his earnestness has
+not volume and force enough to float him over the bar. He wishes to
+have some great thing bidden him to do, but he recoils from the
+sharp test which Christ imposes. He truly wants the prize, but the
+cost is too great; and yet he wishes it so much that he goes away
+without it in deep sorrow, which perhaps, at another day, ripened
+into the resolve which then was too high for him. There is a certain
+severity in our Lord's tone, an absence of recognition of the much
+good in the young man, and a naked stringency in His demand from
+him, which sound almost harsh, but which are set in their true light
+by Mark's note, that Jesus 'loved him,' and therefore treated him
+thus. The truest way to draw ingenuous souls is not to flatter, nor
+to make entrance easy by dropping the standard or hiding the
+requirements, but to call out all their energy by setting before
+them the lofty ideal. Easy-going disciples are easily made--and
+lost. Thorough-going ones are most surely won by calling for entire
+surrender.
+
+I. We may gather together the earlier part of the conversation, as
+introductory to the Lord's requirement (vs. 16-20), in which we have
+the picture of a real though imperfect moral earnestness, and may
+note how Christ deals with it. Matthew tells us that the questioner
+was young and rich. Luke adds that he was a 'ruler'--a synagogue
+official, that is--which was unusual for a young man, and indicates
+that his legal blamelessness was recognised. Mark adds one of his
+touches, which are not only picturesque, but character-revealing, by
+the information that he came 'running' to Jesus in the way, so eager
+was he, and fell at His feet, so reverential was he. His first
+question is singularly compacted of good and error. The fact that he
+came to Christ for a purely religious purpose, not seeking personal
+advantage for himself or for others, like the crowds who followed
+for loaves and cures, nor laying traps for Him with puzzles which
+might entangle Him with the authorities, nor asking theological
+questions for curiosity, but honestly and earnestly desiring to be
+helped to lay hold of eternal life, is to be put down to his credit.
+He is right in counting it the highest blessing.
+
+Where had he got hold of the thought of 'eternal life'? It was miles
+above the dusty speculations and casuistries of the rabbis. Probably
+from Christ Himself. He was right in recognising that the conditions
+of possessing it were moral, but his conception of 'good' was
+superficial, and he thought more of doing good than of being good,
+and of the desired life as payment for meritorious actions. In a
+word, he stood at the point of view of the old dispensation. 'This
+do, and thou shalt live,' was his belief; and what he wished was
+further instruction as to what 'this' was. He was to be praised in
+that he docilely brought his question to Jesus, even though, as
+Christ's answer shows, there was error mingling in his docility.
+Such is the character--a young man, rich, influential, touched with
+real longings for the highest life, ready, so far as he knows
+himself, to do whatever he is bidden, in order to secure it.
+
+We might have expected Christ, who opened His arms wide for
+publicans and harlots, to have welcomed this fair, ingenuous seeker
+with some kindly word. But He has none for him. We adopt the reading
+of the Revised Version, in which our Lord's first word is repellent.
+It is in effect--'There is no need for your question, which answers
+itself. There is one good Being, the source and type of every good
+thing, and therefore the good, which you ask about, can only be
+conformity to His will. You need not come to Me to know what you are
+to do.' He relegates the questioner, not to his own conscience, but
+to the authoritative revealed will of God in the law. Modern views
+of Christ's work, which put all its stress on the perfection of His
+moral character, and His office as a pattern of righteousness, may
+well be rebuked by the fact that He expressly disclaimed this
+character, and declared that, if He was only to be regarded as
+republishing the law of human conduct, His work was needless. Men
+have enough knowledge of what they must do to enter into life,
+without Jesus Christ. No doubt, Christ's moral teaching transcends
+that given of old; but His special work was not to tell men what to
+do, but to make it possible for them to do it; to give, not the law,
+but the power, both the motive and the impulse, which will fulfil
+the law. On another occasion He answered a similar question in a
+different manner. When the Jews asked Him, 'What must we do, that we
+may work the works of God?' He replied by the plain evangelical
+statement: 'This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He
+hath sent.' Why did He not answer the young ruler thus? Only because
+He knew that he needed to be led to that thought by having his own
+self-complacency shattered, and the clinging of his soul to earth
+laid bare. The whole treatment of him here is meant to bring him to
+the apprehension of faith as preceding all truly good work.
+
+The young man's second question says a great deal in its one word.
+It indicates astonishment at being remanded to these old, well-worn
+precepts, and might be rendered, 'What sort of commandments?' as if
+taking it for granted that they must be new and peculiar. It is the
+same spirit as that which in all ages has led men who with partial
+insight longed after eternal life, to seek it by fantastic and
+unusual roads of extraordinary sacrifices or services--the spirit
+which filled monasteries, and invented hair shirts, and fastings,
+and swinging with hooks in your back at Hindoo festivals. The
+craving for more than ordinary 'good works' shows a profound mistake
+in the estimate of the ordinary, and a fatal blunder as to the
+relation between 'goodness' and 'eternal life.'
+
+So Christ answers the question by quoting the second half of the
+Decalogue, which deals with the homeliest duties, and appending to
+it the summary of the law, which requires love to our neighbour as
+to ourselves. Why does He omit the earlier half? Probably because He
+would meet the error of the question, by presenting only the
+plainest, most familiar commandments, and because He desired to
+excite the consciousness of deficiency, which could be most easily
+done in connection with these.
+
+There is a touch of impatience in the rejoinder, 'All these have I
+kept,' and more than a touch of self-satisfaction. The law has
+failed to accomplish one of its chief purposes in the young man, in
+that it has not taught him his sinfulness. No doubt he had a right
+to say that his outward life had been free from breaches of such
+very elementary morality which any old woman could have taught him.
+He had never gone below the surface of the commandments, nor below
+the surface of his acts, or he would not have answered so jauntily.
+He had yet to learn that the height of 'goodness' is reached, not by
+adding some strange new performances to the threadbare precepts of
+everyday duty, but by digging deep into these, and bottoming the
+fabric of our lives on their inmost spirit. He had yet to learn that
+whoever says, 'All these have I kept,' thereby convicts himself of
+understanding neither them nor himself.
+
+Still he was not at rest, although he had, as he fancied, kept them
+all. His last question is a plaintive, honest acknowledgment of the
+hungry void within, which no round of outward obediences can ever
+fill. He knows that he has not the inner fountain springing up into
+eternal life. He is dimly aware of something wanting, whether in his
+obedience or no, at all events in his peace; and he is right in
+believing that the reason for that conscious void is something
+wanting in his conduct. But he will not learn what Christ has been
+trying to teach him, that he needs no new commandment, but a deeper
+understanding and keeping of the old. Hence his question, half a
+wail of a hungry heart, half petulant impatience with Christ's
+reiteration of obvious duties. There are multitudes of this kind in
+all ages, honestly wishing to lay hold of eternal life, able to
+point to virtuous conduct, anxious to know and do anything lacking,
+and yet painfully certain that something is wanting somewhere.
+
+II. Now comes the sharp-pointed test, which pricks the brilliant
+bubble. Mark tells us that Jesus accompanied His word with one of
+those looks which searched a soul, and bore His love into it. 'If
+thou wouldest be perfect,' takes up the confession of something
+'lacking,' and shows what that is. It is unnecessary to remark that
+this commandment to sell all and give to the poor is intended only
+for the individual case. No other would-be disciple was called upon
+to do so. It cannot be meant for others; for, if all were sellers,
+where would the buyers be? Nor need we do more than point out that
+the command of renunciation is only half of Christ's answer, the
+other being, 'Come, follow Me.' But we are not to slide easily over
+the precept with the comfortable thought that it was special
+treatment for a special case. The principle involved in it is
+medicine for all, and the only way of healing for any. This man was
+tied to earth by the cords of his wealth. They did not hinder him
+from keeping the commandments, for he had no temptations to murder,
+or adultery, or theft, or neglect of parents. But they did hinder
+him from giving his whole self up, and from regarding eternal life
+as the most precious of all things. Therefore for him there was no
+safety short of entire outward denuding himself of them; and, if he
+was in earnest out and out in his questions, here was a new thing
+for him to do. Others are hindered by other things, and they are
+called to abandon these. The one thing needful for entrance into
+life is at bottom self-surrender, and the casting away of all else
+for its sovereign sake. 'I do count them but dung' must be the
+language of every one who will win Christ. The hands must be emptied
+of treasures, and the heart swept clear of lesser loves, if He is to
+be grasped by our hands, and to dwell in our hearts. More of us than
+we are willing to believe are kept from entire surrender to Jesus
+Christ, by money and worldly possessions; and many professing
+Christians are kept shrivelled and weak and joyless because they
+love their wealth more than their Lord, and would think it madness
+to do as this man was bidden to do. When ballast is thrown out, the
+balloon shoots up. A general unlading of the 'thick clay' which
+weighs down the Christian life of England, would let thousands soar
+to heights which they will never reach as long as they love money
+and what it buys as much as they do. The letter of this commandment
+may be only applicable in a special case (though, perhaps, this one
+young man was not the only human being that ever needed this
+treatment), but the spirit is of universal application. No man
+enters into life who does not count all things but loss, and does
+not die to them all, that he may follow Christ.
+
+III. Then comes the collapse of all the enthusiasm. The questioner's
+earnestness chills at the touch of the test. What has become of the
+eagerness which brought him running to Jesus, and of the willingness
+to do any hard task to which he was set? It was real, but shallow.
+It deceived himself. But Christ's words cut down to the inner man,
+and laid bare for his own inspection the hard core of selfish
+worldliness which lay beneath. How many radiant enthusiasms, which
+cheat their subjects quite as much as their beholders, disappear
+like tinted mist when the hard facts of self-sacrifice strike
+against them! How much sheer worldliness disguises itself from
+itself and from others in glistering garments of noble sentiments,
+which fall at a touch when real giving up is called for, and show
+the ugly thing below! How much 'religion' goes about the world, and
+gets made 'a ruler' of the synagogue in recognition of its
+excellence, which needs but this Ithuriel's spear to start up in its
+own shape! The completeness  and immediateness of the collapse are
+noticeable. The young man seems to speak no word, and to take no
+time for reflection. He stands for a moment as if stunned, and then
+silently turns away. What a moment! his fate hung on it. Once more
+we see the awful mystery enacted before our eyes, of a soul
+gathering up its power to put away life. Who will say that the
+decision of a moment, which is the outcome of all the past, may not
+fix the whole future? This man had never before been consciously
+brought to the fork in the road; but now the two ways are before
+him, and, knowingly, he chooses the worse. Christ did not desire him
+to do so; but He did desire that he should choose, and should know
+that he did. It was the truest kindness to tear away the veil of
+surface goodness which hid him from himself, and to force him to a
+conscious decision.
+
+One sign of grace he does give, in that he went away 'sorrowful.' He
+is not angry nor careless. He cannot see the fair prospect of the
+eternal life, which he had in some real fashion desired, fade away,
+without a pang. If he goes back to the world, he goes back feeling
+more acutely than ever that it cannot satisfy him. He loves it too
+well to give it up, but not enough to feel that it is enough.
+Surely, in coming days, that godly sorrow would work a change of the
+foolish choice, and we may hope that he found no rest till he cast
+away all else to make Christ his own. A soul which has travelled as
+far on the road to life eternal as this man had done, can scarcely
+thereafter walk the broad road of selfishness and death with entire
+satisfaction.
+
+IV. The section closes with Christ's comment on the sad incident. He
+speaks no word of condemnation, but passes at once from the
+individual to the general lesson of the difficulty which rich men
+(or, as He explains it in Mark, men who 'trust in riches') have in
+entering the kingdom. The reflection breathes a tone of pity, and is
+not so much blame as a merciful recognition of special temptations
+which affect His judgment, and should modify ours. A camel with its
+great body, long neck, and hump, struggling to get through a
+needle's eye, is their emblem. It is a new thing to pity rich men,
+or to think of their wealth as disqualifying them for anything. The
+disciples, with childish _naïveté_, wonder. We may wonder that
+they wondered. They could not understand what sort of a kingdom it
+was into which capitalists would find entrance difficult. All doors
+fly open for them to-day, as then. They do not find much difficulty
+in getting into the church, however hard it may be to get into the
+kingdom. But it still remains true that the man who has wealth has a
+hindrance to his religious character, which, like all hindrances,
+may be made a help by the use he makes of it; and that the man who
+trusts in riches, which he who possesses them is wofully likely to
+do, has made the hindrance into a barrier which he cannot pass.
+
+That is a lesson which commercial nations, like England, have need
+to lay to heart, not as a worn-out saying of the Bible, which means
+very little for us, but as heavy with significance, and pointing to
+the special dangers which beset Christian perfection.
+
+So real is the peril of riches, that Christ would have His disciples
+regard the victory over it as beyond our human power, and beckons us
+away from the effort to overcome the love of the world in our
+strength, pointing us to God, in whose mighty grace, breathed into
+our feeble wills and treacherous hearts, is the only force which can
+overcome the attraction of perishable riches, and make any of us
+willing or able to renounce them all that we may win Christ. The
+young ruler had just shown that 'with men this is impossible.'
+Perhaps he still lingered near enough to catch the assurance that
+the surrender, which had been too much for him to achieve, might yet
+be joyfully made, since 'with God all things are possible.'
+
+
+
+
+NEAREST TO CHRIST
+
+
+    'To sit on My right hand, and on My left, is not Mine
+    to give, but it shall be given to them for whom it is
+    prepared of My Father.'--MATT. xx. 23.
+
+You will observe that an unusually long supplement is inserted by
+our translators in this verse. That supplement is quite unnecessary,
+and, as is sometimes the case, is even worse than unnecessary. It
+positively obscures the true meaning of the words before us.
+
+As they stand in our Bibles, the impression that they leave upon
+one's mind is that Christ in them abjures the power of giving to His
+disciples their places in the kingdom of heaven, and declares that
+it belongs not to His function, but relegates it, to His own
+exclusion, to the Father; whereas what He says is the very opposite
+of this. He does not put aside the granting of places at His right
+hand or His left as not being within His province, but He states the
+principles and conditions on which He does make such a grant, and so
+is really claiming it as in His province. All that would have been a
+great deal clearer if our translators had been contented to render
+the words that they found before them in the Book, without addition,
+and to read, 'To sit on My right hand, and on My left, is not Mine
+to give, but to them for whom it is prepared of My Father.'
+
+Another introductory remark may be made, to the effect that our Lord
+does not put aside this prayer of His apostles as if they were
+seeking an impossible thing. It is never safe, I know, to argue from
+the silence of Scripture. There may be many reasons for that silence
+beyond our ken in any given case; but still it does strike one as
+noteworthy that, when this fond mother and her ambitious sons came
+with their prayer for pre-eminence in His kingdom, our Lord did not
+answer what would have been so obvious to answer if it had been
+true, 'You are asking a thing which cannot be granted to anybody,
+for they are all upon one level in that kingdom of the heavens.' He
+says by implication the very opposite. Not only does His silence
+confirm their belief that when He came in His glory, some would be
+closer to His side than others; but the plain statement of the text
+is that, in the depth of the eternal counsels, and by the
+preparation of divine grace, there were thrones nearest to His own
+which some men should fill. He does _not_ say, 'You are asking
+what cannot be.' He does say, 'There are men for whom it is prepared
+of My Father.'
+
+And then, still further, Jesus does not condemn the prayer as
+indicating a wrong state of mind on the part of James and John,
+though good and bad were strangely mingled in it. We are told
+nowadays that it is a very selfish thing, far below the lofty height
+to which our transcendental teachers have attained, to be heartened
+and encouraged, strengthened and quickened, by the prospect of the
+crown and the rest that remain for the people of God. If so, Christ
+ought to have turned round to these men, and have rebuked the
+passion for reward, which, according to this new light, is so
+unworthy and so low. But, instead of that, He confines Himself to
+explaining the conditions on which the fulfilment of the desire is
+possible, and by implication permits and approves the desire. 'You
+want to sit on My right hand and on My left, do you? Then be it so.
+You may do so if you like. Are you ready to accept the conditions?
+It is well that you should want it,--not for the sake of being above
+your brethren, but for the sake of being nearest to Me. Hearken! Are
+ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of?' They say unto
+Him (and I do not know that there are anywhere grander words than
+the calm, swift, unhesitating, modest, and yet confident answer of
+these two men), 'We are able.' 'You shall have your desire if you
+fulfil the conditions. It is given to them for whom it is prepared
+of My Father.'
+
+I. So, then, if we rightly understand these words, and take them
+without the unfortunate comment which our translators have inserted,
+they contain, first, the principle that some will be nearer Christ
+than others in that heavenly kingdom.
+
+As I have said, the words of our Lord do not merely imply, by the
+absence of all hint that these disciples' petition was impossible,
+the existence of degrees among the subjects of His heavenly kingdom,
+but articulately affirm that such variety is provided for by the
+preparation of the Father. Probably the two brothers thought that
+they were only asking for preeminence in an earthly kingdom, and had
+no idea that their prayer pointed beyond the grave; but that
+confusion of thought could not be cured in their then stage of
+growth, and our Lord therefore leaves it untouched. But the other
+error, if it were an error, was of a different kind, and might, for
+aught that one sees, have been set right in a moment. Instead of
+which the answer adopts it, and seems to set Christ's own
+confirmation on it, as being no Jewish dream, but a truth.
+
+They were asking for earth. He answers--for heaven. He leaves them
+to learn in after days--when the one was slain with the sword, first
+martyr among the apostles, and the other lived to see them all pass
+to their thrones, while he remained the 'companion in tribulation'
+of the second generation of the Church--how far off was the
+fulfilment which they fancied so near.
+
+We need not he surprised that so large a truth should be spoken by
+Christ so quietly, and as it were incidentally. For that is in
+keeping with His whole tone when speaking of the unseen world. One
+knows not whether to wonder more at the decisive authority with
+which He tells us of that mysterious region, or at the small space
+which such revelations occupy in His words. There is an air of
+simplicity and unconsciousness, and withal of authority, and withal
+of divine reticence about them all, which are in full harmony with
+the belief that Christ speaking of heaven speaks of that He knows,
+and testifies that He hath seen.
+
+That truth to which, as we think, our Lord's words here inevitably
+lead, is distinctly taught in many other places of Scripture. We
+should have had less difficulty about it, and should have felt more
+what a solemn and stimulating thought it is, if we had tried a
+little more than most of us do to keep clear before us what really
+is the essential of that future life, what is the lustre of its
+light, the heaven of heaven, the glory of the glory. Men talk about
+physical theories of another life. I suppose they are possible. They
+seem to me infinitely unimportant. Warm imaginations, working by
+sense, write books about a future state which wonderfully succeed in
+making it real by making it earthly. Some of them read more like a
+book of travels in this world than forecastings of the next. They
+may be true or not. It does not matter one whit. I believe that
+heaven is a place. I believe that the corporeity of our future life
+is essential to the perfection of it. I believe that Christ wears,
+and will wear for ever, a glorified human body. I believe that that
+involves locality, circumstance, external occupations; and I say,
+all that being so, and in its own place very important, yet if we
+stop there, we have no vision of the real light that makes the
+lustre, no true idea of the glory that makes the blessedness.
+
+For what is heaven? Likeness to God, love, purity, fellowship with
+Him; the condition of the spirit and the relation of the soul to
+Him. The noblest truth about the future world flows from the words
+of our Master--'This is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true
+God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.' Not 'this brings'; not
+'this will lead up to'; not 'this will draw after it'; but 'this
+is'; and whosoever possesses that eternal life hath already in him
+the germ of all the glories that are round the throne, and the
+blessedness that fills the hearts of perfected spirits.
+
+If so, if already eternal life in the bud standeth in the knowledge
+of God in Christ, what makes its fruitage and completeness? Surely,
+not physical changes or the circumstances of heaven, at least not
+these primarily, however much such changes and circumstances may
+subserve our blessedness there, and the anticipation of them may
+help our sense-bound hopes here. But the completeness of heaven is
+the completion of our knowledge of God and Christ, with all the
+perfecting of spirit which that implies and produces. The faith, and
+love, and happy obedience, and consecration which is calm, that
+partially occupied and ruled the soul here, are to be thought of as
+enlarged, perfected, delivered from the interruption of opposing
+thoughts, of sensuous desires, of selfish purposes, of earthly and
+sinful occupations. And that perfect knowledge and perfect union and
+perfect likeness are perfect bliss. And that bliss is heaven. And
+if, whilst heaven is a place, the heaven of heaven be a state, then
+no more words are needed to show that, then, heaven can be no dead
+level, nor can all stand at the same stage of attainments, though
+all be perfect; but that in that solemn company of the blessed, 'the
+spirits of just men made perfect,' there are indefinitely numerous
+degrees of approximation to the unattainable Perfection, which
+stretches above them all, and draws them all to itself. We have not
+to think of that future life as oppressed, if I may so say, with the
+unbroken monotony of perfect identity in character and attainments.
+All indeed are like one another, because all are like Jesus, but
+that basis of similarity does not exclude infinite variety. The same
+glory belongs to each, but it is reflected at differing angles and
+received in divers measures. Perfect blessedness will belong to
+each, but the capacity to receive it will differ. There will be the
+same crown on each head, the same song on each lip, the same fulness
+of joy filling each heart; but star differeth from star, and the
+great condition of happy intercourse on earth will not be wanting in
+heaven--a deep-seated similarity and a superficial diversity.
+
+Does not the very idea of an endless progress in that kingdom involve
+such variety? We do not think of men passing into the heavens, and
+being perfected by a bound so as that there shall be no growth. We
+think of them indeed as being perfected up to the height of their
+then capacity, from the beginning of that celestial life, so as that
+there shall be no sin, nor any conscious incompleteness, but not so
+as that there shall be no progress. And, if they each grow through
+all the ages, and are ever coming nearer and nearer to Christ, that
+seems necessarily to lead to the thought that this endless progress,
+carried on in every spirit, will place them at different points of
+approximation to the one centre. As in the heavens there are planets
+that roll nearer the central sun, and others that circle farther out
+from its rays, yet each keeps its course, and makes music as it moves,
+as well as planets whose broader disc can receive and reflect more
+of the light than smaller sister spheres, and yet each blazes over
+its whole surface and is full to its very rim with white light; so
+round that throne the spirits of the just made perfect shall move in
+order and peace--every one blessed, every one perfect, every one
+like Christ at first, and becoming liker through every moment of
+the eternities. Each perfected soul looking on his brother shall
+see there another phase of the one perfectness that blesses and
+adorns him too, and all taken together shall make up, in so far as
+finite creatures can make up, the reflection and manifestation of
+the fulness of Christ. 'Having then gifts differing according to
+the grace that is given to us' is the law for the incompleteness
+of earth. 'Having then gifts differing according to the glory that
+is given to us' will be the law for the perfection of the heavens.
+There are those for whom it is prepared of His Father, that they
+shall sit in special nearness to Him.
+
+II. Still further, these words rightly understood assert that truth
+which, at first sight, our Authorised Version's rendering seems to
+make them contradict, viz. that Christ is the giver to each of these
+various degrees of glory and blessedness. 'It is not Mine to give,
+save to them for whom it is prepared.' Then it is Thine to give it
+to them. To deny or to doubt that Christ is the giver of the
+blessedness, whatsoever the blessedness may be, that fills the
+hearts and souls of the redeemed, is to destroy His whole work, to
+destroy all the relations upon which our hopes rest, and to
+introduce confusion and contradiction into the whole matter.
+
+For Scripture teaches us that He is God's unspeakable gift; that in
+Him is given to us everything; that He is the bestower of all which
+we need; that 'out of His fulness,' as one of those two disciples
+long afterwards said, 'all we have received, and grace for grace.'
+There is nothing within the compass of God's love to bestow of which
+Christ is not the giver. There is nothing divine that is done in the
+heavens and the earth, as I believe, of which Christ is not the
+doer. The representation of Scripture is uniformly that He is the
+medium of the activity of the divine nature; that he is the energy
+of the divine will; that He is, to use the metaphor of the Old
+Testament, 'the arm of the Lord'--the forthputting of God's power;
+that He is, to use the profound expression of the New Testament, the
+Word of the Lord, cognate with, and the utterance of, the eternal
+nature, the light that streams from the central brightness, the
+river that flows from the else sealed fountain. As the arm is to the
+body, and as is the word to the soul, so is Christ to God--the
+eternal divine utterance and manifestation of the divine nature.
+And, therefore, to speak of anything that a man can need and
+anything that God can give as not being given by Christ, is to
+strike at the very foundation, not only of our hopes, but at the
+whole scheme of revealed truth. He is the giver of heaven and
+everything else which the soul requires.
+
+And then, again, let me remind you that on this matter we are not
+left to such general considerations as those that I have been
+suggesting, but that the plain statements of Scripture do confirm
+the assertion that Christ is the determiner and the bestower of all
+the differing grades of glory and blessedness yonder. For do we not
+read of Him that He is the Judge of the whole earth? Do we not read
+of Him that His word is acquittal and His frown condemnation--that
+to 'be accepted of Him' is the highest aim and end of the Christian
+life? Do we not read that it is He who says, 'Come, ye blessed of My
+Father, enter into the kingdom prepared for you'? Do we not read
+that the apostle, dying, solaced himself with the thought that
+'there was laid up for him a crown of glory, which the Lord, the
+righteous Judge, would give him at that day'? And do we not read in
+the very last book of Scripture, written by one of those two
+brothers, and containing almost verbal reference to the words of my
+text, the promise seven times spoken from the immortal lips of the
+glorified Son of Man, walking in the midst of the candlesticks, 'To
+him that overcometh will I give'? The fruit of the tree of life is
+plucked by His hands for the wearied conquerors. The crown of life
+is set by Him on the faithful witnesses' brows. The hidden manna and
+the new name are bestowed by Him on those who hold fast His name. It
+is He who gives the victors kingly power over the nations. He
+clothes in white garments those who have not defiled their robes.
+His hand writes upon the triumphant foreheads the name of God. And
+highest of all, beyond which there is no bliss conceivable, 'To him
+that overcometh will I grant to sit with Me in My throne.'
+
+Christ is the bestower of the royalties of the heavens as of the
+redemptions of earth, and it is His to give that which we crave at
+His hands, when we ask pardon here and glory hereafter. 'To him that
+is athirst will He give of the water of life freely,' and to him
+that overcometh will He give the crown of glory.
+
+III. These words lead us, in the third place, to the further
+thought, that these glorious places are not given to mere wishing,
+nor by mere arbitrary will.
+
+'You would sit on My right hand and on My left? You think of that
+pre-eminence as conferred because you chose to ask it--as given by a
+piece of favouritism. Not so. I cannot make a man foremost in my
+kingdom in that fashion. There are conditions which must precede
+such an elevation.'
+
+And there are people who think thus still, as if the mere desire,
+without anything more, were enough--or as if the felicities of the
+heavenly world were dependent solely on Christ's arbitrary will, and
+could be bestowed by an exercise of mere power, as an Eastern prince
+may make this man his vizier and that other one his water-carrier.
+The same principles which we have already applied to the elucidation
+of the idea of varieties and stages of nearness to Christ in His
+heavenly kingdom have a bearing on this matter. If we rightly
+understand that the essential blessedness of heaven is likeness to
+Christ, we shall feel that mere wishing carries no man thither, and
+that mere sovereign will and power do not avail to set us there.
+There are conditions indispensable, from the very nature of the
+case, and unless they are realised it is as impossible for us to
+receive, as for Him to give, a place at His side. If, indeed, the
+future blessedness consisted in mere external circumstances and
+happier conditions of life, it might be so bestowed. But if place
+and surroundings, and a more exquisite and ethereal frame, are but
+subordinate sources of it, and its real fountain is union with Jesus
+and assimilation to Him, then something else than idle desires must
+wing the soul that soars thither, and His transforming grace, not
+His arbitrary will, must set us at His own right hand 'in the
+heavenly places.'
+
+Of all the profitless occupations with which men waste their lives,
+none are more utterly useless than wishing without acting. Our
+wishes are meant to impel us to the appropriate forms of energy by
+which they can be realised. When a pauper becomes a millionaire by
+sitting and vehemently wishing that he were rich, when ignorance
+becomes learning by standing in a library and wishing that the
+contents of all these books were in its head, there will be some
+hope that the gates of heaven will fly open to your desire. But till
+then, 'many, I say unto you, shall seek to enter in and not be
+able.' Many shall _seek_; you must _strive_. For wishing is one thing,
+and _willing_ is another, and _doing_ is yet another. And in regard
+to entrance into Christ's kingdom, our 'doing' is trusting in Him who
+has done all for us. 'This is the work of God, that ye should believe
+on Him whom He hath sent.' Does our wish lead us to the acceptance
+of the condition? Then it will be fulfilled. If not, it will remain
+fruitless, will die into apathy, or will live as a pang and a curse.
+
+You wish, or fancy you wish, to pass into heaven when you die, I
+suppose. Some of its characteristics attract you. You believe in
+punishment for sin, and you would willingly escape that. You believe
+in a place of rest after toil, of happiness after sorrow, where
+nipping frosts of disappointment, and wild blasts of calamity, and
+slow, gnawing decay no more harm and kill your joys--and you would
+like that. But do you wish to be pure and stainless, to have your
+hearts fixed on God alone, to have your whole being filled with Him,
+and emptied of self and sense and sin? The peace of heaven attracts
+you--but its praise repels, does it not? Its happiness draws your
+wishes--does its holiness seem inviting? It would be joyful to be
+far away from punishment--would it be as joyful to be near Christ?
+Ah! no; the wishes lead to no resolve, and therefore to no result,
+for this among other reasons, because they are only kindled by a
+part of the whole, and are exchanged for positive aversion when the
+real heaven of heaven is presented to your thoughts. Many a man who,
+by the set of his whole life, is drifting daily nearer and nearer to
+that region of outer darkness, is conscious of an idle wish for
+peace and joy beyond the grave. In common matters a man may be
+devoured by vain desires all his lifetime, because he will not pass
+beyond wishing to acting accordingly. 'The desire of the slothful
+killeth him; because his hands refused to labour, he coveteth
+greedily all the day long.' And with like but infinitely more
+tragical issues do these vain wishes for a place in that calm world,
+where nothing but holiness enters, gnaw at many a soul. 'Let me die
+the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his,' was
+the aspiration of that Gentile prophet, whose love of the world
+obscured even the prophetic illumination which he possessed--and his
+epitaph is a stern comment on the uselessness of such empty wishes,
+'Balaam, the son of Beor, they slew with the sword.' It needs more
+than a wish to set us at Christ's right hand in His kingdom.
+
+Nor can such a place be given by mere arbitrary will. Christ could
+not, if He would, set a man at His right hand whose heart was not
+the home of simple trust and thankful love, whose nature and desires
+were unprepared for that blessed world. It would be like taking one
+of those creatures--if there be such--that live on the planet whose
+orbit is farthest from the sun, accustomed to cold, organised for
+darkness, and carrying it to that great central blaze, with all its
+fierce flames and tongues of fiery gas that shoot up a thousand
+miles in a moment. It would crumble and disappear before its
+blackness could be seen against the blaze.
+
+His loving will embraces us all, and is the foundation of all our
+hopes. But it had to reach its purpose by a bitter road which He did
+not shrink from travelling. He desires to save us, and to realise
+the desire He had to die. 'It became Him for whom are all things, in
+bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain of their
+salvation perfect through suffering.' What He had to do, we have to
+accept. Unless we accept the mercy of God in Christ, no wish on our
+parts, nor any exercise of power on His, will carry us to the heaven
+which He has died to open, and of which He is at once the giver and
+the gift.
+
+IV. These glorious places are given as the result of a divine
+preparation.
+
+'To them for whom it is prepared of My Father.' We have seen that
+Christ is not to be regarded as abjuring the office, with which His
+disciples' confidence led them to invest Him--that of allotting to
+His servants their place in His kingdom. He neither refers it to the
+Father without Himself, nor claims it for Himself without the
+Father. The living unity of will and work which subsists between the
+Father and the Son forbids such a separation and distribution of
+office. And that unity is set forth on both its sides in His own
+deep words, 'The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth
+the Father do: for whatsoever things He doeth, these also doeth the
+Son likewise.'
+
+So, then, while the gift of thrones at His side is His act and the
+Father's, in like manner the preparation of the royal seats for
+their occupants, and of the kings for their thrones, is the Father's
+act and His.
+
+Our text does not tell us directly what that preparation is, any
+more than it tells us directly what the principles are on which
+entrance into and pre-eminence in the kingdom are granted. But we
+know enough in regard to both, for our practical guidance, for the
+vigour of our hope, and the grasp of our faith.
+
+There is a twofold divine preparation of the heavens for men. One is
+from of old. The kingdom is 'prepared for you before the foundation
+of the world.' That preparation is in the eternal counsel of the
+divine love, which calleth the things that are not as though they
+were, and before which all that is evolved in the generations of men
+and the epochs of time, lies on one plane, equally near to dim from
+whose throne diverge far beneath the triple streams of past,
+present, and future.
+
+And beside that preparation, the counsel of pardoning mercy and
+redeeming grace, there is the other preparation--the realisation of
+that eternal purpose in time through the work of Jesus Christ our
+Lord. His consolation to His disciples in the parting hour was, 'I
+go to prepare a place for you.' How much was included in these words
+we shall never know till we, like Him, see of the travail of His
+soul, and like Him are satisfied. But we can dimly see that on the
+one hand His death, and on the other hand His entrance into that
+holiest of all, make ready for us the many mansions of the Father's
+house. He was crucified for our offences, He was raised again for
+our justification, He is passed through the heavens to stand our
+Forerunner in the presence of God--and by all these mighty acts He
+prepares the heavenly places for us. As the sun behind a cloud,
+which hides it from us, is still pouring out its rays on far-off
+lands, so He, veiled in dark, sunset clouds of Calvary, sent the
+energy of His passion and cross into the unseen world and made it
+possible that we should enter there. 'When Thou didst overcome the
+sharpness of death, Thou didst open the gates of the kingdom of
+heaven to all believers.' As one who precedes a mighty host provides
+and prepares rest for their weariness, and food for their hunger, in
+some city on their line of march, and having made all things ready,
+is at the gates to welcome their travel-stained ranks when they
+arrive, and guide them to their repose; so He has gone before, our
+Forerunner, to order all things for us there. It may be that unless
+Christ were in heaven, our brother as well as our Lord, it were no
+place for mortals. It may be that we need to have His glorified
+bodily presence in order that it should be possible for human
+spirits to bear the light, and be at home with God. Be that as it
+may, this we know, that the Father prepares a place for us by the
+eternal counsel of His love, and by the all-sufficient work of
+Christ, by whom we have access to the Father.
+
+And as His work is the Father's preparation of the place for us by
+the Son, the issue of His work is the Father's preparation of us for
+the place, through the Son, by the Spirit. 'He that hath wrought us
+for the self-same thing is God.'
+
+If so, then what follows? This, among other things, that wishes are
+vain, for heaven is no gift of arbitrary favouritism, but that faith
+in Christ, and faith alone, leads us to His right hand--and the
+measure of our faith and growing Christlikeness here, will be the
+measure of our glory hereafter, and of our nearness to Him. It is
+possible to be 'saved, _yet so as by fire_.' It is possible to
+have 'an entrance ministered unto us _abundantly_ into the
+everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.' If we
+would be near Him then, we must be near Him now. If we would share
+His throne, we must bear His cross. If we would be found in the
+likeness of His resurrection, we must be 'conformable unto His
+death.' Then such desires as these true-hearted, and yet mistaken,
+disciples expressed will not be the voice of selfish ambition, but
+of dependent love. They will not be vain wishes, but be fulfilled by
+Him, who, stooping from amid the royalties of heaven, with love upon
+His face and pity in His heart, will give more than we ask. 'Seekest
+thou a place at My right hand? Nay, I give thee a more wondrous
+dignity. To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with Me in My
+throne.'
+
+
+
+
+THE SERVANT-LORD AND HIS SERVANTS
+
+
+    'Even as the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto,
+    but to minister.'--MATT. xx. 28.
+
+It seems at first sight strangely unsympathetic and irrelevant that
+the ambitious request of James and John and their foolish mother,
+that they should sit at Christ's right hand and His left in His
+kingdom, should have been occasioned by, and have followed
+immediately upon, our Lord's solemn and pathetic announcement of His
+sufferings. But the connection is not difficult to trace. The
+disciples believed that, in some inexplicable way, the sufferings
+which our Lord was shadowing forth were to be the immediate
+precursors of His assuming His regal dignity. And so they took time
+by the forelock, as they thought, and made haste to ensure their
+places in the kingdom, which they believed was now ready to burst
+upon them. Other occasions in the Gospels in which we find similar
+quarrelling among the disciples as to pre-eminence are similarly
+associated with references made by our Lord to His approaching
+crucifixion. On a former occasion He cured these misplaced ambitions
+by setting a child in the midst of them. On this He cures them by a
+still more pathetic and wonderful example, His own; and He says, 'I,
+in My lowliness and service, am to be your Pattern. In Me see the
+basis of all true greatness, and the right use of all influence and
+authority. The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to
+minister.'
+
+I. So, then, let us look first at the perfect life of service of the
+Servant-Lord.
+
+Now, in order to appreciate the significance of that life of service,
+we must take into account the introductory words, 'The Son of Man
+came.' They declare His pre-existence, His voluntary entrance into
+the conditions of humanity, and His denuding Himself of 'the glory
+which He had with the Father before the world was.' We shall never
+understand the Servant-Christ until we understand that He is the
+Eternal Son of the Father. His service began long before any of His
+acts of sympathetic and self-forgetting lowliness rendered help to
+the miserable here upon earth. His service began when He laid aside,
+not the garments of earth, but the vesture of the heavens, and
+girded Himself, not with the cincture woven in man's looms, but with
+the flesh of our humanity, 'and being found in fashion as a man,'
+bowed Himself to enter into the conditions of earth. This was the
+first, the chiefest of all His acts of service, and the sanctity and
+awfulness of it run through the list of all His deeds and make them
+unspeakably great. It was much that His hands should heal, that His
+lips should comfort, that His heart should bleed with sympathy for
+sorrow. But, oh! it was more that He _had_ hands to touch, lips to
+speak to human hearts, and the heart of a man and a brother to feel
+_with_ as well as _for_ us. 'The Son of Man came'--there is
+the transcendent example of the true use of greatness; there is the
+conspicuous instance of the true basis of authority and rule. For it
+was because He was 'found in fashion as a Man' that He has won a 'name
+that is above every name,' and that there have accrued to Him the
+'many crowns' which He wears at the Father's side.
+
+But then, passing beyond this, we may dwell, though all imperfectly,
+upon the features, familiar as they are, of that wonderful life of
+self-oblivious and self-sacrificing ministration to others. Think of
+the purity of the source from all which these wonders and
+blessednesses of service for man flowed. The life of Jesus Christ is
+self-forgetting love made visible. Scientists tell us that, by the
+arrangement of particles of sand upon plates of glass, there can be
+made, as it were, perceptible to the eye, the sweetness of musical
+sounds; and each note when struck will fling the particles into
+varying forms of beauty. The life of Jesus Christ presents in shapes
+of loveliness and symmetry the else invisible music of a divine
+love. He lets us see the rhythm of the Father's heart. The source
+from which His ministrations have flowed is the pure source of a
+perfect love. Ancient legends consolidated the sunbeams into the
+bright figure of the far-darting god of light. And so the sunbeams
+of the divine love have, as it were, drawn themselves together and
+shaped themselves into the human form of the Son of Man who 'came
+not to be ministered unto, but to minister.'
+
+No taint of bye-ends was in that service; no sidelong glances at
+possible advantages of influence or reputation or the like, which so
+often deform men's philanthropies and services to one another. No
+more than the sunbeam shines for the sake of collateral issues which
+may benefit itself, did Jesus Christ seek His own advantage in
+ministering to men. There was no speck of black in that lustrous
+white robe, but all was perfectly unselfish love. Like the clear
+sea, weedless and stainless, that laves the marble steps of the
+palaces of Venice, the deep ocean of Christ's service to man was
+pure to the depths throughout.
+
+That perfect ministry of the Servant-Lord was rendered with strange
+spontaneity and cheerfulness. One of the evangelists says, in a very
+striking and beautiful phrase, that 'He healed them that had need of
+healing,' as if the presence of the necessity evoked the supply, by
+the instinctive action of a perfect love. There was never in Him one
+trace of reluctance to have leisure broken in upon, repose
+disturbed, or even communion with God abbreviated. All men could
+come always; they never came inopportunely. We often cheerfully take
+up a burden of service, but find it very hard to continue bearing
+it. But He was willing to come down from the mountain of
+Transfiguration because there was a demoniac boy in the plain; and
+therefore He put aside the temptation--'Let us build here three
+tabernacles.' He was willing to abandon His desert seclusion because
+the multitude sought Him. Interrupted in His communion with the
+Father by His disciples, He had no impatient word to say, but 'Let
+us go into other cities also, for therefore am I sent.' When He
+stepped from the fishing-boat on the other side of the lake to which
+He had fled for a moment of repose, He was glad when He saw the
+multitude who had pertinaciously outrun Him, and were waiting for
+Him on the beach. On His Cross He had leisure to turn from His own
+physical sufferings and the weight of a world's sin, which lay upon
+Him, to look at that penitent by His side, and He ended His life in
+the ministry of mercy to a brigand. And thus cheerfully, and always
+without a thought of self, 'He came to minister.'
+
+Think, too, of the sweep of His ministrations. They took in all men;
+they were equally open to enemies and to friends, to mockers and to
+sympathisers. Think of the variety of the gifts which He brought in
+His ministry--caring for body and for soul; alleviating sorrow,
+binding up wounds, purifying hearts; dealing with sin, the fountain,
+and with miseries, its waters, with equal helpfulness and equal
+love.
+
+And think of how that ministering was always ministration by 'the
+LORD.' For there is nothing to me more remarkable in the Gospel
+narrative than the way in which, side by side, there lie in Christ's
+life the two elements, so difficult to harmonise in fact, and so
+impossible to have been harmonised in a legend, the consciousness of
+authority and the humility of a servant. The paradox with which John
+introduces his sweet pathetic story of our Lord's washing the
+disciples' feet is true of, and is illustrated by, every instance of
+more than ordinary lowliness and self-oblivion which the Gospel
+contains. 'Jesus, knowing that He had come from God, and went to
+God, and that the Father had given all things into His hand'--did
+what? 'Laid aside His garments and took a towel and girded Himself.'
+The two things ever go together. And thus, in His lowliest
+abasement, as in a star entangled in a cloud, there shine out, all
+the more broad and conspicuous for the environment which wraps them,
+the beams of His uncreated lustre.
+
+That ministration was a service that never shrank from stern rebuke.
+His service was no mere soft and pliant, sympathetic helpfulness,
+but it could smite and stab, and be severe, and knit its brow, and
+speak stern words, as all true service must. For it is not service
+but cruelty to sympathise with the sinner, and say nothing in
+condemnation of his sin. And yet no sternness is blessed which is
+not plainly prompted by desire to help.
+
+Now, I know far better than you do how wretchedly inadequate all
+these poor words of mine have been to the great theme that I have
+been trying to speak of, but they may at least--like a little water
+poured into a pump--have set your minds working upon the theme, and,
+I hope, to better purpose. 'The Son of Man came ... to minister.'
+
+II. Now, secondly, note the service that should be modelled on His.
+
+Oh! brethren, if we, however imperfectly, have taken into mind and
+heart that picture of Him who was and is amongst us as 'One that
+serveth,' how sharp a test, and how stringent, and, as it seems to
+us sometimes, impossible, a commandment are involved in the 'even
+as' of my text. When we think of our grudging services; when we
+think of how much more apt we are to insist upon what men owe to us
+than of what we owe to them; how ready we are to demand, how slow we
+are to give; how we flame up in what we think is warranted
+indignation if we do not get the observance, or the sympathy, or the
+attention that we require, and yet how little we give of these, we
+may well say, 'Thou hast set a pattern that can only drive us to
+despair.' If we would read our Gospels more than we do with the
+feeling, as we trace that Master through each of His phases of
+sympathy and self-oblivion and self-sacrifice and service, 'that is
+what I should be,' what a different book the New Testament would be
+to us, and what different people you and I would be!
+
+There is no ground on which we can rest greatness or superiority in
+Christ's kingdom except this ground of service. And there is no use
+that we can make either of money or of talents, of acquirements or
+opportunities, except the use of helping our fellows with them,
+which will stand the test of this model and example. 'It is more
+blessed to give than to receive.' The servant who serves for love is
+highest in the hierarchy of Heaven. God, who is supreme, has stooped
+lower than any that are beneath Him, and His true rule follows, not
+because He is infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, or any
+of those other pompous Latin words which describe what men call His
+attributes, but because He loves best, and does most for the most.
+And that is what you and I ought to be. We may well take the lesson
+to ourselves. I have no space, and, I hope, no need to enlarge upon
+it; but be sure of this, that if we are ever to be near the right
+and the left of the Master in His kingdom, there is one way, and
+only one way, to come thither, and that is to make self abdicate its
+authority as the centre of our lives, and to enthrone there Christ,
+and for His sake all our brethren. Be ambitious to be first, but
+remember, _Noblesse oblige_. He that is first must become last.
+He that is Servant of all is Master of all. That is the only mastery
+that is worth anything, the devotion of hearts that circle round the
+source from which they draw light and warmth. What is it that makes
+a mother the queen of her children? Simply that all her life she has
+been their servant, and never thought about herself, but always
+about them.
+
+Now much might be said as to the application of these threadbare
+principles in the Church and in society, but I do not enlarge on
+that; only let me say in a word--that here is the one law on which
+preeminence in the Church is to be allocated.
+
+What becomes of sacerdotal hierarchies, what becomes of the 'lords
+over God's heritage,' if the one ground of pre-eminence is service?
+I know, of course, that there may be different forms embodying one
+principle, but it seems to me that that form of Church polity is
+nearest the mind of Christ in which the only dignity is dignity of
+service, and the only use of place is the privilege of stooping and
+helping.
+
+This fruitful principle will one day shape civil as well as
+ecclesiastical societies. For the present, our Lord draws a contrast
+between the worldly and the Christian notions of rank and dignity.
+'It shall not be so among you,' says He. And the nobler conception
+of eminence and service set forth in His disciples, if they are true
+to their Lord and their duty, will leaven, and we may hope finally
+transform society, sweeping away all vulgar notions of greatness as
+depending on birth, or wealth, or ruder forms of powers, and
+marshalling men according to Christ's order of precedence, in which
+helpfulness is preeminence and service is supremacy, while
+conversely pre-eminence is used to help and superiority stoops to
+serve.
+
+One remark will close my sermon. You have to take the last words of
+this verse if you are ever going to put in practice its first words.
+'Even as the Son of Man came, not to be ministered unto, but to
+minister,'--if Jesus Christ had stopped there He would only have
+been one more of the long roll of ineffectual preachers and prophets
+who show men the better way, and leave them struggling in the mire.
+But He did not stop there: 'Even as the Son of Man came ... to give
+His life a ransom for many.'
+
+Ah! the Cross, with its burden of the sacrifice for the world's sin,
+is the only power which will supply us with a sufficient motive for
+the loftiness of Christlike service. I know that there is plenty of
+entirely irreligious and Christless beneficence in the world. And
+God forbid that I should say a word to seem to depreciate that. But
+sure I am that for the noblest, purest, most widely diffused and
+blessedly operative kinds of service of man, there is no motive and
+spring anywhere except 'He loved me, and gave Himself for me.' And,
+bought by that service and that blood, it will be possible, and it
+is obligatory upon all of us, to 'do unto others,' as He Himself
+said, 'as I have done to you.' 'The servant is not greater than his
+Lord.'
+
+
+
+
+WHAT THE HISTORIC CHRIST TAUGHT ABOUT HIS DEATH
+
+
+    'The Son of Man came... to give His life a ransom for
+    many.'--Matt. xx. 28.
+
+We hear a great deal at present about going back to 'the Christ of
+the Gospels.' In so far as that phrase and the movement of thought
+which it describes are a protest against the substitution of
+doctrines for the Person whom the doctrines represent, I, for one,
+rejoice in it. But I believe that the antithesis suggested by the
+phrase, and by some of its advocates avowed, between the Christ of
+the Gospels and the Christ of the Epistles, is false. The Christ of
+the Gospels is the Christ of the Epistles, as I humbly venture to
+believe. And I cannot but see that there is a possibility of a
+movement which, carried out legitimately, should command the fullest
+sympathy of every Christian heart, degenerating into the rejection
+of all the supernatural elements in the nature and work of our Lord,
+and leaving us with a meagre human Christ, shrunken and impotent.
+The Christ of the Gospels, by all means; but let it be the whole
+Christ of all the Gospels, the Christ over whose cradle angels sang,
+by whose empty grave angels watched, whose ascending form angels
+beheld and proclaimed that He should come again to be our Judge. Go
+back to that Christ, and all will be well.
+
+Now it seems to me that one direction in which there is a
+possibility of such movement as I have referred to being one-sided
+and harmful is in reference to the conception which we form of the
+death of Jesus Christ. And therefore I ask you to listen for a few
+moments to me at this time whilst I try to bring out what is plain
+in the words before us; and is, as I humbly believe, interwoven in
+the whole texture of all the Gospels--viz., the conception which
+Jesus Christ Himself formed of the meaning of His death.
+
+I. The first thing that I notice is that the Christ of the Gospels
+thought and taught that His death was to be His own act.
+
+I do not think that it is an undue or pedantic pressing of the
+significance of the words before us, if I ask you to notice two of
+the significant expressions in this text. 'The Son of Man
+_came_,' and came 'to _give_ His life.' The one word refers to the act
+of entrance into, the other to the act of departure from, this earthly
+life. They correspond in so far as that both bring into prominence
+Christ's own consent, volition, and action in the very two things
+about which men are least consulted, their being born and their dying.
+
+'The Son of Man came.' Now if that expression occurred but once it
+might be minimised as being only a synonym for birth, having no
+special force. But if you will notice that it is our Lord's habitual
+word about Himself, only varied occasionally by another one equally
+significant when he says that He 'was sent'; and if you will further
+notice that all through the Gospels He never but once speaks of
+Himself as being 'born,' I think you will admit that I am not making
+too much of a word when I say that when Christ, out of the depths of
+His consciousness, said 'the Son of Man _came_,' He was teaching
+us that He lived before He was born, and that behind the natural fact
+of birth there lay the supernatural fact of His choosing to be
+incarnated for man's redemption.  The one instance in which He does
+speak of Himself as 'being born' is most instructive in this
+connection. For it was before the Roman governor; and He accompanied
+the clause in which He said, 'To this end was I born'--which was
+adapted to Pilate's level of intelligence--with another one which
+seemed to be inserted to satisfy His own sense of fitness, rather
+than for any light that it would give to its first hearer, 'And for
+this cause came I into the world.' The two things were not synonymous;
+but before the birth there was the coming, and Jesus was born because
+the Eternal Word willed to come. So says the Christ of the Gospels;
+and the Christ of the Epistles is represented as 'taking upon Him
+the form of a servant, and being found in fashion as a man.' Do you
+accept that as true of 'the historic Christ'?
+
+With precise correspondence, if we turn to the other end of His
+life, we find the equally significant expression in my text which
+asserts for it, too, that the other necessity to which men
+necessarily and without their own volition bow was to Christ a
+matter of choice. 'The Son of Man came to _give_.' 'No man
+taketh it from Me,' as He said on another occasion. 'I lay it down
+of Myself.' 'The Good Shepherd giveth His life for the sheep.' 'My
+flesh ... I give for the world's life.' Now, brethren, we are not to
+regard these words as mere vague expressions for a willing surrender
+to the necessity of death, but as expressing what I believe is
+taught us all through Scripture, and is fundamental to any real
+grasp of the real Christ, that He died because He chose, and chose
+because He loved. What meant that 'loud voice' with which He said
+'It is finished,' but that there was no physical exhaustion, such as
+was usually the immediate occasion of death by crucifixion? What
+meant that surprising rapidity with which the last moment came in
+His case, to the astonishment of the stolid bystanders? They meant
+the same thing as I believe that the Evangelists meant when they,
+with one consent, employed expressions to describe Christ's death,
+which may indeed be only euphemisms, but are apparently declarations
+of its voluntary character. 'He gave up the ghost.' 'He yielded His
+Spirit.' He breathed forth His life, and so He died.
+
+As one of the old fathers said, 'Who is this that thus falls asleep
+when He wills? To die is weakness, but thus to die is power.' 'The
+weakness of God is stronger than man.' The desperate king of Israel
+bade his slave kill him, and when the menial shrunk from such
+sacrilege he fell upon his own sword. Christ bade His servant Death,
+'Do this,' and he did it; and dying, our Lord and Master declared
+Himself the Lord and Master of Death. This is a part of the history
+of the historic Christ. Do you believe it?
+
+II. Then, secondly, the Christ of the Gospels thought and taught
+that His death was one chief aim of His coming.
+
+I have omitted words from my text which intervene between its first
+and its last ones; not because I regard them as unimportant, but
+because they would lead us into too wide a field to cover in one
+sermon. But I would pray you to observe how the re-insertion of them
+throws immense light upon the significance of the words which I have
+chosen. 'The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to
+minister.' That covers the whole ground of His gracious and gentle
+dealings here on earth, His tenderness, self-abnegation, sympathy,
+healing, and helpfulness. Then, side by side with that, and as the
+crowning manifestation of His work of service, without which His
+life--gracious, radiant, sweet as it is--would still want something
+of its power, He sets His death.
+
+Surely that is an altogether unexampled phenomenon; altogether a
+unique and unparalleled thing, that a _man_ should regard that
+which for all workers, thinkers, speakers, poets, philanthropists,
+is the sad term of their activity, as being a part of His work; and
+not only a part, but so conspicuous a part that it was a purpose
+which He had in view from the very beginning, and before the
+beginning, of His earthly life. So Calvary was to Jesus Christ no
+interruption, tragic and premature, of His life's activities. His
+death was no mere alternative set before Him, which He chose rather
+than be unfaithful or dumb. He did not die because He was hounded by
+hostile priests, but He came on purpose that He might so end His
+career.
+
+I need not remind you of, and space would not permit me to dwell
+upon, other instances in the Gospels in which our Lord speaks the
+same language. At the very beginning of His public ministry He told
+the inquiring rabbi, who came to Him with the notion that He would
+be somewhat flattered by His recognition by one of the authoritative
+and wise pundits of the nation, that 'the Son of Man must be lifted
+up.' The necessity was before Him, but it was no unwelcome
+necessity, for it sprung from His own love. It was the very aim of
+His coming, to live a Servant and to die a Ransom.
+
+Dear brethren, let me press upon you this plain truth, that no
+conception of Christ's death which looks upon it merely as the
+close, by pathetic sufferings, of a life to the activities of which
+it adds nothing but pathos, approaches the signification of it which
+inheres in the thought that this was the aim and purpose with which
+Jesus Christ was incarnate, that He should live indeed the pure and
+sweet life which He lived, but equally that He should die the
+painful and bitter death which He died. He was not merely a martyr,
+though the first of them, but something far more, as we shall see
+presently. If to you the death of Jesus Christ is the same in kind,
+however superior in degree, as those of patriots and reformers and
+witnesses for the truth and martyrs for righteousness, then I humbly
+venture to represent that, instead of going back to, you have gone
+away from, the Christ of the Gospels, who said, 'The Son of Man came
+... to give His life'; and that such a Christ is not a historic but
+an imaginary one.
+
+III. So, thirdly, notice that the Christ of the Gospels thought and
+taught that His death was a ransom.
+
+A ransom is a price paid in exchange for captives that they may be
+liberated; or for culprits that they may be set free. And that was
+Christ's thought of what He had to die for. There lay the 'must.'
+
+I do not dwell upon the conception of our condition involved in that
+word. We are all bound and held by the chain of our sins. We all
+stand guilty before God, and, as I believe, there is a necessity in
+that loving divine nature whereby it is impossible that without a
+ransom there can be, in the interests of mankind and in the
+interests of righteousness, forgiveness of sins. I do not mean that
+in the words before us there is a developed theory of atonement, but
+I do mean that no man, dealing with them fairly, can strike out of
+them the notion of vicarious suffering in exchange for, or instead
+of, 'the many.' This is no occasion for theological discussion, nor
+am I careful now to set forth a fully developed doctrine; but I am
+declaring, as God helps me, what is to me, and I pray may be to you,
+the central thought about that Cross of Calvary, that on it there is
+made the sacrifice for the world's sins.
+
+And, dear brethren, I beseech you to consider, how can we save the
+character of Jesus Christ, accepting these Gospels, which on the
+hypothesis about which I am now speaking are valid sources of
+knowledge, without recognising that He deliberately led His
+disciples to believe that He died for--that is, instead of--them
+that put their trust in Him? For remember that not only such words
+as these of my text are to be taken into account. Remember that it
+was the Christ of the Gospels who established that last rite of the
+Lord's Supper, in which the broken bread, and the separation between
+the bread and the wine, both indicated a violent death, and who said
+about both the one and the other of the double symbols, 'For you.' I
+do not understand how any body of professing believers, rejecting
+Christ's death as the sacrifice for sin, can find a place in their
+beliefs or in their practice for that institution of the Lord's
+Supper, or can rightly interpret the sacred words then spoken. This
+is why the Cross was Christ's aim. This is why He said, with His
+dying breath, 'It is finished.' This truth is the explanation of His
+words, 'The Good Shepherd giveth His life for the sheep.'
+
+And this truth of a ransom-price lies at the basis of all vigorous
+Christianity. A Christianity without a dying Christ is a dying
+Christianity. And history shows us that the expansiveness and
+elevating power of the Gospel depend on the prominence given to the
+sacrifice on the Cross. An old fable says that the only thing that
+melts adamant is the blood of a lamb. The Gospel reveals the
+precious blood of Jesus Christ, His death for us as a ransom, as the
+one power which subdues hostility and binds hearts to Him. The
+Christ of the Gospels is the Christ who taught that He died for us.
+
+IV. Lastly, the Christ of the Gospels thought and taught that His
+death had world-wide power.
+
+He says here, 'A ransom for _many_.' Now that word is not used
+in this instance in contradistinction to 'all,' nor in
+contradistinction to 'few.' It is distinctly employed as emphasising
+the contrast between the single death and the wide extent of its
+benefits; and in terms which, rigidly taken, simply express
+indefiniteness, it expresses universality. That that is so seems to
+me to be plain enough, if we notice other places of Scripture to
+which, at this stage of my sermon, I can but allude. For instance,
+in Romans v. the two expressions, 'the many' and the 'all,'
+alternate in reference to the extent of the power of Christ's
+sacrifice for men. And the Apostle in another place, where probably
+there may be an allusion to the words of the text, so varies them as
+that he declares that Jesus Christ in His death was the ransom
+'instead of all.' But I do not need to dwell upon these. 'Many' is a
+vague word, and in it we see dim crowds stretching away beyond our
+vision, for whom that death was to be the means of salvation. I take
+it that the words of our text have an allusion to those in the great
+prophecy in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, in which we read, 'By
+His knowledge shall My righteous Servant' (mark the allusion in our
+text, 'Who came to _minister_') 'justify many, for He shall
+bear their iniquities.'
+
+So, brethren, I believe that I am not guilty of unduly widening out our
+Lord's thought when I say that the indefinite 'many' is practically
+'all.' And, brother, if 'all,' then _you_; if all, then _me_; if
+all, then _each_. Think of a man, nineteen centuries ago, away
+in a little insignificant corner of the world, standing up and saying,
+'My death is the price paid in exchange for the world!' That is
+meekness and lowliness of heart, is it? That is humility, so beautiful
+in a teacher, is it? How any man can accept the veracity of these
+narratives, believe that Jesus Christ said anything the least like
+this, not believe that He was the Divine Son of the Father, the
+Sacrifice for the world's sin, and yet profess--and honestly profess,
+I doubt not, in many cases--to retain reverence and admiration, all
+but adoration, for Him, I confess that I, for my poor part, cannot
+understand.
+
+But I ask you, what you are going to do with these thoughts and
+teachings of the Christ of the Gospels. Are you going to take them
+for true? Are, you going to trust your salvation to Him? Are you
+going to accept the ransom and say, 'O Lord, truly I am Thy servant;
+Thou hast loosed my bonds'? Brethren, the Christ of the Gospels, by
+all means; but the Christ that said, 'The Son of Man came to ...
+give His life a ransom for many.' My Christ, and your Christ, and
+the world's Christ is 'the Christ that died; yea, rather, that is
+risen again; who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh
+intercession for us.'
+
+
+
+
+THE COMING OF THE KING TO HIS PALACE
+
+
+    'And when they drew nigh unto Jerusalem, and were come
+    to Bethphage, unto the mount of Olives, then sent Jesus
+    two disciples, 2. Saying unto them, Go into the village
+    over against you, and straightway ye shall find an ass
+    tied, and a colt with her: loose them, and bring them
+    unto Me. 3. And if any man say ought unto you, ye shall
+    say, The Lord hath need of them; and straightway he
+    will send them. 4. All this was done, that it might he
+    fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying,
+    5. Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy King
+    cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a
+    colt the foal of an ass. 6. And the disciples went, and
+    did as Jesus commanded them, 7. And brought the ass,
+    and the colt, and put on them their clothes, and they
+    set Him thereon. 8. And a very great multitude spread
+    their garments in the way; others cut down branches
+    from the trees, and strawed them in the way. 9. And the
+    multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried,
+    saying, Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is He that
+    cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.
+    10. And when He was come into Jerusalem, all the city
+    was moved, saying, Who is this? 11. And the multitude
+    said, This is Jesus the prophet of Nazareth of Galilee.
+    12. And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out
+    all them that sold and bought in the temple, and
+    overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the
+    seats of them that sold doves, 13. And said unto them,
+    It is written, My house shall be called the house of
+    prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves. 14. And
+    the blind and the lame came to Him in the temple; and
+    He healed them. 15. And when the chief priests and
+    scribes saw the wonderful things that He did, and the
+    children crying in the temple, and saying, Hosanna to
+    the Son of David, they were sore displeased, 16. And
+    said unto Him, Hearest Thou what these say? And Jesus
+    saith unto them, Yea; have ye never read, Out of the
+    mouth of babes and sucklings Thou hast perfected praise?'
+    --MATT. xxi. 1-16.
+
+Jesus spent His last Sabbath in the quiet home at Bethany with
+Lazarus and his sisters. Some sense of His approaching death tinged
+the modest festivities of that evening with sadness, and spoke in
+Mary's 'anointing of His body for the burying.' The pause was brief,
+and, with the dawn of Sunday, He set Himself again to tread the road
+to the cross. Who can doubt that He felt the relief of that
+momentary relaxation of the strain on His spirit, and the
+corresponding pressure of its renewed tightening? This passage shows
+Him putting out from the quiet haven and facing the storm again. It
+is in two main sections, dealing respectively with the royal
+procession, and the acts of the King in the temple.
+
+I. The procession of the King. The first noteworthy point is that
+our Lord initiates the whole incident, and deliberately sets Himself
+to evoke the popular enthusiasm, by a distinct voluntary fulfilment
+of a Messianic prophecy. The allusion to the prophecy, in His
+sending for the colt and mounting it, may have escaped the disciples
+and the crowds of pilgrims; but they rightly caught His intention to
+make a solemn triumphal entry into the city, and responded with a
+burst of enthusiasm, which He expected and wished. The poor garments
+flung hastily on the animals, the travel-stained cloaks cast on the
+rocky path, the branches of olive and palm waved in the hands, and
+the tumult of acclaim, which shrilly echoed the words of the psalm,
+and proclaimed Him to be the Son of David, are all tokens that the
+crowds hailed Him as their King, and were all permitted and welcomed
+by Him. All this is in absolute opposition to His usual action,
+which had been one long effort to damp down inflammable and
+unspiritual Messianic hopes, and to avoid the very enthusiasm which
+now surges round Him unchecked. Certainly that calm figure, sitting
+on the slow-pacing ass, with the noisy multitude pressing round Him,
+is strangely unlike Him, who hid Himself among the hills when they
+sought to make Him a King. His action is the more remarkable, if it
+be remembered that the roads were alive with pilgrims, most of whom
+passing through Bethany would be Galileans; that they had seen
+Lazarus walking about the village, and knew who had raised him; that
+the Passover festival was _the_ time in all the year when
+popular tumults were to be expected; and that the crowds going to
+Jerusalem were met by a crowd coming from it, bent on seeing the
+doer and the subject of the great miracle. Into this heap of
+combustibles our Lord puts a light. He must have meant that it
+should blaze as it did.
+
+What is the reason for this contrast? The need for the former
+reticence no longer existed. There was no fear now of His teaching
+and ministry being interrupted by popular outburst. He knew that it
+was finished, and that His hour had come. Therefore, the same motive
+of filial obedience which had led Him to avoid what would prevent
+His discharging His Father's commission, now impelled Him to draw
+the attention of the nation and its rulers to the full extent of His
+claims, and to put the plain issue of their acceptance or rejection
+in the most unmistakable manner. A certain divine decorum, if we may
+so call it, required that once He should enter the city as its King.
+Some among the shouting crowds might have their enthusiasm purified
+and spiritualised, if once it were directed to Him. It was for us,
+no less than for them, that this one interruption of His ordinary
+method was adopted by Him, that we too might ponder the fact that He
+laid His hand on that magnificent prophecy, and said, 'It is mine. I
+am the King.'
+
+The royal procession is also a revelation of the character of the
+King and the nature of His kingdom. A strange King this, indeed, who
+has not even an ass of His own, and for followers, peasants with
+palm branches instead of swords! What would a Roman soldier or one
+of Herod's men have thought of that rustic procession of a pauper
+prince on an ass, and a hundred or two of weaponless, penniless men?
+Christ's one moment of royal pomp is as eloquent of His humiliation
+as the long stretch of His lowly life is. And yet, as is always the
+case, side by side with the lowliness there gleams the veiled
+splendour. He had to borrow the colt, and the message in which He
+asks for it is a strange paradox. 'The Lord hath need of him'--so
+great was the poverty of so great a King. But it spoke, too, of a
+more than human knowledge, and of an authority which had only to
+require in order to receive. Some farming villager, no doubt, who
+was a disciple but secretly, gladly yielded his beasts. The prophecy
+which Matthew quotes, with the omission of some words, from
+Zechariah, and the addition of the first clause from Isaiah, is
+symbolic, and would have been amply fulfilled in the mission and
+character of Christ, though this event had never taken place. But
+just as it is symbolic, so this external fulfilment, which is
+intended to point to the real fulfilment, is also symbolic. The
+chariot and the horse are the emblems of conquerors. It is fitting
+that the Prince of Peace should make His state entry on a colt,
+unridden before, and saddled only with a garment. Zechariah meant
+that Zion's King should not reign by the right of the strongest, and
+that all His triumphs should be won by lowly meekness. Christ meant
+the same by His remarkable act. And has not the picture of Him,
+throned thus, stamped for ever on the imagination of the world a
+profounder sense of the inmost nature of His kingdom than many words
+would have done? Have we learned the lesson of the gentleness which
+belongs to His kingdom, and of the unchristian character of war and
+violence? Do we understand what the Psalmist meant when he sang, 'In
+thy majesty ride on prosperously, because of ... meekness'? Let us
+not forget the other picture, 'Behold, a white horse, and He that
+sat thereon, called Faithful and True; and in righteousness He doth
+judge and make war.'
+
+The entry may remind us also of the worthlessness of mere enthusiastic
+feeling in reference to Jesus Christ. The day was the Sunday. How many
+of that crowd were shouting as loudly, 'Crucify Him!' and 'Not this
+man, but Barabbas!' on the Friday? The palm-branches had not faded,
+where they had been tossed, before the fickle crowd had swung round
+to the opposite mood. Perhaps the very exuberance of feeling at the
+beginning, had something to do with the bitterness of the execrations
+at the end, of the week. He had not answered their expectations, but,
+instead of heading a revolt, had simply taught in the temple, and
+meekly let Himself be laid hold of. Nothing succeeds like success,
+and no idol is so quickly forsaken as the idol of a popular rising.
+All were eager to disclaim connection with Him, and to efface the
+remembrance of their Sunday's hosannas by their groans round His
+gibbet. But there is a wider lesson here. No enthusiasm can be too
+intense which is based upon a true sense of our need of Christ, and
+of His work for us; but it is easy to excite apparently religious
+emotion by partial presentations of Him, and such excitement foams
+itself away by its very violence, like some Eastern river that in
+winter time dashes down the wady with irresistible force, and in
+summer is bone dry. Unless we know Christ to be the Saviour of our
+souls and the Lamb of God, we shall soon tire of singing hosannas in
+His train, and want a king with more pretensions; but if we have
+learned who and what He is to us, then let us open our mouths wide,
+and not be afraid of letting the world hear our shout of praise.
+
+II. The coming of the King in the temple. The discussion of the
+accuracy of Matthew's arrangement of events here is unnecessary. He
+has evidently grouped, as usual, incidents which have a common
+bearing, and wishes to put these three, of the cleansing, the
+healing, and the pleasure in the children's praise, as the
+characteristic acts of the King in the temple. We can scarcely avoid
+seeing in the first of the three a reference to Malachi's prophecy,
+'The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to His temple ... And
+He shall purify the sons of Levi.' His first act, when in manhood He
+visited the temple, had been to cleanse. His first act when He
+enters it as its Lord is the same. The abuse had grown again apace.
+Much could be said in its vindication, as convenient and harmless,
+and it was too profitable to be lightly abandoned. But the altar of
+Mammon so near the altar of God was sacrilege in His eyes, and
+though He had passed the traders unmolested many times since that
+first driving out, now that He solemnly comes to claim His rights,
+He cannot but repeat it. It is perhaps significant that His words
+now have both a more sovereign and a more severe tone than before.
+Then He had spoken of 'My Father's house,' now it is 'My house,'
+which are a part of His quotation indeed, but not therefore
+necessarily void of reference to Himself. He is exercising the
+authority of a son over His own house, and bears Himself as Lord of
+the temple. Before, He charged them with making it a 'house of
+merchandise'; now, with turning it into a robber's cave. Evil
+rebuked and done again is worse than before. Trafficking in things
+pertaining to the altar is even more likely than other trading to
+cross the not always very well defined line which separates trade
+from trickery and commerce from theft. That lesson needs to be laid
+to heart in many quarters now. There is always a fringe of moneyed
+interests round Christ's Church, seeking gain out of religious
+institutions; and their stands have a wonderful tendency to creep
+inwards from the court of the Gentiles to holier places. The
+parasite grows very quickly, and Christ had to deal with it more
+than once to keep down its growth. The sellers of doves and changers
+of money into the sacred shekel were venial offenders compared with
+many in the Church, and the race is not extinct. If Christ were to
+come to His house to-day, in bodily form, who doubts that He would
+begin, as He did before, by driving the traders out of His temple?
+How many 'most respectable' usages and people would have to go, if
+He did!
+
+The second characteristic, or we might say symbolical, act is the
+healing of the blind and lame. Royal state and cleansing severity
+are wonderfully blended with tender pity and the gentle hand of
+sovereign virtue to heal. The very manifestation of the former drew
+the needy to Him; and the blind, though they could not see, and the
+lame, though they could not walk, managed to grope and hobble their
+way to Him, not afraid of His severity, nor daunted by His royalty.
+No doubt they haunted the temple precincts as beggars, with perhaps
+as little sense of its sacredness as the money-changers; but their
+misery kindled a flicker of confidence and desire, to which He who
+tends the dimmest wick till it breaks into clear flame could not but
+respond. Though in His house He casts out the traders, He will heal
+the cripples and the blind, who know their need, and faintly trust
+His heart and power. Such a trait could not be wanting in this
+typical representation of the acts of the King.
+
+Finally, He encourages and casts the shield of His approval round
+the children's praises. How natural it is that the children, pleased
+with the stir and not yet drilled into conventionalism, should have
+kept up their glad shouts, even inside the temple enclosure! How
+their fresh treble voices ring yet through all these centuries! The
+priests had, no doubt, been nursing their wrath at all that had been
+going on, but they had not dared to interfere with the cleansing,
+nor, for very shame, with the healings; but now they see their
+opportunity. This is a clear breach of all propriety, and that is
+the crime of crimes in the eyes of such people. They had kept quite
+cool and serenely contemptuous, amid the stir of the glad
+procession, and they did not much care though He healed some
+beggars; but to have this unseemly noise, though it was praise, was
+more than they could stand. Ecclesiastical martinets, and men whose
+religion is mostly ceremony, are, of course, more 'moved with
+indignation' at any breach of ceremonial regulations than at holes
+made in graver laws. Nothing makes men more insensitive to the ring
+of real worship than being accustomed to the dull decorum of formal
+worship. Christ answers their 'hearest thou?' with a 'did ye never
+read?' and shuts their mouths with words so apposite in their
+plainest meaning that even they are silenced. To Him these young
+ringing hosannas are 'perfect praise,' and worth any quantity of
+rabbis' preachments. In their deeper sense, His words declare that
+the ears of God and of His Son, the Lord of the temple, are more
+gladly filled with the praises of the 'little ones,' who know their
+weakness, and hymn His goodness with simple tongue, than with
+heartless eloquence of words or pomp of worship. The psalm from
+which the words are taken declares man's superiority over the
+highest works of God's hands, and the perfecting of the divine
+praise from his lips. We are but as the little children of creation,
+but because we know sin and redemption, we lead the chorus of
+heaven. As St. Bernard says, 'Something is wanting to the praise of
+heaven, if those be wanting who can say, "We went through fire and
+through water; and Thou broughtest us out into a wealthy place."' In
+like manner, those praise Him most acceptably among men who know
+their feebleness, and with stammering lips humbly try to breathe
+their love, their need, and their trust.
+
+
+
+
+A NEW KIND OF KING
+
+
+    'All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which
+    was spoken by the prophet, saying, Tell ye the daughter
+    of Zion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and
+    sitting upon an ass.'--MATT. xxi. 4, 5.
+
+Our Lord's entrance into Jerusalem is one of the comparatively few
+events which are recorded in all the four Gospels. Its singular
+unlikeness to the rest of His life, and its powerful influence in
+bringing about the Crucifixion, may account for its prominence in
+the narratives. It took place probably on the Sunday of Passion
+Week. Before the palm branches were withered the enthusiasm had died
+away, and the shouting crowd had found out that this was not the
+sort of king that they wanted. They might have found that out, even
+by the very circumstances of the entrance, for they were profoundly
+significant; though their meaning, like so much of the rest of
+Christ's life, was less clear to the partakers and spectators than
+it is to us. 'These things understood not the disciples at the
+first,' says John in closing his narrative of the entrance, 'but
+when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that they had done
+these things unto Him.'
+
+My object in this sermon is not at all to attempt a pictorial
+treatment of this narrative, for these Gospels tell it us a great
+deal better than any of us can tell it after them; but to seek to
+bring out, if it may be, two or three aspects of its significance.
+
+I. First, then, I ask you to consider its significance as an
+altogether exceptional fact in Christ's life.
+
+Throughout the whole of the preceding period, He had had two aims
+distinctly in view. One was to shun publicity; and the other was to
+damp down the heated, vulgar anticipations of the multitude, who
+expected a temporal king. And now here He deliberately, and of set
+purpose, takes a step which is like flinging a spark into a powder
+barrel. The nation was assembled in crowds, full of the unwholesome
+excitement which attended their meeting for the annual feast. All
+were in a quiver of expectation; and knowing that, Jesus Christ
+originates this scene by His act of sending the two disciples into
+the village over against them, to 'bring the ass, and the colt the
+foal of an ass.' The reasons for a course so entirely opposed to all
+the preceding must have been strong. Let us try to see what they
+were.
+
+First, He did it in order to precipitate the conflict which was to end
+in His death. Now, had He any right to do that? Knowing as He did the
+ferment of expectation into which He was thrusting this new element
+of disturbance, and foreseeing, as He must have done, that it would
+sharpen the hostility of the rulers of the people to a murderous
+degree, how can He be acquitted of one of two things--either singular
+shortsightedness or rash foolhardiness in taking such a step? Was He
+justified, or was He not?
+
+If we are to look at His conduct from ordinary points of view, the
+answer must certainly be that He was not. And we can only understand
+this, and all the rest of His actions during the fateful three or
+four days that followed it, if we recognise in them the fixed
+resolve of One who knew that His mission was not only to live and to
+teach by word and life, but to die, and by death to deliver the
+world. I take it that it is very hard to save the character of Jesus
+Christ for our reverence if we refuse to regard His death as for our
+redemption. But if He came, and knew that He came, not only 'to
+minister' but 'to give His life a ransom for many,' then we can
+understand how He hastened to the Cross, and deliberately set a
+light to the train which was to end in that great explosion. On any
+other hypothesis it seems to me immensely hard to account for His
+act here.
+
+Then, still further, looking at this distinctly exceptional fact in
+our Lord's life, we see in it a very emphatic claim to very singular
+prerogative and position. He not only thereby presented Himself
+before the nation in their collective capacity as being the King of
+Israel, but He also did a very strange thing. He dressed Himself, so
+to speak, in order to fulfil a prophecy. He posed before the world
+as being the Person who was meant by sacred old words. And His
+Entrance upon the slow-pacing colt was His voluntary and solemn
+assertion that He was the Person of whom the whole stream and
+current of divinely sent premonitions and forecasts had been
+witnessing from the beginning. He claimed thereby to be the King of
+Israel and the Fulfiller of the divine promises that were of old.
+
+Now again, I have to ask the question, Was He right, or was He
+wrong? If He was right, then He is a great deal more than a wise
+Teacher, and a perfect Example of excellence. If He was wrong, He is
+a great deal less. There is no escape from that alternative, as it
+seems to me, but by the desperate expedient of denying that He ever
+did this thing which this narrative tells us that He did. At all
+events I beseech you all, dear friends, to take fairly into your
+account of the character of Jesus Christ, this fact, that He, the
+meek, the gentle, said that He was meek, and everybody has believed
+Him; and that once, in the very crisis of His life, and in
+circumstances which make the act most conspicuous, He who always
+shunned publicity, nor 'caused His voice to be heard in the
+streets,' and steadfastly put away from Himself the vulgar homage
+that would have degraded Him into a mere temporal monarch, did
+assert that He was the King of Israel and the Fulfiller of prophecy.
+Ask yourselves, What does that fact mean?
+
+And then, still further, looking at the act as exceptional in our
+Lord's life, note that it was done in order to make one final,
+solemn appeal and offer to the men who beheld Him. It was the last
+bolt in His quiver. All else had failed, perhaps this might succeed.
+We know not the depths of the mysteries of that divine foreknowledge
+which, even though it foresees failure, ceases not to plead and to
+woo obstinate hearts. But this we may thankfully learn, that, just
+as with despairing hope, but with unremitting energy, Jesus Christ,
+often rejected, offered Himself once more if perchance He might win
+men to repentance, so the loving patience and long-suffering of our
+God cease not to plead ever with us. 'Last of all He sent unto them
+His Son, saying, They will reverence My Son when they see Him'; and
+yet the expectation was disappointed, and the Son was slain. We
+touch deep mysteries, but the persistence of the pleading and
+rejected love and pity of our God shine through this  strange fact.
+
+II. And now, secondly, let me ask you to note its significance as a
+symbol.
+
+The prophecy which two out of the four evangelists--viz., Matthew and
+John--regard as having been, in some sense, fulfilled by the Entrance
+into Jerusalem, would have been fulfilled quite as truly if there had
+been no Entrance. For the mere detail of the prophecy is but a
+picturesque way of setting forth its central and essential point--viz.,
+the meekness of the King. So our Lord's fulfilment is only an external,
+altogether subsidiary, accomplishment of the prophecy; and in fact,
+like some other of the external correspondences between His life and
+the outward details of Old Testament prophecy, is intended for little
+more than a picture or a signpost which may direct our thoughts to the
+inward correspondence, which is the true fulfilment.
+
+So then, the deed, like the prophecy after which it is moulded, is
+wholly and entirely of importance in its symbolical aspect.
+
+The symbolism is clear enough. This is a new kind of King. He comes,
+not mounted on a warhorse, or thundering across the battlefield in a
+scythe-armed chariot, like the Pharaohs and the Assyrian monarchs,
+who have left us their vainglorious monuments, but mounted on the
+emblem of meekness, patience, gentleness, and peace. And He is a
+pauper King, for He has to borrow the beast on which He rides, and
+His throne is draped with the poor, perhaps ragged, robes of a
+handful of fishermen. And His attendants are not warriors bearing
+spears, but peasants with palm branches. And the salutation of His
+royalty is not the blare of trumpets, but the 'Hosanna!' from a
+thousand throats. That is not the sort of King that the world calls
+a King. The Roman soldiers might well have thought they were
+perpetrating an exquisite jest when they thrust the reed into His
+unresisting hand, and crushed down the crown of thorns on His
+bleeding brows.
+
+But the symbol discloses the very secret of His Kingdom, the
+innermost mysteries of His own character and of the forces to which
+He intrusts the further progress of His word. Gentleness is royal
+and omnipotent; force and violence are feeble. The Lord is in the
+still, small voice, not in the earthquake, nor the fire, nor the
+mighty wind. The dove's light pinion will fly further than the wings
+of Rome's eagles, with their strong talons and blood-dyed beaks. And
+the kingdom that is established in meekness, and rules by gentleness
+and for gentleness, and has for its only weapons the power of love
+and the omnipotence of patience, that is the kingdom which shall be
+eternal and universal.
+
+Now all that is a great deal more than pretty sentiment; it has the
+closest practical bearing upon our lives. How slow God's Church has
+been to believe that the strength of Christ's kingdom is meekness!
+Professing Christian men have sought to win the world to their side,
+and by wealth or force or persecution, or this, that, or the other
+of the weapons out of the world's armoury, to promote the kingdom of
+Christ. But it has all been in vain. There is only one power that
+conquers hate, and that is meek love. There is only one way by which
+Christ's kingdom can stand firm, and that is its unworldly contrast
+to all the manner of human dominion. Wheresoever God's Church has
+allied itself with secular sovereignties, and trusted in the arm of
+flesh, there has the fine gold become dimmed. Endurance wears out
+persecution, patient submission paralyses hostile violence, for you
+cannot keep on striking down unresisting crowds with the sword. The
+Church of Christ is an anvil that has been beaten upon by many
+hammers, and it has worn them all out. Meekness is victorious, and
+the kingdom of Christ can only be advanced by the faithful
+proclamation of His gentle love, from lips that are moved by hearts
+which themselves are conformed to His patient image.
+
+Then, still further, let me remind you that this symbol carries in
+it, as it seems to me, the lesson of the radical incompatibility of
+war with Christ's kingdom and dominion. It has taken the world all
+these centuries to begin to learn that lesson. But slowly men are
+coming to it, and the day will dawn when all the pomp of warfare,
+and the hell of evil passions from which it comes, and which it
+stimulates, will be felt to be as utterly incompatible with the
+spirit of Christianity as slavery is felt to-day. The prophecy which
+underlies our symbol is very significant in this respect.
+Immediately upon that vision of the meek King throned on the colt
+the foal of an ass, follows this: 'And I will cut off the chariot
+from Ephraim, and the horses from Jerusalem; and the battle bow
+shall be cut off, and He shall speak peace unto the heathen.'
+
+Let me beseech you, Christian men and women, to lay to heart the
+duty of Christ's followers in reference to the influence and
+leavening of public opinion upon this matter, and to see to it that,
+in so far as we can help, we set ourselves steadfastly against that
+devilish spirit which still oppresses with an incubus almost
+intolerable, the nations of so-called Christendom. Lift up your
+voices be not afraid, but cry, 'We are the followers of the Prince
+of Peace, and we war against the war that is blasphemy against His
+dominion.'
+
+And so, still further, note the practical force of this symbol as
+influencing our own conduct. We are the followers of the meek
+Christ. It becomes _us_ to walk in all meekness and gentleness.
+'Spirited conduct' is the world's euphemism for unchristian conduct,
+in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred. The perspective of virtue
+has altered since Jesus Christ taught us how to love. The old
+heathen virtues of magnanimity, fortitude, and the like have 'with
+shame to take a lower room.' There is something better than these.
+The saint has all the virtues of the old heathen hero, and some more
+besides, which are higher than these, and those which he has in
+common, he has in different proportion. The flaunting tulips and
+peonies of the garden of the world seem to outshine the white
+snowdrops and the glowing, modest little violets below their leaves,
+but the former are vulgar, and they drop very soon, and the latter,
+if paler and more delicate, are refined in their celestial beauty.
+The slow-pacing steed on which Jesus Christ rides will out-travel
+the fiery warhorse, and will pursue its patient, steadfast path till
+He 'bring forth righteousness unto judgment,' and 'all the upright
+in heart shall follow Him.'
+
+III. Lastly, notice the significance of this fact as a prophecy. It
+was, as I have pointed out, the last solemn appeal to the nation,
+and in a very real sense it was Christ's coming to judgment. It is
+impossible to look at it without seeing, besides all its other
+meanings, gleaming dimly through it, the anticipations of that other
+coming, when the Lord Himself 'shall descend with a shout, with the
+voice of the Archangel, and the trump of God.'
+
+Let me bring into connection with the scene of my text three others,
+gathered from various parts of Scripture. In the forty-fifth Psalm
+we find, side by side with the great words, 'Ride on prosperously
+because of truth and _meekness_ and righteousness,' the others,
+'Thine arrows are sharp in the hearts of the king's enemies; the
+people shall fall under Thee.' Now, though it is possible that that
+later warlike figure may be merely the carrying out of the thought
+which is more gently put before us in the former words, still it
+looks as if there were two sides to the conquering manifestation of
+the king--one being in 'meekness and truth and righteousness,' and
+the other in some sense destructive and punitive.
+
+But, however that may be, my second scene is drawn from the last
+book of Scripture, where we read that, when the first seal was
+opened, there rode forth a Figure, crowned, mounted upon a white
+steed, bearing bow and arrow, 'conquering and to conquer.' And,
+though that again may be but an image of the victorious progress of
+the gentle Gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the whole earth, still
+it comes as one in a series of judgments, and may rather be taken to
+express the punitive effects which follow its proclamation even here
+and now.
+
+But there can be no doubt with regard to the third of the scenes
+which I connect with the incident of which we are discoursing: 'And
+I saw heaven opened, and beheld a white horse; and He that sat upon
+Him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness doth He judge
+and make war.... And out of His mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with
+it He should smite the nations; and He shall rule them with a rod of
+iron; and He treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of
+Almighty God.' That is the Christ who came into Jerusalem on the colt
+the foal of an ass. That is the Christ who is meek and long-suffering.
+There is a reserve of punitive and destructive power in the meek King.
+And oh I what can be so terrible as the anger of meekness, the wrath
+of infinite gentleness? In the triumphal entry, we find that, when
+the procession turned the rocky shoulder of Olivet, and the long line
+of the white city walls, with the gilding of the Temple glittering in
+the sunshine, burst upon their view, the multitude lifted up their
+voices in gladness. But Christ sat there, and as He looked across the
+valley, and beheld, with His divine prescience, the city, now so
+joyous and full of stir, sitting solitary and desolate, He lifted up
+His voice in loud wailing. The Christ wept because He must punish,
+but He punished though He wept.
+
+Our Judge is the gentle Jesus, therefore we can hope. The gentle
+Jesus is our Judge, therefore let us not presume. I beseech you,
+brethren, lay, as these poor people did their garments, your lusts
+and proud wills in His way, and join the welcoming shout that hails
+the King, 'meek and having salvation.' And then, when He comes forth
+to judge and to destroy, you will not be amongst the ranks of the
+enemies, whom He will ride down and scatter, but amongst 'the armies
+that follow Him, ... clothed in fine linen, clean and pure.'
+
+'Kiss the Son lest He be angry, and ye perish from the way when His
+wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their
+trust in Him.'
+
+
+
+
+THE VINEYARD AND ITS KEEPERS
+
+
+    'Hear another parable: There was a certain householder,
+    which planted a vineyard, and hedged it round about,
+    and digged a winepress in it, and built a tower, and
+    let it out to husbandmen, and went into a far country:
+    34. And when the time of the fruit drew near, he sent
+    his servants to the husbandmen, that they might receive
+    the fruits of it. 35. And the husbandmen took his
+    servants, and beat one, and killed another, and stoned
+    another. 36. Again, he sent other servants more than
+    the first: and they did unto them likewise. 37. But
+    last of all he sent unto them his son, saying, They
+    will reverence my son. 38. But when the husbandmen saw
+    the son, they said among themselves, This is the heir;
+    come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his
+    inheritance. 39. And they caught him, and cast him out
+    of the vineyard, and slew him. 40. When the lord
+    therefore of the vineyard cometh what will he do unto
+    those husbandmen? 41. They say unto him, He will
+    miserably destroy those wicked men, and will let out
+    his vineyard unto other husbandmen, which shall render
+    him the fruits in their seasons. 42. Jesus saith unto
+    them, Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone
+    which the builders rejected, the same is become the
+    head of the corner: this is the Lord's doing, and it is
+    marvellous in our eyes? 43. Therefore say I unto you,
+    The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given
+    to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof. 44. And
+    whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but
+    on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to
+    powder. 45. And when the chief priests and Pharisees
+    had heard His parables, they perceived that He spake of
+    them. 46. But when they sought to lay hands on Him,
+    they feared the multitude, because they took Him for a
+    prophet.'--MATT. xxi. 33-46.
+
+This parable was apparently spoken on the Tuesday of the Passion
+Week. It was a day of hand-to-hand conflict with the Jewish
+authorities and of exhausting toil, as the bare enumeration of its
+incidents shows. It included all that Matthew records between verse
+20 of this chapter and the end of the twenty-fifth chapter--the
+answer to the deputation from the Sanhedrin; the three parables
+occasioned by it, namely, those of the two sons, this one, and that
+of the marriage of the king's son; the three answers to the traps of
+the Pharisees and Herodians about the tribute, of the Sadducees
+about the resurrection, and of the ruler about the chief
+commandment; Christ's question to His questioners about the Son and
+Lord of David; the stern woes hurled at the unmasked hypocrites; to
+which must be added, from other gospels, the sweet eulogium on the
+widow's mite, and the deep saying to the Greeks about the corn of
+wheat, with, possibly, the incident of the woman taken in adultery;
+and then, following all these, the solemn prophecies of the end
+contained in Matthew xxiv. and xxv., spoken on the way to Bethany,
+as the evening shadows were falling. What a day! What a fountain of
+wisdom and love which poured out such streams! The pungent severity
+of this parable, with its transparent veil of narrative, is only
+appreciated by keeping clearly in view the circumstances and the
+listeners. They had struck at Jesus with their question as to His
+authority, and He parries the blow. Now it is His turn, and the
+sharp point goes home.
+
+I. The first stage is the preparation of the vineyard, in which
+three steps are marked. It is planted and furnished with all
+appliances needful for making wine, which is its great end. The
+direct divine origin of the religious ideas and observances of
+'Judaism' is thus asserted by Christ. The only explanation of them
+is that God enclosed that bit of the wilderness, and with His own
+hands set growing there these exotics. Neither the theology nor the
+ritual is of man's establishing. We need not seek for special
+meanings for wall, wine-press, and tower. They simply express the
+completeness of the equipment of the vineyard, as in Isaiah's song,
+which lies at the foundation of the parable, and suggest his
+question, 'What could have been done more?'
+
+Thus furnished, the vineyard is next handed over to the husbandmen,
+who, in Matthew, are exclusively the rulers, while in Luke they are
+the people. No doubt it was 'like people, like priest.' The strange
+dominion of the Pharisees rested entirely on popular consent, and
+their temper accurately indexed that of the nation. The Sanhedrin
+was the chief object at which Christ aimed the parable. But it only
+gave form and voice to the national spirit, and 'the people loved to
+have it so.' National responsibilities are not to be slipped out of
+by being shifted on to the broad shoulders of governments or
+influential men. Who lets them be governments and influential?
+
+  'Guv'ment ain't to answer for it,
+   God will send the bill to you.'
+
+Christ here teaches both rulers and ruled the ground and purpose of
+their privileges. They prided themselves on these as their own, but
+they were only tenants. They made their 'boast of the law'; but they
+forgot that fruit was the end of the divine planting and equipment.
+Holiness and glad obedience were what God sought, and when He found
+them, He was refreshed as with 'grapes in the wilderness.'
+
+Having installed the husbandmen, the owner goes into another
+country. The cluster of miracles which inaugurate an epoch of
+revelation are not continued beyond its beginning. Centuries of
+comparative divine silence followed the planting of the vineyard.
+Having given us our charge, God, as it were, steps aside to leave us
+room to work as we will, and so to display what we are made of. He
+is absent in so far as conspicuous oversight and retribution are
+concerned. He is present to help, love, and bless. The faithful
+husbandman has Him always near, a joy and a strength, else no fruit
+would grow; but the sin and misery of the unfaithful are that they
+think of Him as far off.
+
+II. Then comes the habitual ill-treatment of the messengers. These
+are, of course, the prophets, whose office was not only to foretell,
+but to plead for obedience and trust, the fruits sought by God. The
+whole history of the nation is summed up in this dark picture.
+Generation after generation of princes, priests, and people had done
+the same thing. There is no more remarkable historical fact than
+that of the uniform hostility of the Jews to the prophets. That a
+nation of such a sort as always to hate and generally to murder them
+should have had them in long succession, throughout its history, is
+surely inexplicable on any naturalistic hypothesis. Such men were
+not the natural product of the race, nor of its circumstances, as
+their fate shows. How did they spring up? No 'philosophy of Jewish
+history' explains the anomaly except the one stated here,--'He sent
+His servants.' We are told nowadays that the Jews had a natural
+genius for religion, just as the Greeks for art and thought, and the
+Romans for law and order, and that that explains the origin of the
+prophets. Does it explain their treatment?
+
+The hostility of the husbandmen grows with indulgence. From beating
+they go on to killing, and stoning is a specially savage form of
+killing. The opposition which began, as the former parable tells us,
+with polite hypocrisy and lip obedience, changed, under the stimulus
+of prophetic appeals, to honest refusal, and from that to violence
+which did not hesitate to slay. The more God pleads with men, the
+more self-conscious and bitter becomes their hatred; and the more
+bitter their hatred, the more does He plead, sending other
+messengers, more perhaps in number, or possibly of more weight, with
+larger commission and clearer light. Thus both the antagonistic
+forces grow, and the worse men become, the louder and more
+beseeching is the call of God to them. That is always true; and it
+is also ever true that he who begins with 'I go, sir, and goes not,
+is in a fair way to end with stoning the prophets.
+
+Christ treats the whole long series of violent rejections as the
+acts of the same set of husbandmen. The class or nation was one, as
+a stream is one, though all its particles are different; and the
+Pharisees and scribes, who stood with frowning hatred before Him as
+He spoke, were the living embodiment of the spirit which had
+animated all the past. In so far as they inherited their taint, and
+repeated their conduct, the guilt of all the former generations was
+laid at their door. They declared themselves their predecessors'
+heirs; and as they reproduced their actions, they would have to bear
+the accumulated weight of the consequences.
+
+III. Verses 37-39 tell of the mission of the Son and of its fatal
+issue. Three points are prominent in them. The first is the unique
+position which Christ here claims, with unwonted openness and
+decisiveness, as apart from and far above all the prophets. They
+constitute one order, but He stands alone, sustaining a closer
+relation to God. They were faithful 'as servants,' but He 'as a
+Son,' or, as Mark has it, 'the only and beloved Son.' The listeners
+understood Him well enough. The assertion, which seemed audacious
+blasphemy to them, fitted in with all His acts in that last week,
+which was not only the crisis of His life, but of the nation's fate.
+Rulers and people must decide whether they will own or reject their
+King, and they must do it with their eyes open. Jesus claimed to
+fill a unique position. Was He right or wrong in His claim? If He
+was wrong, what becomes of His wisdom, His meekness, His religion?
+Is a religious teacher, who made the mistake of thinking that He was
+the Son of God in a sense in which no other man is so, worthy of
+admiration? If He was right, what becomes of a Christianity which
+sees in Him only the foremost of the prophets?
+
+The next point marked is the owner's vain hope, in sending his Son. He
+thought that He would be welcomed, and He was disappointed. It was His
+last attempt. Christ knew Himself to be God's last appeal, as He is to
+all men, as well as to that generation. He is the last arrow in God's
+quiver. When it has shot that bolt, the resources even of divine love
+are exhausted, and no more can be done for the vineyard than He has
+done for it. We need not wonder at unfulfilled hopes being here
+ascribed to God. The startling thought only puts into language the
+great mystery which besets all His pleadings with men, which are
+carried on, though they often fail, and which must, therefore, in view
+of His foreknowledge, be regarded as carried on with the knowledge that
+they will fail. That is the long-suffering patience of God. The
+difficulty is common to the words of the parable and to the facts of
+God's unwearied pleading with impenitent men. Its surface is a
+difficulty, its heart is an abyss of all-hoping charity.
+
+The last point is the vain calculation of the husbandmen. Christ
+puts hidden motives into plain words, and reveals to these rulers
+what they scarcely knew of their own hearts. Did they, in their
+secret conclaves, look each other in the face, and confess that He
+was the Heir? Did He not Himself ground His prayer for their pardon
+on their ignorance? But their ignorance was not entire, else they
+had had no sin; neither was their knowledge complete, else they had
+had no pardon. Beneath many an obstinate denial of Him lies a secret
+confession, or misgiving, which more truly speaks the man than does
+the loud negation. And such strange contradictions are men, that the
+secret conviction is often the very thing which gives bitterness and
+eagerness to the hostility. So it was with some of those whose
+hidden suspicions are here set in the light. How was the rulers' or
+the people's wish to 'seize on His inheritance' their motive for
+killing Jesus? Their great sin was their desire to have their
+national prerogatives, and yet to give no true obedience. The ruling
+class clung to their privileges and forgot their responsibilities,
+while the people were proud of their standing as Jews, and careless
+of God's service. Neither wished to be reminded of their debt to the
+Lord of the vineyard, and their hostility to Jesus was mainly
+because He would call on them for fruits. If they could get this
+unwelcome and persistent voice silenced, they could go on in the
+comfortable old fashion of lip-service and real selfishness. It is
+an account, in vividly parabolic language, not only of _their_
+hostility, but of that of many men who are against Him. They wish to
+possess life and its good, without being for ever pestered with
+reminders of the terms on which they hold it, and of God's desire
+for their love and obedience. They have a secret feeling that Christ
+has the right to ask for their hearts, and so they often turn from
+Him angrily, and sometimes hate Him.
+
+With what sad calmness does Jesus tell the fate of the son, so
+certain that it is already as good as done! It _was_ done in
+their counsels, and yet He does not cease to plead, if perchance
+some hearts may be touched and withdraw themselves from the
+confederacy of murder.
+
+IV. We have next the self-condemnation from unwilling lips. Our Lord
+turns to the rulers with startling and dramatic suddenness, which
+may have thrown them off their guard, so that their answer leaped
+out before they had time to think whom it hit. His solemn
+earnestness laid a spell on them, which drew their own condemnation
+from them, though they had penetrated the thin veil of the parable,
+and knew full well who the husbandmen were. Nor could they refuse to
+answer a question about legal punishments for dishonesty, which was
+put to them, the fountains of law, without incurring a second time
+the humiliation just inflicted when He had forced them to
+acknowledge that they, the fountains of knowledge, did not know
+where John came from. So from all these motives, and perhaps from a
+mingling of audacity, which would brazen it out and pretend not to
+see the bearing of the question, they answer. Like Caiaphas in his
+counsel, and Pilate with his writing on the Cross, and many another,
+they spoke deeper things than they knew, and confessed beforehand
+how just the judgments were, which followed the very lines marked
+out by their own words.
+
+V. Then come the solemn application and naked truth of the parable.
+We have no need to dwell on the cycle of prophecies concerning the
+corner-stone, nor on the original application of the psalm. We must
+be content with remarking that our Lord, in this last portion of His
+address, throws away even the thin veil of parable, and speaks the
+sternest truth in the nakedest words. He puts His own claim in the
+plainest fashion, as the corner-stone on which the true kingdom of
+God was to be built. He brands the men who stood before Him as
+incompetent builders, who did not know the stone needed for their
+edifice when they saw it. He declares, with triumphant confidence,
+the futility of opposition to Himself--even though it kill Him. He
+is sure that God will build on Him, and that His place in the
+building, which shall rise through the ages, will be, to even
+careless eyes, the crown of the manifest wonders of God's hand.
+Strange words from a Man who knew that in three days He would be
+crucified! Stranger still that they have come true! He is the
+foundation of the best part of the best men; the basis of thought,
+the motive for action, the pattern of life, the ground of hope, for
+countless individuals; and on Him stands firm the society of His
+Church, and is hung all the glory of His Father's house.
+
+Christ confirms the sentence just spoken by the rulers on
+themselves, but with the inversion of its clauses. All disguise is
+at an end. The fatal 'you' is pronounced. The husbandmen's
+calculation had been that killing the heir would make them lords of
+the vineyard; the grim fact was that they cast themselves out when
+they cast him out. He is the heir. If we desire the inheritance, we
+must get it through Him, and not kill or reject, but trust and obey
+Him. The sentence declares the two truths, that possession of the
+vineyard depends on honouring the Son, and on bringing forth the
+fruits. The kingdom has been taken from the churches of Asia Minor,
+Africa, and Syria, because they bore no fruit. It is not held by us
+on other conditions. Who can venture to speak of the awful doom set
+forth in the last words here? It has two stages: one a lesser
+misery, which is the lot of him who stumbles against the stone,
+while it lies passive to be built on; one more dreadful, when it has
+acquired motion and comes down with irresistible impetus. To stumble
+at Christ, or to refuse His grace, and not to base our lives and
+hopes on Him is maiming and damage, in many ways, here and now. But
+suppose the stone endowed with motion, what can stand against it?
+And suppose that the Christ, who is now offered for the rock on
+which we may pile our hopes and never be confounded, comes to judge,
+will He not crush the mightiest opponent as the dust of the summer
+threshing-floor?
+
+
+
+
+THE STONE OF STUMBLING
+
+
+    'Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken:
+    but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to
+    powder.'--MATT. xxi. 44.
+
+As Christ's ministry drew to its close, its severity and its
+gentleness both increased; its severity to the class to whom it was
+always severe, and its gentleness to the class from whom it never
+turned away. Side by side, through all His manifestation of Himself,
+there were the two aspects: 'He showed Himself _froward_' (if I
+may quote the word) to the self-righteous and the Pharisee; and He
+bent with more than a woman's tenderness of yearning love over the
+darkness and sinfulness, which in its great darkness dimly knew
+itself blind, and in its sinfulness stretched out a lame hand of
+faith, and groped after a divine deliverer. Here, in my text, there
+are only words of severity and awful foreboding. Christ has been
+telling those Pharisees and priests that the kingdom is to be taken
+from them, and given to a nation that brings forth the fruits
+thereof. He interprets for them an Old Testament figure, often
+recurring, which we read in the 118th Psalm (and I may just say, in
+passing, that we get here His interpretation of that psalm, and the
+vindication of our application of it, and other similar ones, to Him
+and His office); 'The stone which the builders rejected,' said He,
+'is become the head of the corner'; and then, falling back on other
+Old Testament uses of the same figure, He weaves into one the whole
+of them--that in Isaiah about the 'sure foundation,' and that in
+Daniel about 'the stone cut out without hands, which became a great
+mountain,' crushing down all opposition,--and centres them all in
+Himself; as fulfilled in Himself, in His person and His work.
+
+The two clauses of my text figuratively point to two different
+classes of operation on the rejecters of the Gospel. What are these
+two classes? 'Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken:
+but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.' In
+the one case, the stone is represented as passive, lying quiet; in
+the other, it has acquired motion. In the one case, the man stumbles
+and hurts himself; a remediable injury, a self-inflicted injury, a
+natural injury, without the active operation of Christ to produce it
+at all; in the other case the injury is worse than remediable, it is
+utter, absolute, grinding destruction, and it comes from the active
+operation of the 'stone of stumbling.' That is to say, the one class
+represents the present hurts and harms which, by the natural
+operation of things, without the action of Christ judicially at all,
+every man receives in the very act of rejecting the Gospel; and the
+other represents the ultimate issue of that rejection, which
+rejection is darkened into opposition and fixed hostility, when the
+stone that was laid 'for a foundation' has got wings (if I may so
+say), and comes down in judgment, crushing and destroying the
+antagonist utterly. 'Whosoever falls on this stone is broken,' here
+and now; and 'on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to
+powder,' hereafter and yonder.
+
+Taking, then, into account the weaving together in this passage of
+the three figures from the Old Testament to which I have already
+referred,--the rejected stone, the foundation, and the mountain-stone
+of Daniel, and looking in the light of these, at the twofold issues,
+one present and one future, which the text distinctly brings before
+us,--we have just three points to which I ask your attention now.
+First, Every man has some kind of contact with Christ. Secondly,
+Rejection of Him, here and now, is harm and maiming. And, lastly,
+Rejection of Him, hereafter and yonder, is hopeless, endless, utter
+destruction.
+
+I. In the first place, every man has some kind of connection with
+Christ.
+
+I am not going to enter at all now upon any question about the
+condition of the 'dark places of the earth' where the Gospel has not
+come as a well-known preached message; we have nothing to do with
+that; the principles on which _they_ are judged is not the
+question before us now. I am speaking exclusively about persons who
+have heard the word of salvation, and are dwelling in the midst of
+what we call a Christian land. Christ is offered to each of us, in
+good faith on God's part, as a means of salvation, a foundation on
+which we may build. A man is free to accept or to reject that offer.
+If he reject it, he has not thereby cut himself off from all contact
+and connection with that rejected Saviour, but he still sustains a
+relation to Him; and the message that he has refused to believe, is
+exercising an influence upon his character and his destiny.
+
+Christ comes, I say, offered to us all in good faith on the part of
+God, as a foundation upon which we may build. And then comes in that
+strange mystery, that a man, consciously free, turns away from the
+offered mercy, and makes Him that was intended to be the basis of
+his life, the foundation of his hope, the rock on which, steadfast
+and serene, he should build up a temple-home for his soul to dwell
+in,--makes Him a stumbling-stone against which, by rejection and
+unbelief, he breaks himself!
+
+My friend, will you let me lay this one thing upon your heart,--you
+cannot hinder the Gospel from influencing you somehow. Taking it in
+its lowest aspects, it is one of the forces of modern society, an
+element in our present civilisation. It is everywhere, it obtrudes
+itself on you at every turn, the air is saturated with its
+influence. To be unaffected by such an all-pervading phenomenon is
+impossible. To no individual member of the great whole of a nation
+is it given to isolate himself utterly from the community. Whether
+he oppose or whether he acquiesce in current opinions, to denude
+himself of the possessions which belong in common to his age and
+state of society is in either case impracticable. 'That which cometh
+into your mind,' said one of the prophets to the Jews who were
+trying to cut themselves loose from their national faith and their
+ancestral prerogatives, 'That which cometh into your mind shall not
+be at all, that ye say, We will be as the heathen, as the families
+of the countries to serve wood and stone.' Vain dream! You can no
+more say, I will pass the Gospel by, and it shall be nothing to me,
+I will simply let it alone, than you can say, I will shut myself up
+from other influences proper to my time and nation. You cannot go
+back to the old naked barbarism, and you cannot reduce the influence
+of Christianity, even considered merely as one of the characteristics
+of the times, to zero. You may fancy you are letting it alone, but
+it does not let you alone; it is here, and you cannot shut yourself
+off from it.
+
+But it is not merely as a subtle and diffused influence that the
+Gospel exercises a permanent effect upon us. It is presented to each
+of us here individually, in the definite form of an actual offer of
+salvation for each, and of an actual demand of trust from each. The
+words pass into our souls, and thenceforward we can never be the
+same as if they had not been there. The smallest ray of light
+falling on a sensitive plate produces a chemical change that can
+never be undone again, and the light of Christ's love, once brought
+to the knowledge and presented for the acceptance of a soul, stamps
+on it an ineffaceable sign of its having been there. The Gospel once
+heard, is always the Gospel which has been heard. Nothing can alter
+that. Once heard, it is henceforward a perpetual element in the
+whole condition, character, and destiny of the hearer.
+
+Christ does something to every one of us. His Gospel will tell upon
+you, it _is_ telling upon you. If you disbelieve it, you are
+not the same as if you had never heard it. Never is the box of
+ointment opened without some savour from it abiding in every nostril
+to which its odour is wafted. Only the alternative, the awful
+'either, or,' is open for each--the 'savour of life unto life,
+_or_ the savour of death unto death.' To come back to the
+illustration of the text, Christ is something, and does something to
+every one of us. He is either the rock on which I build, poor, weak,
+sinful creature as I am, getting security, and sanctity, and
+strength from Him, I being a living stone' built upon 'the living
+stone,' and partaking of the vitality of the foundation; or else He
+is the other thing, 'a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence to
+them which stumble at the word.' Christ stands for ever in some kind
+of relation to, and exercises for ever some kind of influence on,
+every man who has heard the Gospel.
+
+II. The immediate issue of rejection of Him is loss and maiming.
+
+'Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken.' Just think for
+a moment, by way of illustrating this principle, first of all, of
+the _positive_ harm which you do to yourself in the act of
+turning away from the mercy offered you in Christ; and then think
+for a moment of the _negative_ loss which you sustain by the
+same act.
+
+Note the _positive_ harm. Am I uncharitable when I say that no
+man ever yet _passively neglected_ the message of love in God's
+Son; but that always _this_ is the rude outline of the experience
+of people who know what it is to have a Saviour offered to them, and
+know what it is to put Him away,--that there is a feeble and transitory
+movement of heart and will; that Conscience says, 'Thou oughtest'; that
+Will says, 'I would'; that the heart is touched by some sense of that
+great and gentle vision of light and love which passes before the eye;
+that the man, as it were, like some fever-ridden patient, lifts himself
+up for an instant from the bed on which he is lying, and puts out a
+hand, and then falls back again, the vacillating, fevered, paralysed
+will recoiling from the resolution, and the conscience having power to
+say, 'Thou oughtest,' but no power to enforce the execution of its
+decrees, and the heart turning away from the salvation that it would
+have found in the love of love, to the loss that it finds in the love
+of self and earth? Or in other words, is it not true that every man
+who rejects Christ does in simple verity _reject_ Him, and not
+merely neglect Him; that there is always an effort, that there is a
+struggle, feeble, perhaps, but real, which ends in the turning away? It
+is not that you stand there, and simply let Him go past. That were bad
+enough; but the fact is worse than that. It is that you turn your back
+upon Him. It is not that His hand is laid on yours, and yours remains
+dead and cold, and does not open to clasp it; but it is that His hand
+being laid on yours, you clench yours the tighter, and _will not_
+have it. And so every man (I believe) who rejects Christ does these
+things thereby--wounds his own conscience, hardens his own heart,
+makes himself a worse man, just because he has had a glimpse, and
+has willingly, and almost consciously, 'loved darkness rather than
+light.' Oh, brethren, the message of love can never come into a
+human soul, and pass away from it unreceived, without leaving that
+spirit worse, with all its lowest characteristics strengthened, and
+all its best ones depressed, by the fact of rejection. I have nothing
+to do now with pursuing that process to its end; but the natural
+result--if there were no future Judgment at all, if there were no
+movement ever given to the stone that you ought to build on--the
+natural result of the simple rejection of the Gospel is that, bit by
+bit, all the lingering remains of nobleness that hover about the man,
+like scent about a broken vase, pass away; and that, step by step,
+through the simple process of saying, 'I will not have Christ to rule
+over me,' the whole being degenerates, until manhood becomes
+devil-hood, and the soul is lost by its own want of faith. Unbelief
+is its own judgment; unbelief is its own condemnation; unbelief, as
+sin, is punished, like all other sins, by the perpetuation of deeper
+and darker forms of itself. Every time that you stifle a conviction,
+fight down a conviction, or drive away a conviction; and every time
+that you feebly move towards the decision, 'I _will_ trust Him, and
+love Him, and be His,' yet fail to realise it, you have harmed your
+soul, you have made yourself a worse man, you have lowered the tone
+of your conscience, you have enfeebled your will, you have made your
+heart harder against love, you have drawn another horny scale over
+the eye, that will prevent you from seeing the light that is yonder;
+you have, as much as in you is, withdrawn from God, and approximated
+to the other pole of the universe (if I may say that), to the dark
+and deadly antagonist of mercy, and goodness, and truth, and grace.
+'Whosoever falls on this stone,' by the natural result of his
+unbelief, 'shall be broken' and maimed, and shall mar his own nature.
+
+I need not dwell on the _negative_ evil results of unbelief;
+the loss of that which is the only guide for a man, the taking away,
+or rather the failing to possess, that great love above us, that
+divine Spirit in us, by which only we are ever made what we ought to
+be. This only I would leave with you, in this part of my subject,
+Whoever is not in Christ is maimed. Only he that is 'a man in Christ'
+has come 'to the measure of the stature of a perfect man.' There,
+and there alone, do we get the power which will make us full-grown.
+There alone is the soul planted in that good soil in which, growing,
+it becomes as a rounded, perfect tree, with leaves and fruits in
+their season. All other men are half-men, quarter-men, fragments of
+men, parts of humanity exaggerated and contorted and distorted from
+the reconciling whole which the Christian ought to be, and in
+proportion to his Christianity is on the road to be, and one day will
+assuredly and actually be, a 'complete and entire man, wanting
+nothing'; nothing maimed, nothing broken, the realisation of the
+ideal of humanity, the renewed copy 'of the second Adam, the Lord
+from heaven.'
+
+There is another consideration closely connected with this second
+part of my subject, that I just mention and pass on. Not only by the
+act of rejection of Christ do we harm and maim ourselves, but also
+all attempts at opposition--formal opposition--to the Gospel as a
+system, stand self-convicted and self-condemned to speedy decay.
+What a commentary upon that word, 'Whosoever falls on this stone
+shall be broken,' is the whole history of the heresies of the Church
+and the assaults of unbelief! Man after man, rich in gifts, endowed
+often with far larger and nobler faculties than the people who
+oppose him, with indomitable perseverance, a martyr to his error,
+sets himself up against the truth that is sphered in Jesus Christ;
+and the great divine message simply goes on its way, and all the
+babblement and noise are like so many bats flying against a light,
+or like the sea-birds that come sweeping up in the tempest and the
+night, to the hospitable Pharos that is upon the rock, and smite
+themselves dead against it. Sceptics well known in their generation,
+who made people's hearts tremble for the ark of God, what has become
+of them? Their books lie dusty and undisturbed on the top shelf of
+libraries; whilst there the Bible stands, with all the scribblings
+wiped off the page, as though they had never been! Opponents fire
+their small shot against the great Rock of Ages, and the little
+pellets fall flattened, and only scale off a bit of the moss that
+has gathered there! My brother, let the history of the past teach
+you and me, with other deeper thoughts, a very calm and triumphant
+confidence about all that opponents say nowadays; for all the modern
+opposition to this Gospel will go as all the past has done, and the
+newest systems which cut and carve at Christianity, will go to the
+tomb where all the rest have gone; and dead old infidelities will
+rise up from their thrones, and say to the bran-new ones of this
+generation, when their day is worked out, 'Are ye also become weak
+as we? art thou also become like one of us?' 'Whosoever shall fall
+on this stone shall be broken': personally, he will be harmed; and
+his opinions, and his books, and his talk, and all his
+argumentation, will come to nothing, like the waves that break into
+impotent foam against the rocky cliffs.
+
+III. Last of all, the issue, the ultimate issue, of unbelief is
+irremediable destruction when Christ begins to move.
+
+The former clause has spoken about the harm that naturally follows
+unbelief whilst the Gospel is being preached; the latter clause speaks
+about the active agency of Christ when the end shall have come, and
+the preaching of the Gospel shall have merged into the act of judgment.
+I do not mean to dwell, brethren, upon that thought; it seems to me
+far too awful a one to be handled by my hands, at any rate. Let us
+leave it in the vagueness and dreadfulness of the words of Him who
+never spoke exaggerated words, and who, when He said, 'It shall grind
+him to powder,' meant (as it seems to me) nothing less than a
+destruction which, contrasted with the former remediable wounding and
+breaking, was a destruction utter, and hopeless, and everlasting, and
+without remedy. Ground--ground to powder! Any life left in that? any
+gathering up of that, and making a man of it again? All the humanity
+battered out of it, and the life clean gone from it! Does not that
+sound very much like 'everlasting destruction from the presence of God
+and from the glory of His power'? Christ, silent now, will begin to
+speak; passive now, will begin to act. The stone comes down, and the
+fall of it will be awful. I remember, away up in a lonely Highland
+valley, where beneath a tall black cliff, all weather-worn, and cracked,
+and seamed, there lies at the foot, resting on the greensward that
+creeps round its base, a huge rock, that has fallen from the face of
+the precipice. A shepherd was passing beneath it; and suddenly, when
+the finger of God's will touched it, and rent it from its ancient bed
+in the everlasting rock, it came down, leaping and bounding from pinnacle
+to pinnacle--and it fell; and the man that was beneath it is there now!
+'Ground to powder.' Ah, my brethren, that is not _my_ illustration--that
+is Christ's. Therefore I say to you, since all that stand against Him
+shall become 'as the chaff of the summer threshing-floor,' and be swept
+utterly away, make Him the foundation on which you build; and when the
+storm sweeps away every 'refuge of lies,' you will be safe and serene,
+builded upon the Rock of Ages.
+
+
+
+
+TWO WAYS OF DESPISING GOD'S FEAST
+
+
+    'And Jesus answered and spake unto them again by
+    parables, and said, 2. The kingdom of heaven is like
+    unto a certain king, which made a marriage for his son,
+    3. And sent forth his servants to call them that were
+    bidden to the wedding: and they would not come.
+    4. Again, he sent forth other servants, saying, Tell
+    them which are bidden, Behold, I have prepared my
+    dinner: my oxen and my fatlings are killed, and all
+    things are ready: come unto the marriage. 6. But they
+    made light of it, and went their ways, one to his farm,
+    another to his merchandise; 6. 'And the remnant took
+    his  servants, and entreated them spitefully, and slew
+    them. 7. But when the king heard thereof, he was wroth:
+    and he sent forth his armies, and destroyed those
+    murderers, and burned up their city. & Then saith he to
+    his servants, The wedding is ready, but they which were
+    bidden were not worthy. 9. Go ye therefore into the
+    highways, and as many as ye shall find, bid to the
+    marriage.  10. So those servants went out into the
+    highways, and gathered together all as many as they
+    found, both bad and good: and the wedding was furnished
+    with guests. 11. And when the king came in to see the
+    guests, he saw there a man which had not on a
+    wedding-garment: 12. And he saith unto him, Friend, how
+    earnest thou in hither not having a wedding-garment?
+    And he was speechless. 13. Then said the king to the
+    servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away,
+    and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be
+    weeping and gnashing of teeth. 14. For many are called,
+    but few are chosen.'--MATT. xxii. 1-14.
+
+This parable, and the preceding one of the vine-dressers, make a
+pair. They are closely connected in time, as well as subject. 'Jesus
+answered.' What? Obviously, the unspoken murderous hate, restrained
+by fear, which had been raised in the rulers' minds, and flashed in
+their eyes, and moved in their gestures. Christ answers it by
+repeating His blow; for the present parable is, in outline,
+identical with the preceding, though differing in colouring, and
+carrying its thoughts farther. That stopped with the transference of
+the kingdom to the Gentiles; this passes on to speak also of the
+development among the Gentiles, and ends with the law 'many called,
+few chosen,' which is exemplified in Jew and Gentile. There are,
+then, two parts in it: verses 1-9 covering the same ground as the
+former; verses 10-14 adding new matter.
+
+I. The judgment on those who refuse the offered joys of the kingdom.
+In the previous parable, the kingdom was presented on the side of
+duty and service. The call was to render obedience. The vineyard was
+a sphere for toil. The owner had given it indeed, but, having given,
+he required. That is only half the truth, and the least joyful half.
+So this parable dismisses all ideas of work, duty, service,
+requirement, and instead gives the emblem of a marriage feast as the
+picture of the kingdom. It therein unites two familiar prophetic
+images for the Messianic times--those of a festival and of a
+marriage. As Luther says, 'He calls it a marriage feast, not a time
+of toil or a time of sorrow, but a time of holiday and a time of
+joy; in which we make ourselves fine, sing, play, dance, eat, drink,
+are glad, and have a good time; else it would not be a wedding
+feast, if people were to be working, mourning, or crying. Therefore,
+Christ calls His Christianity and gospel by the name of the highest
+joy on earth; namely, by the name of a marriage feast.' How pathetic
+this designation of His kingdom is on Christ's lips, when we
+remember how near His bitter agony He stood, and that He tasted its
+bitterness already! It is not the whole truth any more than the
+vineyard emblem is. Both must be united in our idea of the kingdom,
+as both may be in experience. It is possible to be at once toiling
+among the vines in the hot sunshine, and feasting at the table. The
+Christian life is not all grinding at heavy tasks, nor all enjoyment
+of spiritual refreshment; but our work may be so done as to be our
+'meat'--as it was His--and our glad repose may be unbroken even in
+the midst of toil. We are, at one and the same time, labourers in
+the king's vineyard, and guests at the king's table; and the same
+duality will, in some unknown fashion, continue in the perfect
+kingdom, where there will be both work and feasting, and all the
+life shall be both in one.
+
+The second point to be noticed is the invitations of the king. There
+had been an invitation before the point at which the parable begins,
+for the servants are sent to summon those who had already been
+'called.' That calling, which lies beyond the horizon of our
+parable, is the whole series of agencies in Old Testament times. So
+this parable begins almost where the former leaves off. They only
+slightly overlap. The first servants here are Christ Himself, and
+His followers in their ministry during His life; and the second set
+are the apostles and preachers of the gospel during the period
+between the completion of the preparation of the feast (that is, the
+death of Christ) and the destruction of Jerusalem. The characteristic
+difference of their message from that of the servants in the former
+parable, embodies the whole difference between the preaching of the
+prophets, as messengers demanding the fruit of righteousness, and the
+glad tidings of a gospel of free grace which does not demand, but
+offers, and does not say 'obey' until it has said 'eat, and be glad.'
+The reiterated invitations not only correspond to the actual facts,
+but, like the facts, set the miracle of God's patience in a still
+brighter light than the former story did; for while it is wonderful
+that the lord of the vineyard should stoop to ask so often for fruit,
+it is far more wonderful that the founder of the feast, who is king
+too, should stoop to offer over and over again the refused abundance
+of his table.
+
+Mark, further, the refusal of the invitations: 'They would not (or
+"did not wish to") come.' That is Christ's gentle way of describing
+the unbelief of His generation. It is the second set of refusers who
+are painted in darker colours. We are accustomed to think that the
+sin of His contemporaries was great beyond parallel, but he seems
+here to hint that the sin of those who reject Him after the Cross
+and the Resurrection, is blacker than theirs. At any rate, it
+clearly is so. But note that the parable speaks as if the refusers
+were the same persons throughout, thus taking the same point of view
+as the former one did, and regarding the generations of the Jews as
+one whole. There is a real unity, though the individuals be
+different, if the spirit actuating successive generations be the
+same.
+
+Note the two classes of rejecters. The first simply pay no
+attention, because their heads are full of business. They do not
+even speak more or less lame excuses, as the refusers in Luke's
+similar parable had the decency to do. The king's messenger
+addresses a group, who pause on their road for a moment, to listen
+listlessly to what he has to say, and, when he has done, disperse
+without a word, each man going on his road, as if nothing had
+happened. The ground of their indifference lies in their absorption
+with this world's good, and their belief that it is best. 'His own
+farm,' as the original puts it emphatically, holds one man by the
+solid delight of possessing acres that he can walk over and till;
+his merchandise draws another, by the excitement of speculation and
+the lust of acquiring. It is not only the hurry and fever of a great
+commercial city, but the quiet and leisure of country life, which
+shut out taste for God's feast. Strange preference of toil and risk
+of loss to abundance, repose, and joy! Savages barter gold for glass
+beads. We choose lives of weary work and hunting after uncertain
+riches, rather than listen to His call, despising the open-handed
+housekeeping of our Father's house, and trying to fill our hunger
+with the swine's husks. The suicidal madness of refusing the kingdom
+is set in a vivid light in these quiet words.
+
+But stranger still is the conduct of the rest. Why should they kill
+men whose only fault was bringing them a hospitable invitation? The
+incongruity of the representation has given offence to some
+interpreters, who are not slow to point out how Christ could have
+improved His parable. But the reality is more incongruous still, and
+the unmotived outburst of wrath against the innocent bearers of a
+kindly invitation is only too true to life. Mark the distinction
+drawn by our Lord between the bulk of the people who simply
+neglected, and the few who violently opposed. He does not charge the
+guilt on all. The murderers of Him and of His first followers were
+not the mass of the nation, who, left to themselves, would not have
+so acted, but the few who stirred up the many. But, though He does
+not lay the guilt at the doors of all, yet the punishment falls on
+all, and, when the city is burned, the houses of the negligent and
+of the slayers are equally consumed; for simple refusal of the
+message and slaying the messengers were but the positive and
+superlative degrees of the same crime--rebellion against the king,
+whose invitation was a command.
+
+The fatal issue is presented, as in the former parable, in two
+parts: the destruction of the rebels, and the passing over of the
+kingdom to others. But the differences are noteworthy. Here we read
+that 'the king was wroth.' Insult to a king is worse than dishonesty
+to a landlord. The refusal of God's proffered grace is even more
+certain to awake that awful reality, the wrath of God, than the
+failure to render the fruits of the good possessed. Love repelled
+and thrown back on itself cannot but become wrath. That refusal,
+which is rebellion, is fittingly described as punished by force of
+arms and the burning of the city. We can scarcely help seeing that
+our Lord here, in a very striking and unusual way, mingles prose
+prediction with parabolic imagery. Some commentators object to this,
+and take the armies and the burning to be only part of the imagery,
+but it is difficult to believe that. Note the forcible pronouns,
+'His armies,' and 'their city.' The terrible Roman legions were His
+soldiers for the time being, the axe which He laid to the root of
+the tree. The city had ceased to be His, just as the temple ceased
+to be 'My house,' and became, by their sin, 'your house.' The legend
+told that, before their destruction, a mighty voice was heard
+saying, 'Let us depart,' and, with the sound of rushing wings, His
+presence left sanctuary and city. When He was no longer 'the glory
+in the midst,' He was no longer 'a wall of fire round about,' and
+the Roman torches worked their will on the city which was no longer
+'the city of our God.'
+
+The command to gather in others to fill the vacant places follows on
+the destruction of the city. This may seem to be opposed to the
+facts of the transference of the kingdom to the Gentiles, which
+certainly was begun long before Jerusalem fell. But its fall was the
+final and complete severance of Christianity from Judaism, and not
+till then had the messengers to give up the summons to Israel as
+hopeless. Perhaps Paul had this parable floating in his memory when
+he said to the howling blasphemers at Antioch in Pisidia, 'Seeing ye
+... judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, lo, we turn to the
+Gentiles. For so hath the Lord commanded us.' 'They which were
+bidden were not worthy,' and their unworthiness consisted not in any
+other moral demerit, but solely in this, that they had refused the
+proffered blessings. That is the only thing which makes any of us
+unworthy. And that will make the best of us unworthy.
+
+II. Verses 10-14 carry us beyond the preceding parable, and show us
+the judgment on the unworthy accepters of the invitation. There are
+two ways of sinning against God's merciful gift: the one is refusing
+to accept it; the other is taking it in outward seeming, but
+continuing in sin. The former was the sin of the Jews; the latter is
+the sin of nominal Christians. We may briefly note the points of
+this appendix to the parable. The first is the indiscriminate
+invitation, which is more emphatically marked as being so, by the
+mention of the 'bad' before the good among the guests. God's offer
+is for all, and, in a very real sense, is specially sent to the
+worst, just as the doctor goes first to the most severely wounded.
+So the motley crew, without the least attempt at discrimination, are
+seated at the table. If the Church understands its business, it will
+have nothing to do in its message with distinctions of character any
+more than of class, but, if it makes any difference, will give the
+outcast and disreputable the first place in its efforts. Is that
+what it does?
+
+The next point is the king's inspection. The word rendered 'behold'
+implies a fixed and minute observation. When does that scrutiny take
+place? Obviously, from the sequel, the final judgment is referred
+to, and it is remarkable that here there is no mention of the king's
+son as the judge. No parable can shadow forth all truth, and though
+the Father 'has committed all judgment to the Son,' the Son's
+judgment is the Father's, and the exigencies of the parable required
+that the son as bridegroom should not be brought into view as judge.
+Note that there is only one guest without the dress needed. That may
+be an instance of the lenity of Christ's charity, which hopeth all
+things; or it may rather be intended to suggest the keenness of the
+king's glance, which, in all the crowded tables, picks out the one
+ragged losel who had found his way there--so individual is his
+knowledge, so impossible for us to hide in the crowd.
+
+Mark that the feast has not begun, though the guests are seated. The
+judgment stands at the threshold of the heavenly kingdom. The king
+speaks with a certain coldness, very unlike the welcome fit for a
+guest; and his question is one of astonishment at the rude boldness
+of the man who came there, knowing that he had not the proper dress.
+(That knowledge is implied in the form of the sentence in the
+Greek.) What, then, is the wedding garment? It can be nothing else
+than righteousness, moral purity, which fits for sitting at His
+table in His kingdom. And the man who has it not, is the nominal
+Christian, who says that he has accepted God's invitation, and lives
+in sin, not putting off 'the old man with his deeds,' nor putting on
+'the new man, which is created in righteousness.' How that garment
+was to be obtained is no part of this parable. We know that it is
+only to be received by faith in Jesus Christ, and that if we are to
+pass the scrutiny of the king, it must be as 'not having our own
+righteousness,' but His made ours by faith which makes us righteous,
+and then by all holy effort, and toil in His strength, we must
+clothe our souls in the dress which befits the banqueting hall; for
+only they who are washed and clothed in fine linen, clean and white,
+shall sit there. But Christ's purpose here was not to explain how
+the robe was to be procured, but to insist that it must be worn.
+
+'He was speechless,'--or, as the word means, 'muzzled.' The man is
+self-condemned, and, having nothing to say in extenuation, the
+solemn promise is pronounced of ejection from the lighted hall, with
+limbs bound so that he cannot struggle, and consignment to the
+blackness outside, of which our Lord adds, in words not put into the
+king's mouth, but which we have heard from Him before, 'There shall
+be the [well-known and terrible] weeping and gnashing of teeth--awful
+though figurative expressions for despair and passion.
+
+Both parts of the parable come under one law, and exemplify one
+principle of the kingdom, that its invitations extend more widely
+than the real possession of its gifts. The unbelieving Jew, in one
+direction, and the unrighteous Christian in another, are instances
+of this.
+
+This is not the place to discuss that wide and well-worn question of
+the ground of God's choice. That does not enter into the scope of
+the parable. For it, the choice is proved by the actual
+participation in the feast. They who do not choose to receive the
+invitation, or to put on the wedding garment, do, in different ways,
+show that they are not 'chosen' though 'called.' The lesson is, not
+of interminable and insoluble questionings about God's secrets, but
+of earnest heed to His gracious call, and earnest, believing effort
+to make the fair garment our very own, 'if so be that being clothed
+we shall not be found naked.'
+
+
+
+
+THE TABLES TURNED: THE QUESTIONERS QUESTIONED
+
+
+    'But when the Pharisees had heard that He had put the
+    Sadducees to silence, they were gathered together.
+    35. Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked Him a
+    question, tempting Him, and saying, 36. Master, which
+    is the great commandment in the law? 37. Jesus said
+    unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy
+    heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
+    38. This is the first and great commandment. 39. And
+    the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy
+    neighbour as thyself. 40. On these two commandments
+    hang all the law and the prophets. 41. While the
+    Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them,
+    42. Saying, What think ye of Christ? whose Son is He?
+    They say unto Him, The son of David. 43. He saith unto
+    them, How then doth David in spirit call Him Lord,
+    saying, 44. The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit Thou on My
+    right hand, till I make Thine enemies Thy footstool?
+    45. If David then call Him Lord, how is He his son?
+    46. And no man was able to answer Him a word; neither
+    durst any man, from that day forth, ask Him any more
+    questions.'--MATT.xxii.34-46.
+
+Herodians, Sadducees, Pharisees, who were at daggers drawn with each
+other, patched up an alliance against Jesus, whom they all hated.
+Their questions were cunningly contrived to entangle Him in the
+cobwebs of casuistry and theological hair-splitting, but He walked
+through the fine-spun snares as a lion might stalk away with the
+nooses set for him dangling behind him. The last of the three
+questions put to Jesus, and the one question with which He turned
+the tables and silenced His questioners, are our subject. In the
+former, Jesus declares the essence of the law or of religion; in the
+latter, He brings to light the essential loftiness of the Messiah.
+
+I. The two preceding questions are represented to have been asked by
+deputations; this is specially noted as emanating from an
+individual. The 'lawyer' seems to have anticipated his colleagues,
+and possibly his question was not that which they had meant to put.
+His motive in asking it was that of 'tempting' Jesus, but we must
+not give that word too hostile a sense, for it may mean no more than
+'testing' or trying. The legal expert wished to find out the
+attainments and standpoint of this would-be teacher, and so he
+proposed a question which would bring out the whereabouts of Jesus,
+and give opportunity for a theological wrangle. He did not ask the
+question for guidance, but as an inquisitor cross-examining a
+suspected heretic. Probably the question was a stereotyped one, and
+there are traces in the Gospels that the answer recognised as
+orthodox was that which Jesus gave (Luke x. 27). The two
+commandments are quoted from Deuteronomy vi. 5 and Leviticus xix. 18
+respectively. The lawyer probably only desired to raise a discussion
+as to the relative worth of isolated precepts. Jesus goes deep down
+below isolated precepts, and unifies, as well as transforms, the
+law. Supreme and undivided love to God is not only the great, but
+also the first, commandment. In more modern phrase, it is the sum of
+man's duty and the germ of all goodness. Note that Jesus shifts the
+centre from conduct to character, from deeds to affections. 'As a
+man _thinketh_ in his heart, so is he,' said the sage of old;
+Christ says, 'As a man loves, so is he.' Two loves we have,--either
+the dark love of self and sense, or the white love of God, and all
+character and conduct are determined by which of these sways us.
+Note, further, that love to God must needs be undivided. God is one
+and all; man is one and finite. To love such an object with half a
+heart is not to love. True, our weakness leads astray, but the only
+real love corresponding to the natures of the lover and the loved is
+whole-hearted, whole-souled, whole-minded. It must be 'all in all,
+or not at all.'
+
+'A second is like unto it,'--love to man is the under side, as it
+were, of love to God. The two commandments are alike, for both call
+for love, and the second is second because it is a consequence of
+the first. Each sets up a lofty standard; 'with all thy heart' and
+'as thyself' sound equally impossible, but both result necessarily
+from the nature of the case. Religion is the parent of all morality,
+and especially of benevolent love to men. Innate self-regard will
+yield to no force but that of love to God. It is vain to try to
+create brotherhood among men unless the sense of God's fatherhood is
+its foundation. Love of neighbours is the second commandment, and to
+make it the first, as some do now, is to end all hope of fulfilling
+it. Still further, Jesus hangs law and prophets on these two
+precepts, which, at bottom, are one. Not only will all other duties
+be done in doing these, since 'love is the fulfilling of the law,'
+but all other precepts, and all the prophets' appeals and
+exhortations, are but deductions from, or helps to the attainment
+of, these. All our forms of worship, creeds, and the like, are of
+worth in so far as they are outcomes of love to God, or aid us in
+loving Him and our neighbours. Without love, they are 'as sounding
+brass, or a tinkling cymbal.'
+
+II. The Pharisees remained 'gathered together,' and may have been
+preparing another question, but Jesus had been long enough
+interrogated. It was not fitting that He should be catechised only.
+His questions teach. He does not seek to 'entangle' the Pharisees
+'in their speech,' nor to make them contradict themselves, but
+brings them full up against a difficulty, that they may open their
+eyes to the great truth which is its only solution. His first
+question, 'What think ye of the Christ?' is simply preparatory to
+the second. The answer which He anticipated was given,--as, of
+course, it would be, for the Davidic descent of the Messiah was a
+commonplace universally accepted. One can fancy that the Pharisees
+smiled complacently at the attempt to puzzle them with such an
+elementary question, but the smile vanished when the next one came.
+They interpreted Psalm 110 as Messianic, and David in it called
+Messiah 'my Lord.' How can He be both? Jesus' question is in two
+forms,--'If He is son, how does David call Him Lord?' or, if He is
+Lord, 'how then is He his son?' Take either designation, and the
+other lands you in inextricable difficulties.
+
+Now what was our Lord's purpose in thus driving the Pharisees into a
+corner? Not merely to 'muzzle' them, as the word in verse 34,
+rendered 'put to silence,' literally means, but to bring to light
+the inadequate conceptions of the Messiah and of the nature of His
+kingdom, to which exclusive recognition of his Davidic descent
+necessarily led. David's son would be but a king after the type of
+the Herods and Cæsars, and his kingdom as 'carnal' as the wildest
+zealot expected, but David's Lord, sitting at God's right hand, and
+having His foes made His footstool by Jehovah Himself,--what sort of
+a Messiah King would that be? The majestic image, that shapes itself
+dimly here, was a revelation that took the Pharisees' breath away,
+and made them dumb. Nor are the words without a half-disclosed claim
+on Christ's part to be that which He was so soon to avow Himself
+before the high priest as being. The first hearers of them probably
+caught that meaning partly, and were horrified; we hear it clearly
+in the words, and answer, 'Thou art the King of glory, O Christ!
+Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father.'
+
+Jesus here says that Psalm 110 is Messianic, that David was the
+author, and that he wrote it by divine inspiration. The present
+writer cannot see how our Lord's argument can be saved from collapse
+if the psalm is not David's.
+
+
+
+
+THE KING'S FAREWELL
+
+
+    'Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for
+    ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear
+    beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's
+    bones, and of all uncleanness. 28. Even so ye also
+    outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are
+    full of hypocrisy and iniquity. 29. Woe unto you,
+    scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the
+    tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of
+    the righteous, 30. And say, If we had been in the days
+    of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with
+    them in the blood of the prophets. 31. Wherefore ye be
+    witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of
+    them which killed the prophets. 32. Fill ye up then the
+    measure of your fathers. 33. Ye serpents, ye generation
+    of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell!
+    34. Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and
+    wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill
+    and crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in your
+    synagogues, and persecute them from city to city;
+    35. That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed
+    upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto
+    the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew
+    between the temple and the altar. 36. Verily I say unto
+    you, All these things shall come upon this generation.
+    37. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the
+    prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee,
+    how often would I have gathered thy children together,
+    even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings,
+    and ye would not! 38. Behold, your house is left unto
+    you desolate.  39. For I say unto you, Ye shall not see
+    Me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is He that
+    cometh in the name of the Lord.'--MATT.  xxiii. 27-39.
+
+If, with the majority of authorities, we exclude verse 14 from the
+text, there are, in this chapter, seven woes, like seven thunders,
+launched against the rulers. They are scathing exposures, but, as
+the very word implies, full of sorrow as well as severity. They are
+not denunciations, but prophecies warning that the end of such
+tempers must be mournful. The wailing of an infinite compassion,
+rather than the accents of anger, sounds in them; and it alone is
+heard in the outburst of lamenting in which Christ's heart runs
+over, as in a passion of tears, at the close. The blending of
+sternness and pity, each perfect, is the characteristic of this
+wonderful climax of our Lord's appeals to His nation. Could such
+tones of love and righteous anger joined have been sent echoing
+through the ages in this Gospel, if they had not been heard?
+
+I. The woe of the 'whited sepulchres.' The first four woes are
+directed mainly to the teachings of the scribes and Pharisees; the
+last three to their characters. The two first of these fasten on the
+same sin, of hypocritical holiness. There is, however, a difference
+between the representation of hypocrites under the metaphor of the
+clean outside of the cup and platter, and that of the whited
+sepulchre. In the former, the hidden sin is 'extortion and excess';
+that is, sensual enjoyment wrongly procured, of which the emblems of
+cup and plate suggest that good eating and drinking are a chief
+part. In the latter, it is 'iniquity'--a more general and darker
+name for sin. In the former, the Pharisee is 'blind,' self-deceived
+in part or altogether; in the latter, stress is rather laid on his
+'appearance unto men.' The repetition of the same charge in the two
+woes teaches us Christ's estimate of the gravity and frequency of
+the sin.
+
+The whitened tombs of Mohammedan saints still gleam in the strong
+sunlight on many a knoll in Palestine. If the Talmudical practice is
+as old as our Lord's time, the annual whitewashing was lately over.
+Its purpose was not to adorn the tombs, but to make them
+conspicuous, so that they might be avoided for fear of defilement.
+So He would say, with terrible irony, that the apparent holiness of
+the rulers was really a sign of corruption, and a warning to keep
+away from them. What a blow at their self-complacency! And how
+profoundly true it is that the more punctiliously white the
+hypocrite's outside, the more foul is he within, and the wider berth
+will all discerning people give him! The terrible force of the
+figure needs no dwelling on. In Christ's estimate, such a soul was
+the very dwelling-place of death; and foul odours and worms and
+corruption filled its sickening recesses. Terrible words to come
+from His lips into which grace was poured, and bold words to be
+flashed at listeners who held the life of the Speaker in their
+hands! There are two sorts of hypocrites, the conscious and the
+unconscious; and there are ten of the latter for one of the former,
+and each ten times more dangerous. Established religion breeds them,
+and they are specially likely to be found among those whose business
+is to study the documents in which it is embodied. These woes are
+not like thunder-peals rolling above our heads, while the lightning
+strikes the earth miles away. A religion which is mostly whitewash
+is as common among us as ever it was in Jerusalem; and its foul
+accompaniments of corruption becoming more rotten every year, as the
+whitewash is laid on thicker, may be smelt among us, and its fatal
+end is as sure.
+
+II. The woe of the sepulchre builders (vs. 29-36). In these verses
+we have, first, the specification of another form of hypocrisy,
+consisting in building the prophets' tombs, and disavowing the
+fathers' murder of them. Honouring dead prophets was right; but
+honouring dead ones and killing living ones was conscious or
+unconscious hypocrisy. The temper of mind which leads to glorifying
+the dead witnesses, also leads to supposing that all truth was given
+by them; and hence that the living teachers, who carry their message
+farther, are false prophets. A generation which was ready to kill
+Jesus in honour of Moses, would have killed Moses in honour of
+Abraham, and would not have had the faintest apprehension of the
+message of either.
+
+It is a great deal easier to build tombs than to accept teachings,
+and a good deal of the posthumous honour paid to God's messengers
+means, 'It's a good thing they are dead, and that we have nothing to
+do but to put up a monument.' Bi-centenaries and ter-centenaries and
+jubilees do not always imply either the understanding or the
+acceptance of the principles supposed to be glorified thereby. But
+the magnifiers of the past are often quite unconscious of the
+hollowness of their admiration, and honest in their horror of their
+fathers' acts; and we all need the probe of such words as Christ's
+to pierce the skin of our lazy reverence for our fathers' prophets,
+and let out the foul matter below--namely, our own blindness to
+God's messengers of to-day.
+
+The statement of the hypocrisy is followed, in verses 31-33, with
+its unmasking and condemnation. The words glow with righteous wrath
+at white heat, and end in a burst of indignation, most unfamiliar to
+His lips. Three sentences, like triple lightning flash from His
+pained heart. With almost scornful subtlety He lays hold of the
+words which He puts into the Pharisees' mouths, to convict them of
+kindred with those whose deeds they would disown. 'Our fathers, say
+you? Then you do belong to the same family, after all. You confess
+that you have their blood in your veins; and, in the very act of
+denying sympathy with their conduct, you own kindred. And, for all
+your protestations, spiritual kindred goes with bodily descent.'
+Christ here recognises that children probably 'take after their
+parents,' or, in modern scientific terms, that 'heredity' is the
+law, and that it works more surely in the transmission of evil than
+of good.
+
+Then come the awful words bidding that generation 'fill up the
+measure of the fathers.' They are like the other command to Judas to
+do his work quickly. They are more than permission, they are
+command; but such a command as, by its laying bare of the true
+character of the deed in view, is love's last effort at prevention.
+Mark the growing emotion of the language. Mark the conception of a
+nation's sins as one through successive generations, and the other,
+of these as having a definite measure, which being filled, judgment
+can no longer tarry. Generation after generation pours its
+contributions into the vessel, and when the last black drop which it
+can hold has been added, then comes the catastrophe. Mark the fatal
+necessity by which inherited sin becomes darker sin. The fathers'
+crimes are less than the sons'. This inheritance increases by each
+transmission. The cloak strikes one more at each revolution of the
+hands.
+
+It is hard to recognise Christ in the terrible words that follow. We
+have heard part of them from John the Baptist; and it sounded
+natural for him to call men serpents and the children of serpents,
+but it is somewhat of a shock to hear Jesus hurling such names at
+even the most sinful. But let us remember that He who sees hearts,
+has a right to tell harsh truths, and that it is truest kindness to
+strip off masks which hide from men their own real character, and
+that the revelation of the divine love in Jesus would be a partial
+and impotent revelation if it did not show us the righteous love
+which is wrath. There is nothing so terrible as the anger of gentle
+compassion, and the fiercest and most destructive wrath is 'the
+wrath of the Lamb.' Seldom, indeed, did He show that side of His
+character; but it is there, and the other side would not be so
+blessed as it is, unless that were there too.
+
+The woe ends with the double prophecy that that generation would
+repeat and surpass the fathers' guilt, and that on it would fall the
+accumulated penalties of past bloodshed. Note that solemn
+'therefore,' which looks back to the whole preceding context, and
+forward to the whole subsequent. Because the rulers professed
+abhorrence of their fathers' deeds, and yet inherited their spirit,
+they too would have their prophets, and would slay them. God goes on
+sending His messengers, because we reject them; and the more deaf
+men are, the more does He peal His words into their ears. That is
+mercy and compassion, that all men may be saved and come to the
+knowledge of the truth; but it is judgment too, and its foreseen
+effect must be regarded as part of the divine purpose in it.
+Christ's desire is one thing, His purpose another. His desire is
+that all should find in His gospel 'the savour of life'; but His
+purpose is that, if it be not that to any, it shall be to them the
+savour of death. Mark, too, the authority with which He, in the face
+of these scowling Pharisees, assumes the distinct divine prerogative
+of sending forth inspired men, who, as His messengers, shall stand
+on a level with the prophets of old. Mark His silence as to His own
+fate, which is only obscurely hinted at in the command to fill up
+the measure of the fathers. Observe the detailed enumeration of His
+messengers' gifts,--'prophets' under direct inspiration, like those
+of old, which may especially refer to the apostles; 'wise men,' like
+a Stephen or an Apollos; 'scribes,' such as Mark and Luke and many a
+faithful servant since, whose pen has loved to write the name above
+every name. Note the detailed prophecy of their treatment, which
+begins with _slaying_ and goes down to the less severe _scourging_,
+and thence to the milder _persecution_. Do the three punishments
+belong to the three classes of messengers, the severest falling to
+the lot of the most highly endowed, and even the quiet penman being
+hunted from city to city?
+
+We need not wriggle and twist to try to avoid admitting that the
+calling of the martyred Zacharias, 'the son of Barachias,' is an
+error of some one who confused the author of the prophetic book with
+the person whose murder is narrated in 2 Chronicles xxiv. We do not
+know who made the mistake, or how it appears in our text, but it is
+not honest to try to slur it over. The punishment of long ages of
+sin, carried on from father to son, does in the course of that
+history of the world, which is a part of the judgment of the world,
+fall upon one generation. It takes long for the mass of heaped-up
+sin to become top-heavy; but when it is so, it buries one generation
+of those who have worked at piling it up, beneath its down-rushing
+avalanche.
+
+  'The mills of God grind slowly,
+   But they grind exceeding small.'
+
+The catastrophes of national histories are prepared for by continuous
+centuries. The generation that laid the first powder-hornful of the
+train is dead and buried, long before the explosion which sends
+constituted order and institutions sky-high. The misery is that often
+the generation which has to pay the penalty has begun to awake to the
+sin, and would be glad to mend it, if it could. England in the
+seventeenth century, France in the eighteenth, America in the
+nineteenth, had to reap harvests from sins sown long before. Such is
+the law of the judgment wrought out by God's providence in history.
+But there is another judgment, begun here and perfected hereafter, in
+which fathers and sons shall each bear their own burden, and reap
+accurately the fruit of what they have sown. 'The soul that sinneth,
+it shall die.'
+
+III. The parting wail of rejected love. The lightning flashes of the
+sevenfold woes end in a rain of pity and tears. His full heart
+overflows in that sad cry of lamentation over the long-continued
+foiling of the efforts of a love that would fain have fondled and
+defended. What intensity of feeling is in the redoubled naming of
+the city! How yearningly and wistfully He calls, as if He might still
+win the faithless one, and how lingeringly unwilling He is to give up
+hope! How mournfully, rather than accusingly, He reiterates the acts
+which had run through the whole history, using a form of the verbs
+which suggests continuance. Mark, too, the matter-of-course way in
+which Christ assumes that He sent all the prophets whom, through
+the generations, Jerusalem had stoned.
+
+So the lament passes into the solemn final leave-taking, with which
+our Lord closes His ministry among the Jews, and departs from the
+temple. As, in the parable of the marriage-feast, the city was
+emphatically called 'their city,' so here the Temple, in whose
+courts He was standing, and which in a moment He was to quit for
+ever, is called 'your house,' because His departure is the
+withdrawing of the true Shechinah. It had been the house of God: now
+He casts it off, and leaves it to them to do as they will with it.
+The saddest punishment of long-continued rejection of His pleading
+love, is that it ceases at last to plead. The bitterest woe for
+those who refuse to render to Him the fruits of the vineyard, is to
+get the vineyard for their own, undisturbed. Christ's utmost
+retribution for obstinate blindness is to withdraw from our sight.
+All the woes that were yet to fall, in long, dreary succession on
+that nation, so long continued in its sin, so long continued in its
+misery, were hidden in that solemn departure of Christ from the
+henceforward empty temple. Let us fear lest our unfaithfulness meet
+the like penalty! But even the departure does not end His yearnings,
+nor close the long story of the conflict between God's beseeching
+love and their unbelief. The time shall come when the nation shall
+once more lift up, with deeper, truer adoration, the hosannas of the
+triumphal entry. And then a believing Israel shall see their King,
+and serve Him. Christ never takes final leave of any man in this
+world. It is ever possible that dumb lips may be opened to welcome
+Him, though long rejected; and His withdrawals are His efforts to
+bring about that opening. When it takes place, how gladly does He
+return to the heart which is now His temple, and unveil His beauty
+to the long-darkened eyes!
+
+
+
+
+TWO FORMS OF ONE SAYING
+
+
+    'He that endureth to the end, the same shall be saved.'
+    --Matt. xxiv. 13, R.V.
+
+    'In your patience possess ye your souls.'--Luke xxi. 19.
+
+These two sayings, different as they sound in our Version, are
+probably divergent representations of one original. The reasons for
+so supposing are manifold and obvious on a little consideration. In
+the first place, the two sayings occur in the Evangelists' reports
+of the same prophecy and at the same point therein. In the second
+place, the verbal resemblance is much greater than appears in our
+Authorised Version, because the word rendered 'patience' in Luke is
+derived from that translated 'endureth' in Matthew; and the true
+connection between the two versions of the saying would have been
+more obvious if we had had a similar word in both, reading in the
+one 'he that endureth,' and in the other 'in your endurance.' In the
+third place, the difference between these two sayings presented in
+our Version, in that the one is a promise and the other a command,
+is due to an incorrect reading of St. Luke's words. The Revised
+Version substitutes for the imperative 'possess' the promise 'ye
+shall possess,' and with that variation the two sayings are brought
+a good deal nearer each other. In both endurance is laid down as the
+condition, which in both is followed by a promise. Then, finally,
+there need be no difficulty in seeing that 'possessing,' or, more
+literally, 'gaining your souls,' is an exact equivalent of the other
+expression, 'ye shall be saved.' One cannot but remember our Lord's
+solemn antithetical phrase about a man 'losing his own soul.' To
+'win one's soul' is to be saved; to be saved is to win one's soul.
+
+So I think I have made out my thesis that the two sayings are
+substantially one. They carry a great weight of warning, of
+exhortation, and of encouragement to us all. Let us try now to reap
+some of that harvest.
+
+I. First, then, notice the view of our condition which underlies
+these sayings.
+
+It is a sad and a somewhat stern one, but it is one to which, I
+think, most men's hearts will respond, if they give themselves
+leisure to think; and if they 'see life steadily, and see it whole.'
+For howsoever many days are bright, and howsoever all days are good,
+yet, on the whole, 'man is a soldier, and life is a fight.' For some
+of us it is simple endurance; for all of us it has sometimes been
+agony; for all of us, always, it presents resistance to every kind of
+high and noble career, and especially to the Christian one. Easy-going
+optimists try to skim over these facts, but they are not to be so
+lightly set aside. You have only to look at the faces that you
+meet in the street to be very sure that it is always a grave and
+sometimes a bitter thing to live. And so our two texts presuppose
+that life on the whole demands endurance, whatever may be included
+in that great word.
+
+Think of the inward resistance and outward hindrances to every lofty
+life. The scholar, the man of culture, the philanthropist--all who
+would live for anything else than the present, the low, and the
+sensual--find that there is a banded conspiracy, as it were, against
+them, and that they have to fight their way by continual antagonism,
+by continual persistence, as well as by continual endurance. Within,
+weakness, torpor, weariness, levity, inconstant wills, bright
+purposes clouding over, and all the cowardice and animalism of our
+nature war continually against the better, higher self. And without,
+there is a down-dragging, as persistent as the force of gravity,
+coming from the whole assemblage of external things that solicit,
+and would fain seduce us. The old legends used to tell us how,
+whensoever a knight set out upon any great and lofty quest, his path
+was beset on either side by voices, sometimes whispering seductions,
+and sometimes shrieking maledictions, but always seeking to withdraw
+him from his resolute march onwards to his goal. And every one of
+us, if we have taken on us the orders of any lofty chivalry, and
+especially if we have sworn ourselves knights of the Cross, have to
+meet the same antagonism. Then, too, there are golden apples rolled
+upon our path, seeking to draw us away from our steadfast endurance.
+
+Besides the hindrances in every noble path, the hindrances within
+and the hindrances without, the weight of self and the drawing of
+earth, there come to us all--in various degrees no doubt, and in
+various shapes--but to all of us there come the burdens of sorrows
+and cares, and anxieties and trials. Wherever two or three are
+gathered together, even if they gather for a feast, there will be
+some of them who carry a sorrow which they know well will never be
+lifted off their shoulders and their hearts, until they lay down all
+their burdens at the grave's mouth; and it is weary work to plod on
+the path of life with a weight that cannot be shifted, with a wound
+that can never be stanched.
+
+Oh, brethren, rosy-coloured optimism is all a dream. The recognition
+of the good that is in the evil is the devout man's talisman, but
+there is always need for the resistance and endurance which my texts
+prescribe. And the youngest of us, the gladdest of us, the least
+experienced of us, the most frivolous of us, if we will question our
+own hearts, will hear their Amen to the stern, sad view of the facts
+of earthly life which underlies this text.
+
+Though it has many other aspects, the world seems to me sometimes to
+be like that pool at Jerusalem in the five porches of which lay,
+groaning under various diseases, but none of them without an ache, a
+great multitude of impotent folk, halt and blind. Astronomers tell
+us that one, at any rate, of the planets rolls on its orbit swathed
+in clouds and moisture. The world moves wrapped in a mist of tears.
+God only knows them all, but each heart knows its own bitterness and
+responds to the words, 'Ye have need of patience.'
+
+II. Now, secondly, mark the victorious temper.
+
+That is referred to in the one saying by 'he that endureth,' and in
+the other 'in your endurance.' Now, it is very necessary for the
+understanding of many places in Scripture to remember that the
+notion either of patience or of endurance by no means exhausts the
+power of this noble Christian word. For these are passive virtues,
+and however excellent and needful they may be, they by no means sum
+up our duty in regard to the hindrances and sorrows, the burdens and
+weights, of which I have been trying to speak. For you know it is
+only 'what cannot be cured' that 'must be endured,' and even
+incurable things are not merely to be endured, but they ought to be
+utilised. It is not enough that we should build up a dam to keep the
+floods of sorrow and trial from overflowing our fields; we must turn
+the turbid waters into our sluices, and get them to drive our mills.
+It is not enough that we should screw ourselves up to lie
+unresistingly under the surgeon's knife; though God knows that it is
+as much as we can manage sometimes, and we have to do as convicts
+under the lash do, get a bit of lead or a bullet into our mouths,
+and bite at it to keep ourselves from crying out. But that is not
+all our duty in regard to our trials and difficulties. There is
+required something more than passive endurance.
+
+This noble word of my texts does mean a great deal more than that. It
+means active persistence as well as patient submission. It is not
+enough that we should stand and bear the pelting of the pitiless storm,
+unmurmuring and unbowed by it; but we are bound to go on our course,
+bearing up and steering right onwards. Persistent perseverance in the
+path that is marked out for us is especially the virtue that our Lord
+here enjoins. It is well to sit still unmurmuring; it is better to
+march on undiverted and unchecked. And when we are able to keep
+straight on in the path which is marked out for us, and especially in
+the path that leads us to God, notwithstanding all opposing voices, and
+all inward hindrances and reluctances; when we are able to go to our
+tasks of whatever sort they are and to do them, though our hearts are
+beating like sledge-hammers; when we say to ourselves, 'It does not
+matter a bit whether I am sad or glad, fresh or wearied, helped or
+hindered by circumstances, this one thing I do,' then we have come to
+understand and to practise the grace that our Master here enjoins. The
+endurance which wins the soul, and leads to salvation, is no mere
+passive submission, excellent and hard to attain as that often is;
+but it is brave perseverance in the face of all difficulties, and in
+spite of all enemies.
+
+Mark how emphatically our Lord here makes the space within which
+that virtue has to be exercised conterminous with the whole duration
+of our lives. I need not discuss what 'the end' was in the original
+application of the words; that would take us too far afield. But
+this I desire to insist upon, that right on to the very close of
+life we are to expect the necessity of putting forth the exercise of
+the very same persistence by which the earlier stages of any noble
+career must necessarily be marked. In other departments of life
+there may be relaxation, as a man goes on through the years; but in
+the culture of our characters, and in the deepening of our faith,
+and in the drawing near to our God, there must be no cessation or
+diminution of earnestness and of effort right up to the close.
+
+There are plenty of people, and I dare say that I address some of
+them now, who began their Christian career full of vigour and with a
+heat that was too hot to last. But, alas, in a year or two all the
+fervency was past, and they settled down into the average, easygoing,
+unprogressive Christian, who is a wet blanket to the devotion and
+work of a Christian church. I wonder how many of us would scarcely
+know our own former selves if we could see them. Christian people,
+to how many of us should the word be rung in our ears: 'Ye did run
+well; _what_ did hinder you'? The answer is--Myself.
+
+But may I say that this emphatic 'to the end' has a special lesson
+for us older people, who, as natural strength abates and enthusiasm
+cools down, are apt to be but the shadows of our old selves in many
+things? But there should be fire within the mountain, though there
+may be snow on its crest. Many a ship has been lost on the harbour
+bar; and there is no excuse for the captain leaving the bridge, or
+the engineer coming up from the engine-room, stormy as the one
+position and stifling as the other may be, until the anchor is down,
+and the vessel is moored and quiet in the desired haven. The desert,
+with its wild beasts and its Bedouin, reaches right up to the city
+gates, and until we are within these we need to keep our hands on
+our sword-hilts and be ready for conflict. 'He that endureth to the
+end, the same shall be saved.'
+
+III. Lastly, note the crown which endurance wins.
+
+Now, I need not spend or waste your time in mere verbal criticism,
+but I wish to point out that that word 'soul' in one of our two
+texts means both the soul and the life of which it is the seat; and
+also to remark that the being saved and the winning of the life or
+the soul has distinct application, in our Lord's words, primarily to
+corporeal safety and preservation in the midst of dangers; and,
+still further, to note the emphatic '_in_ your patience,' as
+suggesting not only a future but a present acquisition of one's own
+soul, or life, as the result of such persevering endurance and
+enduring perseverance. All which things being kept in view, I may
+expand the great promise that lies in my text, as follows:--
+
+First, by such persevering persistence in the Christian path, we gain
+ourselves. Self-surrender is self-possession.  We never own ourselves
+till we have given up owning ourselves, and yielded ourselves to that
+Lord who gives us back saints to ourselves. Self-control is
+self-possession. We do not own ourselves as long as it is possible
+for any weakness in flesh, sense, or spirit to gain dominion over us
+and hinder us from doing what we know to be right. We are not our own
+masters then. 'Whilst they promise them liberty, they themselves are
+the bond-slaves of corruption.' It is only when we have the bit well
+into the jaws of the brutes, and the reins tight in our hands, so
+that a finger-touch can check or divert the course, that we are truly
+lords of the chariot in which we ride and of the animals that impel it.
+
+And such self-control which is the winning of ourselves is, as I
+believe, thoroughly realised only when, by self-surrender of
+ourselves to Jesus Christ, we get His help to govern ourselves and
+so become lords of ourselves. Some little petty Rajah, up in the
+hills, in a quasi-independent State in India, is troubled by
+mutineers whom he cannot subdue; what does he do? He sends a message
+down to Lahore or Calcutta, and up come English troops that
+consolidate his dominion, and he rules securely, when he has
+consented to become a feudatory, and recognise his overlord. And so
+you and I, by continual repetition, in the face of self and sin, of
+our acts of self-surrender, bring Christ into the field; and then,
+when we have said, 'Lord, take me; I live, yet not I, but Christ
+liveth in me'; and when we daily, in spite of hindrances, stand to
+the surrender and repeat the consecration, then 'in our perseverance
+we acquire our souls.'
+
+Again, such persistence wins even the bodily life, whether it
+preserves it or loses it. I have said that the words of our texts
+have an application to bodily preservation in the midst of the
+dreadful dangers of the siege and destruction of Jerusalem. But so
+regarded they are a paradox. For hear how the Master introduces
+them: 'Some of you shall they cause to be put to death, but there
+shall not a hair of your heads perish. In your perseverance ye shall
+win your lives.' 'Some of you they will put to death,' but ye 'shall
+win your lives,'--a paradox which can only be solved by experience.
+Whether this bodily life be preserved or lost, it is gained when it
+is used as a means of attaining the higher life of union with God.
+Many a martyr had the promise, 'Not a hair of your head shall
+perish,' fulfilled at the very moment when the falling axe shore his
+locks in twain, and severed his head from his body.
+
+Finally, full salvation, the true possession of himself, and the
+acquisition of the life which really is life, comes to a man who
+perseveres to the end, and thus passes to the land where he will
+receive the recompense of the reward. The one moment the runner,
+with flushed cheek and forward swaying body, hot, with panting
+breath, and every muscle strained, is straining to the winning-post;
+and the next moment, in utter calm, he is wearing the crown.
+
+'To the end,' and what a contrast the next moment will be! Brethren,
+may it be true of you and of me that 'we are not of them that draw
+back unto perdition, but of them that believe to the winning of
+their souls!'
+
+
+
+
+THE CARRION AND THE VULTURES
+
+
+    'Wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be
+    gathered together.'--MATT. xxiv. 28.
+
+This grim parable has, of course, a strong Eastern colouring. It is
+best appreciated by dwellers in those lands. They tell us that no
+sooner is some sickly animal dead, or some piece of carrion thrown
+out by the way, than the vultures--for the eagle does not prey upon
+carrion--appear. There may not have been one visible a moment before
+in the hot blue sky, but, taught by scent or by sight that their
+banquet is prepared, they come flocking from all corners of the
+heavens, a hideous crowd round their hideous meal, fighting with
+flapping wings and tearing it with their strong talons. And so, says
+Christ, wherever there is a rotting, dead society, a carcase
+hopelessly corrupt and evil, down upon it, as if drawn by some
+unerring attraction, will come the angels, the vultures of the
+divine judgment.
+
+The words of my text were spoken, according to the version of them
+in Luke's Gospel, in answer to a question from the disciples. Our
+Lord had been discoursing, in very solemn words, which, starting
+from the historical event of the impending fall of Jerusalem, had
+gradually passed into a description of the greater event of His
+second coming. And all these solemn warnings had stirred nothing
+deeper in the bosoms of the disciples than a tepid and idle
+curiosity which expressed itself in the one almost irrelevant
+question, 'Where, Lord?' He answers--Not here, not there, but
+everywhere where there is a carcase. The great event which is
+referred to in our Lord's solemn words is a future judgment, which
+is to be universal. But the words are not exhausted in their
+reference to that event. There have been many 'comings of the Lord,'
+many 'days of the Lord,' which on a smaller scale have embodied the
+same principles as are to be displayed in world-wide splendour and
+awfulness at the last.
+
+I. The first thing, then, in these most true and solemn words is
+this, that they are to us a revelation of a law which operates with
+unerring certainty through all the course of the world's history.
+
+We cannot tell, but God can, when evil has become incurable; or
+when, in the language of my text, the mass of any community has
+become a carcase. There may be flickerings of life, all unseen by
+our eyes, or there may be death, all unsuspected by our shallow
+vision. So long as there is a possibility of amendment, 'sentence
+against an evil work is not executed speedily'; and God dams back,
+as it were, the flow of His retributive judgment, 'not willing that
+any should perish, but that all should come to the knowledge of the
+truth.' But when He sees that all is vain, that no longer is
+restoration or recovery possible, then He lets loose the flood; or,
+in the language of my text, when the thing has become a carcase,
+then the vultures, God's scavengers, come and clear it away from off
+the face of the earth.
+
+Now that is the law that has been working from the beginning,
+working as well in regard to the long delays as in regard to the
+swift execution. There is another metaphor, in the Old Testament,
+that puts the same idea in a very striking form. It speaks about
+God's 'awakening,' as if His judgment slumbered. All round that dial
+the hand goes creeping, creeping, creeping slowly, but when it comes
+to the appointed line, then the bell strikes. And so years and
+centuries go by, all chance of recovery departs, and then the crash!
+The ice palace, built upon the frozen blocks, stands for a while,
+but when the spring thaws come, it breaks up.
+
+Let me remind you of some instances and illustrations. Take that
+story which people stumble over in the early part of the Old
+Testament revelation--the sweeping away of those Canaanitish nations
+whose hideous immoralities had turned the land into a perfect sty of
+abominations. There they had been wallowing, and God's Spirit, which
+strives with men ever and always, had been striving with them, we
+know not for how long, but when the time came at which, according to
+the grim metaphor of the Old Testament, 'the measure of their
+iniquity was full,' then He hurled upon them the fierce hosts out of
+the desert, and in a whirlwind of fire and sword swept them off the
+face of the earth.
+
+Take another illustration. These very people, who had been the
+executioners of divine judgment, settled in the land, fell into the
+snare--and you know the story. The captivities of Israel and Judah
+were other illustrations of the same thing. The fall of Jerusalem,
+to which our Lord pointed in the solemn context of these words, was
+another. For millenniums God had been pleading with them, sending
+His prophets, rising early and sending, saying, 'Oh, do not do this
+abominable thing which I hate!' 'And last of all He sent His Son.'
+Christ being rejected, God had shot His last bolt. He had no more
+that He could do. Christ being refused, the nation's doom was fixed
+and sealed, and down came the eagles of Rome, again God's scavengers,
+to sweep away the nation on which had been lavished such wealth of
+divine love, but which had now come to be a rotting abomination,
+and to this day remains in a living death, a miraculously preserved
+monument of God's Judgments.
+
+Take another illustration how, once more, the executants of the law
+fall under its power. That nation which crushed the feeble resources
+of Judaea, as a giant might crush a mosquito in his grasp, in its
+turn became honeycombed with abominations and immoralities; and then
+down from the frozen north came the fierce Gothic tribes over the
+Roman territory. One of their captains called himself the 'Scourge
+of God,' and he was right. Another swooping down of the vultures
+flashed from the blue heavens, and the carrion was torn to fragments
+by their strong beaks.
+
+Take one more illustration--that French Revolution at the end of the
+eighteenth century. The fathers sowed the wind, and the children
+reaped the whirlwind. Generations of heartless luxury, selfishness,
+carelessness of the cry of the poor, immoral separation of class
+from class, and all the sins which a ruling caste could commit
+against a subject people, had prepared for the convulsion. Then, in
+a carnival of blood and deluges of fire and sulphur, the rotten
+thing was swept off the face of the earth, and the world breathed
+more freely for its destruction.
+
+Take another illustration, through which many of us have lived. The
+bitter legacy of negro slavery that England gave to her giant son
+across the Atlantic, which blasted and sucked the strength out of
+that great republic, went down amidst universal execration. It took
+centuries for the corpse to be ready, but when the vultures came
+they made quick work of it.
+
+And so, as I say, all over the world, and from the beginning of
+time, with delays according to the possibilities of restoration and
+recovery which the divine eye discerns, this law is working. Verily
+there is a God that judgeth in the earth. 'The wheels of God grind
+slowly, but they grind exceeding small.' 'Wheresoever the carcase
+is, there will the eagles be gathered together.'
+
+And has the law exhausted its force? Are there going to be no more
+applications of it? Are there no European societies at this day that
+in their godlessness and social iniquities are hurrying fast to the
+condition of carrion? Look around us--drunkenness, sensual
+immorality, commercial dishonesty, senseless luxury amongst the
+rich, heartless indifference to the wail of the poor, godlessness
+over all classes and ranks of the community. Surely, surely, if the
+body politic be not dead, it is sick nigh unto death. And I, for my
+part, have little hesitation in saying that as far as one can see,
+European society is driving as fast as it can, with its godlessness
+and immorality, to such another 'day of the Lord' as these words of
+my text suggest. Let us see to it that we do our little part to be
+the 'salt of the earth' which shall keep it from rotting, and so
+drive away the vultures of judgment.
+
+II. But let me turn to another point. We have here a law which is to
+have a far more tremendous accomplishment in the future.
+
+There have been many comings of the Lord, many days of the Lord,
+when, as Isaiah says in his magnificent vision of one such, 'the
+loftiness of man has been bowed down, and the haughtiness of man
+made low, and the Lord alone exalted in that day when He arises to
+shake terribly the earth. And all these 'days of the Lord' are
+prophecies, and distinctly point to a future 'day' when the same
+principles which have been disclosed as working on a small scale in
+them, shall be manifested in full embodiment. These 'days of the
+Lord' proclaim '_the_ day of the Lord.' In the prophecies both
+of the Old and New Testaments that universal future judgment is seen
+glimmering through the descriptions of the nearer partial judgments.
+So interpreters are puzzled to say at what point in a prophecy the
+transition is made from the smaller to the greater. The prophecies
+are like the diagrams in treatises on perspective, in which
+diverging lines are drawn from the eye, enclosing a square or other
+figure, and which, as they recede further from the point of view,
+enclose a figure, the same in shape but of greater dimensions. There
+is a historical event foretold, the fall of Jerusalem. It is close
+up to the eyes of the disciples, and is comparatively small. Carry
+out the lines that touch its corners and define its shape, and upon
+the far distant curtain of the dim future there is thrown a like
+figure immensely larger, the coming of Jesus Christ to judge the
+world. All these little premonitions and foretastes and anticipatory
+specimens point onwards to the assured termination of the world's
+history in that great and solemn day, when all men shall be gathered
+before Christ's throne, and He shall judge all nations--judge you
+and me amongst the rest. That future judgment is distinctly a part
+of the Christian revelation. Jesus Christ is to come in bodily form
+as He went away. All men are to be judged by Him. That judgment is
+to be the destruction of opposing forces, the sweeping away of the
+carrion of moral evil.
+
+It is therefore distinctly a part of the message that is to be
+preached by us, under penalty of the awful condemnation pronounced
+on the watchman who seeth the sword coming and gives no warning. It
+is not becoming to make such a solemn message the opportunity for
+pictorial rhetoric, which vulgarises its greatness and weakens its
+power. But it is worse than an offence against taste; it is
+unfaithfulness to the preaching which God bids us, treason to our
+King, and cruelty to our hearers, to suppress the warning--'The day
+of the Lord cometh.' There are many temptations to put it in the
+background. Many of you do not want that kind of preaching. You want
+the gentle side of divine revelation. You say to us in fact, though
+not in words. 'Prophesy to us smooth things. Tell us about the
+infinite love which wraps all mankind in its embrace. Speak to us of
+the Father God, who "hateth nothing that He hath made." Magnify the
+mercy and gentleness and tenderness of Christ. Do not say anything
+about that other side. It is not in accordance with the tendencies
+of modern thought.'
+
+So much the worse, then, for the tendencies of modern thought. I
+yield to no man in the ardour of my belief that the centre of all
+revelation is the revelation of a God of infinite love, but I cannot
+forget that there is such a thing as 'the terror of the Lord,' and I
+dare not disguise my conviction that no preaching sounds every
+string in the manifold harp of God's truth, which does not strike
+that solemn note of warning of judgment to come.
+
+Such suppression is unfaithfulness. Surely, if we preachers believe
+that tremendous truth, we are bound to speak. It is cruel kindness
+to be silent. If a traveller is about to plunge into some gloomy
+jungle infested by wild beasts, he is a friend who sits by the
+wayside to warn him of his danger. Surely you would not call a
+signalman unfeeling because he held out a red lamp when he knew that
+just round the curve beyond his cabin the rails were up, and that
+any train that reached the place would go over in horrid ruin.
+Surely that preaching is not justly charged with harshness which
+rings out the wholesome proclamation of a day of judgment, when we
+shall each give account of ourselves to the divine-human Judge.
+
+Such suppression weakens the power of the Gospel, which is the
+proclamation of deliverance, not only from the power, but also from
+the future retribution of sin. In such a maimed gospel there is but
+an enfeebled meaning given to that idea of deliverance. And though
+the thing that breaks the heart and draws men to God is not terror,
+but love, the terror must often be evoked in order to lead to love.
+It is only 'judgment to come' which will make Felix tremble, and
+though his trembling may pass away, and he be none the nearer the
+kingdom, there will never any good be done to him unless he does
+tremble. So, for all these reasons, all faithful preaching of
+Christ's Gospel must include the proclamation of Christ as Judge.
+
+But, if I should be unfaithful, if I did not preach this truth, what
+shall we call you if you turn away from it? You would not think it a
+wise thing of the engine-driver to shut his eyes if the red lamp
+were shown, and to go along at full speed and to pay no heed to
+that? Do you think it would be right for a Christian minister to
+lock his lips and never say, 'There is a judgment to come'? And do
+you think it is wise of you not to think of that, and to shape your
+conduct accordingly?
+
+Oh, dear friends! I do not doubt that the centre of all divine
+revelation is the love of God, nor do I doubt that incomparably the
+highest representation of the power of Christ's Gospel is that it
+draws men away from the love and the practice of evil, and makes
+them pure and holy. But that is not all. There is not only the
+practice and the power of sin to be fought against, but there is the
+penalty of sin to be taken into account; and as sure as you are
+living, and as sure as there is a God above us, so sure is it that
+there is a Day of Judgment, when 'He will judge the world in
+righteousness by the Man whom He hath ordained.' The believing of
+that is not salvation, but the belief of that seems to me to be
+indispensable for any vigorous grasp of the delivering love of God
+in Jesus Christ our Lord.
+
+III. And so the last thing that I have to say is that this is a law
+which need never touch you, nor you know anything about but by the
+hearing of the ear.
+
+It is told us that we may escape it. When Paul reasoned of
+righteousness, and temperance, and judgment to come, his hearer
+trembled as he listened, but there was an end. But the true effect
+of this message is the effect that Paul himself attached to it when
+he said in the hearing of Athenian wisdom, 'God hath commanded all
+men everywhere _to repent_, because He hath appointed a day in
+the which He will judge the world in righteousness.' Judgment
+faithfully preached is the preparation for preaching that 'there is
+no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.' If we trust in
+that great Saviour, we shall be quickened from the death of sin, and
+so shall not be food for the vultures of judgment. Can these corpses
+live? Can this eating putrescence, which burrows its foul way
+through our souls, be sweetened? Is there any antiseptic for it?
+Yes, blessed be God, and the hand whose touch healed the leper will
+heal us, and 'our flesh will come again as the flesh of a little
+child.' Christ has bared His breast to the divine judgments against
+sin, and if by faith we shelter ourselves in Him, we shall never
+know the terrors of that awful day.
+
+Be sure that judgment to come is no mere figure dressed up to
+frighten children, nor the product of blind superstition, but that
+it is the inevitable issue of the righteousness of the All-ruling
+God. You and I and all the sons of men have to face it. 'Herein is
+our love made perfect, that we may have boldness before Him in the
+Day of Judgment.' Betake yourselves, as poor sinful creatures who
+know something of the corruption of your own hearts, to that dear
+Christ who has died on the Cross for you, and all that is obnoxious
+to the divine judgments will, by His transforming life breathed into
+you, be taken out of your hearts; and when that 'day of the Lord'
+shall dawn, you, trusting in the sacrifice of Him who is your Judge,
+will 'have a song as when a holy solemnity is kept.' Take Christ for
+your Saviour, and then, when the vultures of judgment, with their
+mighty black pinions, are wheeling and circling in the sky, ready to
+pounce upon their prey, He will gather you 'as a hen gathereth her
+chickens under her wings,' and beneath their shadow you will be
+safe.
+
+
+
+
+WATCHING FOR THE KING
+
+
+    'Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord
+    doth come. 43. But know this, that if the goodman of
+    the house had known in what watch the thief would come,
+    he would have watched, and would not have suffered his
+    house to be broken up. 44. Therefore be ye also ready:
+    for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of Man
+    cometh. 45. Who then is a faithful and wise servant,
+    whom his lord hath made ruler over his household, to
+    give them meat in due season! 46. Blessed is that
+    servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so
+    doing. 47. Verily I say unto you, That he shall make
+    him ruler over all his goods. 48. But and if that evil
+    servant shall say in his heart, My lord delayeth his
+    coming; 49. And shall begin to smite his fellow-
+    servants, and to eat and drink with the drunken;
+    50. The lord of that servant shall come in a day when
+    he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not
+    aware of, 51. And shall out him asunder, and appoint
+    him his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be
+    weeping and gnashing of teeth.'--MATT. xxiv. 42-51.
+
+The long day's work was nearly done. Christ had left the temple,
+never to return. He took His way across the Mount of Olives to
+Bethany, and was stayed by the disciples' question as to the date of
+the destruction of the temple, which He had foretold, and of the
+'end of the world,' which they attached to it. They could not fancy
+the world lasting without the temple! We often make a like mistake.
+So there, on the hillside, looking across to the city lying in the
+sad, fading evening light, He spoke the prophecies of this chapter,
+which begin with the destruction of Jerusalem, and insensibly merge
+into the final coming of the Son of Man, of which that was a prelude
+and a type. The difficulty of accurately apportioning the details of
+this prophecy to the future events which fulfil them is common to it
+with all prophecy, of which it is a characteristic to blend events
+which, in the fulfilment, are far apart. From the mountain top, the
+eye travels over great stretches of country, but does not see the
+gorges, separating points which seem close together, foreshortened
+by distance.
+
+There are many comings of the Son of Man before His final coming for
+final judgment, and the nearer and smaller ones are themselves
+prophecies. So, we do not need to settle the chronology of
+unfulfilled prophecy in order to get the full benefit of Christ's
+teachings here. In its moral and spiritual effect on us, the
+uncertainty of the time of our going to Christ is nearly identical
+with the uncertainty of the time of His coming to us.
+
+I. The command of watchfulness enforced by our ignorance of the time
+of His coming (vs. 42-44). The two commands at the beginning and end
+of the paragraph are not quite the same. 'Be ye ready' is the
+consequence of watchfulness. Nor are the two appended reasons the
+same; for the first command is grounded on His coming at a day when
+'ye _know_ not,' and the second on His coming 'in an hour that
+ye _think_ not,' that is to say, it not only is uncertain, but
+unexpected and surprising. There may also be a difference worth
+noting in the different designations of Christ as 'your Lord,'
+standing in a special relation to you, and as 'the Son of Man,' of
+kindred with all men, and their Judge. What is this 'watchfulness'?
+It is literally wakefulness. We are beset by perpetual temptations
+to sleep, to spiritual drowsiness and torpor. 'An opium sky rains
+down soporifics.' And without continual effort, our perception of
+the unseen realities and our alertness for service will be lulled to
+sleep. The religion of multitudes is a sleepy religion. Further, it
+is a vivid and ever-present conviction of His certain coming, and
+consequently a habitual realising of the transience of the existing
+order of things, and of the fast-approaching realities of the
+future. Further, it is the keeping of our minds in an attitude of
+expectation and desire, our eyes ever travelling to the dim distance
+to mark the far-off shining of His coming. What a miserable contrast
+to this is the temper of professing Christendom as a whole! It is
+swallowed up in the present, wide awake to interests and hopes
+belonging to this 'bank and shoal of time,' but sunk in slumber as
+to that great future, or, if ever the thought of it intrudes,
+shrinking, rather than desire, accompanies it, and it is soon
+hustled out of mind.
+
+Christ bases His command on our ignorance of the time of His coming.
+It was no part of His purpose in this prophecy to remove that
+ignorance, and no calculations of the chronology of unfulfilled
+predictions have pierced the darkness. It was His purpose that from
+generation to generation His servants should be kept in the attitude
+of expectation, as of an event that may come at any time and must
+come at some time. The parallel uncertainty of the time of death,
+though not what is meant here, serves the same moral end if rightly
+used, and the fact of death is exposed to the same danger of being
+neglected because of the very uncertainty, which ought to be one
+chief reason for keeping it ever in view. Any future event, which
+combines these two things, absolute certainty that it will happen,
+and utter uncertainty when it will happen, ought to have power to
+insist on being remembered, at least, till it was prepared for, and
+would have it, if men were not such fools. Christ's coming would be
+oftener contemplated if it were more welcome. But what sort of a
+servant is he, who has no glow of gladness at the thought of meeting
+his lord? True Christians are 'all them that have loved His
+appearing.'
+
+The illustrative example which separates these two commands is
+remarkable. The householder's ignorance of the time when the thief
+would come is the reason why he does not watch. He cannot keep awake
+all night, and every night, to be ready for him; so he has to go to
+sleep, and is robbed. But our ignorance is a reason for wakefulness,
+because we can keep awake all the night of life. The householder
+watches to prevent, but we to share in, that for which the watch is
+kept. The figure of the thief is chosen to illustrate the one point
+of the unexpected stealthy approach. But is there not deep truth in
+it, to the effect that Christ's coming is like that of a robber to
+those who are asleep, depriving them of earthly treasures? The word
+rendered 'broken up' means literally 'dug through,' and points to a
+clay or mud house, common in the East, which is entered, not by
+bursting open doors or windows, but by digging through the wall.
+Death comes to men sunk in spiritual slumber, to strip them of good
+which they would fain keep, and makes his entrance by a breach in
+the earthly house of this tabernacle. So St. Paul, in his earliest
+Epistle, refers to this saying (a proof of the early diffusion of
+the gospel narrative), and says, 'Ye, brethren, are not in darkness,
+that that day should overtake you as a thief.'
+
+II. The picture and reward of watchfulness. The general exhortation
+to watch is followed by a pair of contrasted parable portraits,
+primarily applicable to the apostles and to those 'set over His
+household.' But if we remember what Christ taught as the condition
+of pre-eminence in His kingdom, we shall not confine their
+application to an order.
+
+  'The least flower with a brimming cup may stand,
+   And share its dew-drop with another near,'
+
+and the most slenderly endowed Christian has some crumb of the bread
+of life intrusted to him to dispense. It is to be observed that
+watchfulness is not mentioned in this portraiture of the faithful
+servant. It is presupposed as the basis and motive of his service.
+So we learn the double lesson that the attitude of continual outlook
+for the Lord is needed, if we are to discharge the tasks which He
+has set us, and that the true effect of watchfulness is to harness
+us to the car of duty. Many other motives actuate Christian
+faithfulness, but all are reinforced by this, and where it is feeble
+they are more or less inoperative. We cannot afford to lose its
+influence. A Church or a soul which has ceased to be looking for Him
+will have let all its tasks drop from its drowsy hands, and will
+feel the power of other constraining motives of Christian service
+but faintly, as in a half-dream.
+
+On the other hand, true waiting for Him is best expressed in the
+quiet discharge of accustomed and appointed tasks. The right place
+for the servant to be found, when the Lord comes, is 'so doing' as
+He commands, however secular the task may be. That was a wise judge
+who, when sudden darkness came on, and people thought the end of the
+world was at hand, said, 'Bring lights, and let us go on with the
+case. We cannot be better employed, if the end has come, than in
+doing our duty.' Flighty impatience of common tasks is not watching
+for the King, as Paul had to teach the Thessalonians, who were
+'shaken' in mind by the thought of the day of the Lord; but the
+proper attitude of the watchers is 'that ye study to be quiet, and
+to do your own business.'
+
+Observe, further, the interrogative form of the parable. The
+question is the sharp point which gives penetrating power, and
+suggests Christ's high estimate of the worth and difficulty of such
+conduct, and sets us to ask for ourselves, 'Lord, is it I?' The
+servant is 'faithful' inasmuch as he does his Lord's will, and
+rightly uses the goods intrusted to him, and 'wise' inasmuch as he
+is 'faithful.' For a single-hearted devotion to Christ is the parent
+of insight into duty, and the best guide to conduct; and whoever
+seeks only to be true to his Lord in the use of his gifts and
+possessions, will not lack prudence to guide him in giving to each
+his food, and that in due season. The two characteristics are
+connected in another way also; for, if the outcome of faithfulness
+be taken into account, its wisdom is plain, and he who has been
+faithful even unto death will be seen to have been wise though he
+gave up all, when the crown of eternal life sparkles on his
+forehead. Such faithfulness and wisdom (which are at bottom but two
+names for one course of conduct) find their motive in that
+watchfulness, which works as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye, and
+as ever keeping in view His coming, and the rendering of account to
+Him.
+
+The reward of the faithful servant is stated in language similar to
+that of the parable of the talents. Faithfulness in a narrower
+sphere leads to a wider. The reward for true work is more work, of
+nobler sort and on a grander scale. That is true for earth and for
+heaven. If we do His will here, we shall one day exchange the
+subordinate place of the steward for the authority of the ruler, and
+the toil of the servant for the 'joy of the Lord.' The soul that is
+joined to Christ and is one in will with Him has all things for its
+servants; and he who uses all things for his own and his brethren's
+highest good is lord of them all, while he walks amid the shadows of
+time, and will be lifted to loftier dominion over a grander world
+when he passes hence.
+
+III. The picture and doom of the unwatchful servant. This portrait
+presupposes that a long period will elapse before Christ comes. The
+secret thought of the evil servant is the thought of a time far down
+the ages from the moment of our Lord's speaking. It would take
+centuries for such a temper to be developed in the Church. What is
+the temper? A secret dismissal of the anticipation of the Lord's
+return, and that not merely because He has been long in coming, but
+as thinking that He has broken His word, and has not come when He
+said that He would. This unspoken dimming over of the expectation
+and unconfessed doubt of the firmness of the promise, is the natural
+product of the long time of apparent delay which the Church has had
+to encounter. It will cloud and depress the religion of later ages,
+unless there be constant effort to resist the tendency and to keep
+awake. The first generations were all aflame with the glad hope
+'Maranatha'--'The Lord is at hand.' Their successors gradually lost
+that keenness of expectation, and at most cried, 'Will not He come
+soon?' Their successors saw the starry hope through thickening mists
+of years; and now it scarcely shines for many, or at least is but a
+dim point, when it should blaze as a sun.
+
+He was an 'evil' servant who said so in his heart. He was evil
+because he said it, and he said it because he was evil; for the
+yielding to sin and the withdrawal of love from Jesus dim the desire
+for His coming, and make the whisper that He delays, a hope; while,
+on the other hand, the hope that He delays helps to open the
+sluices, and let sin flood the life. So an outburst of cruel
+masterfulness and of riotous sensuality is the consequence of the
+dimmed expectation. There would have been no usurpation of authority
+over Christ's heritage by priest or pope, or any other, if that hope
+had not become faint. If professing Christians lived with the great
+white throne and the heavens and earth fleeing away before Him that
+sits on it, ever burning before their inward eye, how could they
+wallow amid the mire of animal indulgence? The corruptions of the
+Church, especially of its official members, are traced with sad and
+prescient hand in these foreboding words, which are none the less a
+prophecy because cast by His forbearing gentleness into the milder
+form of a supposition.
+
+The dreadful doom of the unwatchful servant is couched in terms of
+awful severity. The cruel punishment of sawing asunder, which,
+tradition says, was suffered by Isaiah and was not unfamiliar in old
+times, is his. What concealed terror of retribution it signifies we
+do not know. Perhaps it points to a fate in which a man shall be, as
+it were, parted into two, each at enmity with the other. Perhaps it
+implies a retribution in kind for his sin, which consisted, as the
+next clause implies, in hypocrisy, which is the sundering in twain
+of inward conviction and practice, and is to be avenged by a like
+but worse rending apart of conscience and will. At all events, it
+shadows a fearful retribution, which is not extinction, inasmuch as,
+in the next clause, we read that his portion--his lot, or that
+condition which belongs to him by virtue of his character--is with
+'the hypocrites.' He was one of them, because, while he said 'my
+lord,' he had ceased to love and obey, having ceased to desire and
+expect; and therefore whatever is their fate shall be his, even to
+the 'dividing asunder of soul and spirit,' and setting eternal
+discord among the thoughts and intents of the heart. That is not the
+punishment of unwatchfulness, but of what unwatchfulness leads to,
+if unawakened. Let these words of the King ring an alarum for us
+all, and rouse our sleepy souls to watch, as becomes the children of
+the day.
+
+
+
+
+THE WAITING MAIDENS
+
+
+    'Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten
+    virgins, which took their lamps, and went forth to meet
+    the bridegroom. 2. And five of them were wise, and five
+    were foolish. 3. They that were foolish took their
+    lamps, and took no oil with them: 4. But the wise took
+    oil in their vessels with their lamps. 5. While the
+    bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept. 6. And
+    at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom
+    cometh; go ye out to meet him. 7. Then all those virgins
+    arose, and trimmed their lamps. 8. And the foolish said
+    unto the wise, Give us of your oil; for our lamps are
+    gone out. 9. But the wise answered, saying, Not so; lest
+    there be not enough for us and you: but go ye rather to
+    them that sell, and buy for yourselves. 10. And while
+    they went to buy, the bridegroom came; and they that
+    were ready went in with him to the marriage: and the
+    door was shut. 11 Afterward came also the other virgins,
+    saying, Lord, Lord, open to us. 12. But he answered and
+    said, Verily I say unto you, I know you not. 13. Watch
+    therefore; for ye know neither the day nor the hour
+    wherein the Son of Man cometh.'--MATT. xxv. 1-13.
+
+We shall best understand this beautiful but difficult parable if we
+look on to its close. Our Lord appends to it the refrain of all this
+context, the exhortation to watch, based upon our ignorance of the
+time of His coming. But as in the former little parable of the wise
+servant it was his faithful, wise dispensing of his lord's goods,
+and not his watchfulness, which was the point of the eulogium passed
+on him, so here it is the readiness of the wise virgins to take
+their places in the wedding march which is commended. That readiness
+consists in their having their lamps burning and their oil in store.
+This, then, is the main thing in the parable. It is an exhibition,
+under another aspect, of what constitutes fitness for entrance into
+the festal chamber of the bridegroom, which had just been set forth
+as consisting in faithful stewardship. Here it is presented as being
+the possession of lamp and oil.
+
+I. The first consideration, then, must be, What is the meaning of
+these emblems? A great deal of fine-spun ingenuity has been expended
+on subordinate points in the parable, such as the significance of
+the number of maidens, the conclusions from the equal division into
+wise and foolish, the place from which they came to meet the
+bridegroom, the point in the marriage procession where they are
+supposed to join it, whether it was at going to fetch the bride, or
+at coming back with her; whether the feast is held in her house, or
+in his, and so on. But all these are unimportant questions, and as
+Christ has left them in the background, we only destroy the
+perspective by dragging them into the front. In no parable is it
+more important than in this to restrain the temptation to run out
+analogies into their last results. The remembrance that the virgins,
+as the emblem of the whole body of the visible Church, are the same
+as the bride, who does not appear in the parable, might warn against
+such an error. They were ten, as being the usual number for such a
+company, or as being the round number naturally employed when
+definiteness was not sought. They were divided equally, not because
+our Lord desired to tell, but because He wished to leave unnoticed,
+the numerical proportion of the two classes. One set are 'wise' and
+the other 'foolish,' because He wishes to show not only the sin, but
+the absurdity, of unreadiness, and to teach us that true wisdom is
+not of the head only, but far more of the heart. The conduct of the
+two groups of maidens is looked at from the prudent and common-sense
+standpoint, and the provident action of the one sets in relief the
+reckless stupidity of the other.
+
+There have been many opinions as to the meaning of the lamps and the
+oil, which it is needless to repeat. Surely the analogy of
+scriptural symbolism is our best guide. If we follow it, we get a
+meaning which perfectly suits the emblems and the whole parable. In
+the Sermon on the Mount, our Lord uses the same figure of the lamp,
+and explains it: 'Let your light shine before men, that they may see
+your good works.'
+
+II. Note the sleep of all the virgins. No blame is hinted on account
+of it. It is not inconsistent with the wisdom of the wise, nor does
+it interfere with their readiness to meet the bridegroom. It is,
+then, such a sleep as is compatible with watching. Our Lord's
+introduction of this point is an example of His merciful allowance
+for our weakness. There must be a certain slackening of the tension
+of expectation when the bridegroom tarries. Centuries of delay
+cannot but modify the attitude of the waiting Church, and Jesus here
+implies that there will be a long stretch of time before His advent,
+during which all His people will feel the natural effect of the
+deferring of hope. But the sleep which He permits, unblamed, is
+light, and such as one takes by snatches when waiting to be called.
+He does not ask us always to be on tiptoe of expectation, nor to
+refuse the teaching of experience; but counts that we have watched
+aright, if we wake from our light slumbers when the cry is heard,
+and have our lamps lit, ready for the procession.
+
+III. Then comes the midnight cry and the waking of the maidens. The
+hour, 'of night's black arch the keystone,' suggests the unexpectedness
+of His coming; the loudness of the cry, its all-awaking effect; the
+broken words of the true reading, 'Behold the bridegroom!' the
+closeness on the heels of the heralds with which the procession
+flashes through the darkness. The virgins had 'gone forth to meet him'
+at the beginning of the parable, but the going forth to which they are
+now summoned is not the same. The Christian soul goes forth once when,
+at the beginning of its Christian life, it forsakes the world to wait
+for and on Christ, and again, when it leaves the world to pass with
+Him into the banquet. Life is the slumber from which some are awaked
+by the voice of death, and some who 'remain' shall be awaked by the
+trumpet of judgment. There is no interval between the cry and the
+appearance of the bridegroom; only a moment to rouse themselves, to
+look to their lamps, and to speak the hurried words of the foolish
+and the answer of the wise, and then the procession is upon them. It
+is all done as in a flash, 'in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.'
+This impression of swiftness, which leaves no time for delayed
+preparation, is the uniform impression conveyed by all the Scripture
+references to the coming of the Lord. The swoop of the eagle, the
+fierce blaze of lightning from one side of the sky to the other, the
+bursting of the flood, that morning's work at Sodom, not begun till
+dawn and finished before the 'sun was risen on the earth,' are its
+types. Foolish indeed to postpone preparation till that moment when
+cry and coming are simultaneous, like lightning and thunder right
+overhead!
+
+The foolish virgins' imploring request and its answer are not to be
+pressed, as if they meant more than to set forth the hopelessness of
+then attempting to procure the wanting oil, and especially the
+hopelessness of attempting to get it from one's fellows. There is a
+world of suppressed terror and surprise in that cry, 'Our lamps are
+going out.' Note that they burned till the bridegroom came, and
+then, like the magic lamps in old legends, at his approach shivered
+into darkness. Is not that true of the formal, outward religion,
+which survives everything but contact with His all-seeing eye and
+perfect judgment? These foolish maidens were as much astonished as
+alarmed at seeing their lights flicker down to extinction; and it is
+possible for professing Christians to live a lifetime, and never to
+be found out either by themselves or by anybody else. But if there
+has been no oil in the lamp, it will be quenched when He appears.
+The atmosphere that surrounds His throne acts like oxygen on the
+oil-fed flame, and like carbonic acid gas on the other.
+
+The answer of the wise is not selfishness. It is not from our
+fellows, however bright their lamps, that we can ever get that
+inward grace. None of them has more than suffices for his own needs,
+nor can any give it to another. It may be bought, on the same terms
+as the pearl of great price was bought, 'without money'; but the
+market is closed, as on a holiday, on the day of the king's son's
+marriage. That is not touched upon here, except in so far as it is
+hinted at in the absence of the foolish when he enters the
+banqueting chamber, and in their fruitless prayer. They had no time
+to get the oil before he came, and they had not got it when they
+returned. The lesson is plain. We can only get the new life of the
+Spirit, which will make our lives a light, from God; and we can get
+it now, not then.
+
+IV. We see the wise virgins within and the foolish without. They
+are, indeed, no longer designated by these adjectives, but as
+'ready' and 'the others'; for preparedness is fitness, and they who
+are found of Him in possession of the outward righteousness and of
+its inward source, His own divine life in them, are prepared. To
+such the gates of the festal chamber fly open. In that day, place is
+the outcome of character, and it is equally impossible for the
+'ready' to be shut out, and for 'the others' to go in.
+
+'When the bridegroom with his feastful friends passes to bliss at
+the mid hour of night,' they who have 'filled their odorous lamps
+with deeds of light' have surely 'gained their entrance.' There is
+silence as to the unspeakable joys of the wedding feast. Some faint
+sounds of music and dancing, some gleams from the lighted windows,
+find their way out; but the closed door keeps its secret, and only
+the guests know the gladness.
+
+That closed door means security, perpetuity, untold blessedness, but
+it means exclusion too. The piteous reiterated call of the shut-out
+maidens, roused too late, and so suddenly, from songs and laughter
+to vain cries, evokes a stern answer, through which shines the awful
+reality veiled in the parable. We do not need to regard the prayer
+for entrance, and its refusal, as conveying more than the
+fruitlessness of wishes for entrance then, when unaccompanied with
+fitness to enter. Such desire as is expressed in this passionate
+beating at the closed door, with hoarse entreaties, is not fitness.
+If it were, the door would open; and the reason why it does not lies
+in the bridegroom's awful answer, 'I know you not.' The absence of
+the qualification prevents his recognising them as his. Surely the
+unalleviated darkness of a hopeless exclusion settles down on these
+sad five, standing, huddled together, at the door, with the
+extinguished lamps hanging in their despairing hands. 'Too late, too
+late, ye cannot enter now.' The wedding bell has become a funeral
+knell. They were not the enemies of the bridegroom, they thought
+themselves his friends. They let life ebb without securing the one
+thing needful, and the neglect was irremediable. There is a tragedy
+underlying many a life of outward religiousness and inward
+emptiness, and a dreadful discovery will flare in upon such, when
+they have to say to themselves,
+
+  'This might have been once,
+   And we missed it, lost it for ever.'
+
+
+
+
+DYING LAMPS
+
+
+    'Our lamps are gone out.'--MATT. xxv. 8.
+
+This is one of the many cases in which the Revised Version, by
+accuracy of rendering the tense of a verb, gives a much more
+striking as well as correct reproduction of the original than the
+Authorised Version does. The former reads 'going out,' instead of
+'gone out,' a rendering which the Old Version has, unfortunately,
+relegated to the margin. It is clearly to be preferred, not only
+because it more correctly represents the Greek, but because it sets
+before us a more solemn and impressive picture of the precise time
+at which the terrible discovery was made by the foolish five. They
+woke from their sleep, and hastily trimmed their lamps. These burned
+brightly for a moment, and then began to flicker and die down. The
+extinction of their light was not the act of a moment, but was a
+gradual process, which had advanced in some degree before it
+attracted the attention of the bearers of the lamps. At last it
+roused the half-sleeping five into startled, wide-awake
+consciousness. There is a tone of alarm and fear in their sudden
+exclamation, 'Our lamps are going out.' They see now the catastrophe
+that threatens, and understand that the only means of averting it is
+to replenish the empty oil-vessels before the flame has quite
+expired. But their knowledge and their dread were alike too late,
+and, as they went on their hopeless search for some one to give them
+what they once might have had in abundance, the last faint flicker
+ceased, and they had to grope their way in the dark, with their
+lightless lamps hanging useless in their slack hands, while far off
+the torches of the bridal procession, in which they might have had a
+part, flashed through the night. We have nothing to do with the
+tragical issue of the process of extinction; but solemn lessons of
+universal application gather round the picture of that process, as
+represented in our text, and to these we turn now.
+
+I. We must settle the meaning of the oil and the lamps.
+
+The Old Testament symbolism is our best guide as to the significance
+of the oil. Throughout it, oil symbolises the divine influences that
+come down on men appointed by God to their several functions, and
+which are there traced to the Spirit of the Lord. So the priests
+were set apart by unction with the holy oil; so Samuel poured oil on
+the black locks of Saul. So, too, the very name Messiah means
+'anointed,' and the great prophecy, which Jesus claimed for His own
+in His first sermon in the synagogue at Nazareth, put into the
+Messiah's lips the declaration, 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
+because He hath anointed Me.' But there are Old Testament symbols
+which bear still more closely on the emblems of our text. Zechariah
+saw in vision a golden lamp-stand with seven lamps, and on either
+side of it an olive tree, from which oil flowed through golden pipes
+to feed the flame. The interpretation of the vision was given by the
+'angel that talked with' the prophet as being, 'not by might nor by
+power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord.'
+
+So, then, we follow the plainly marked road and Scripture use of a
+symbol when we take the oil in this parable to be that which every
+listener to Jesus, who was instructed in the old things which he was
+bringing forth with new emphasis from the ancient treasure-house of
+the word of God, would take it to be--namely, the sum of the
+influences from Heaven which were bestowed through the Spirit of the
+Lord.
+
+Such being the meaning of the oil, what was meant by the lamp? We
+have no intention of discussing here the many varying interpretations
+which have been given to the symbol. To do so would lead us too far
+afield. We can only say that the interpretation of the oil as the
+influence of the Holy Spirit necessarily involves the explanation of
+the lamp which is fed by it, as being the spiritual life of the
+individual, which is nourished and made visible to the world as light,
+by the continual communication from God of these hallowing influences.
+Turning again to the Old Testament, I need only remind you of the
+great seven-branched lamp which stood in the Tabernacle, and afterwards
+in the Temple. It was the symbol of the collective Israel, as recipient
+of divine influences, and thereby made the light of a dark world. Its
+rays streamed out over the desert first, and afterwards shone from
+the mountain of the Lord's house, beaming illumination and invitation
+to those who sat in darkness to behold the great light, and to walk
+in the light of the Lord. Zechariah's emblem was based on the Temple
+lamp. In accordance with the greater prominence given by the Old
+Testament to national than to individual religion, both of these
+represented the people as a whole. In accordance with the more
+advanced individualism of the New Testament, our text so far varies
+the application of the emblem, that each of the ten virgins who, as
+a whole, stand for the collective professing Church, has her own
+lamp. But that is the only difference between the Old and the New
+Testament uses of the symbol.
+
+I need not remind you how the same metaphor recurs frequently in the
+teachings of our Lord and of the Apostles. Sometimes the Old
+Testament collective point of view is maintained, as in our Lord's
+saying in the Sermon on the Mount, 'Ye are the light of the world,'
+but more frequently, the characteristic individualising of the
+figure prevails, and we read of Christians shining 'as lights in the
+world,' and each holding forth, as a lamp does its light, 'the word
+of life.' Nor must we forget the climax of the uses of this emblem,
+in the vision of the Apocalypse, where John once more saw the Lord,
+on whose bosom his head had so often peacefully lain, 'walking in
+the midst of the seven golden candlesticks.' There, again, the
+collective rather than the individual bearing of the figure is
+prominent, but with significant differences from the older use of
+it. In Judaism there was a formal, outward unity, represented by the
+one lamp with its manifold lights, all welded together on the golden
+stem; but the churches of Asia Minor were distinct organisations,
+and their oneness came, not from outward union of a mechanical kind,
+but from the presence in their midst of the Son of God.
+
+The sum of all this course of thought is that the lamp is the
+Christian life of the individual sustained by the communication of
+the influences of God's Holy Spirit.
+
+II. We note next the gradual dying out of the light. 'Our lamps are
+going out.'
+
+All spiritual emotions and vitality, like every other kind of
+emotion and vitality, die unless nourished. Let no theological
+difficulties about 'the final perseverance of the saints,' or 'the
+indefeasibleness of grace,' and the impossibility of slaying the
+divine life that has once been given to a man, come in the way of
+letting this parable have its full, solemn weight. These foolish
+virgins had oil and had light, the oil failed by their fault, and so
+the light went out, and they were startled, when they awoke from
+their slumber, to see how, instead of brilliant flame, there was
+smoking wick.
+
+Dear brethren, let us take the lesson. There is nothing in our
+religious emotions which has any guarantee of perpetuity in it,
+except upon certain conditions. We may live, and our life may ebb. We
+may trust, and our trust may tremble into unbelief. We may obey, and
+our obedience may be broken by the mutinous risings of self-will. We
+may walk in the 'paths of righteousness,' and our feet may falter
+and turn aside. There is certainty of the dying out of all communicated
+life, unless the channel of communication with the life from which it
+was first kindled, be kept constantly clear. The lamp may be 'a burning
+and a shining light,' or, more accurately translating the phrase of
+our Lord, 'a light kindled and' (therefore) 'shining,' but it will be
+light 'for a season' only, unless it is fed from that from which it
+was first set alight; and that is from God Himself.
+
+'Our lamps are going out,'--a slow process that! The flame does not
+all die into darkness in a minute. There are stages in its death.
+The white portion of the flame becomes smaller and the blue part
+extends; then the flame flickers, and finally shudders itself, as it
+were, off the wick; then nothing remains but a charred red line
+along the top; then that line breaks up into little points, and one
+after another these twinkle out, and then all is black, and the lamp
+is gone out. And so, slowly, like the ebbing away of the tide, like
+the reluctant, long-protracted dying of summer days, like the
+dropping of the blood from some fatal wound, by degrees the process
+of extinction creeps, creeps, creeps on, and the lamp that was going
+is finally gone out.
+
+III. Again, we note that extinction is brought about simply by doing
+nothing.
+
+These five foolish virgins did not stray away into any forbidden
+paths. No positive sin is alleged against them. They were simply
+asleep. The other five were asleep too. I do not need to enter, here
+and now, into the whole interpretation of the parable, or there
+might be much to say about the difference between these two kinds of
+sleep. But what I wish to notice is that it was nothing except
+negligence darkening into drowsiness, which caused the dying out of
+the light.
+
+It was not of set purpose that the foolish five took no oil with
+them. They merely neglected to do so, not having the wit to look
+ahead and provide against the contingency of a long time of waiting
+for the bridegroom. Their negligence was the result, not of
+deliberate wish to let their lights go out, but of their
+heedlessness; and because of that negligence they earned the name of
+'foolish.' If we do not look forward, and prepare for possible
+drains on our powers, we shall deserve the same adjective. If we do
+not lay in stores for future use, we may be sent to school to the
+harvesting ant and the bee. That lesson applies to all departments
+of life; but it is eminently applicable to the spiritual life, which
+is sustained only by communications from the Spirit of God. For
+these communications will be imperceptibly lessened, and may be
+altogether intercepted, unless diligent attention is given to keep
+open the channels by which they enter the spirit. If the pipes are
+not looked to, they will be choked by masses of matted trifles,
+through which the 'rivers of living water,' which Christ took as a
+symbol of the Spirit's influences, cannot force a way.
+
+The thing that makes shipwreck of the faith of most professing
+Christians that do come to grief is no positive wickedness, no
+conduct which would be branded as sin by the Christian conscience or
+even by ordinary people, but simply torpor. If the water in a pond
+is never stirred, it is sure to stagnate, and green scum to spread
+over it, and a foul smell to rise from it. A Christian man has only
+to do what I am afraid a good many of us are in great danger of
+doing--that is, nothing--in order to ensure that his lamp shall go
+out.
+
+Do you try to keep yours alight? There is only one way to do it--that
+is to go to Christ and get Him to pour His sweetness and His power
+into our open hearts. When one of the old patriarchs had committed a
+great sin, and had unbelievingly twitched his hand out of God's hand,
+and gone away down into Egypt to help himself instead of trusting to
+God, he was commanded, on his return to Palestine, to go to the place
+where he dwelt at the first, and begin again, at the point where he
+began when he first entered the land. Which being translated is just
+this--the only way to keep our spirits vital and quick is by having
+recourse, again and again, to the same power which first imparted
+life to them, and this is done by the first means, the means of simple
+ reliance upon Christ in the consciousness of our own deep need, and
+of believingly waiting upon Him for the repeated communication of the
+gifts which we, alas! have so often misimproved. Negligence is enough
+to slay. Doing nothing is the sure way to quench the Holy Spirit.
+
+And, on the other hand, keeping close to Him is the sure way to
+secure that He will never leave us. You can choke a lamp with oil,
+but you cannot have in your hearts too much of that divine grace.
+And you receive all that you need if you choose to go and ask it
+from Him. Remember the old story about Elisha and the poor woman.
+The cruse of oil began to run. She brought all the vessels that she
+could rake together, big and little, pots and cups, of all shapes
+and sizes, and set them, one after the other, under the jet of oil.
+They were all filled; and when she brought no more vessels the oil
+stayed. If you do not take your empty hearts to God, and say, 'Here,
+Lord, fill this cup too; poor as it is, fill it with Thine own
+gracious influences,' be very sure that no such influences will come
+to you. But if you do go, be as sure of this, that so long as you
+hold out your emptiness to Him, He will flood it with His fulness,
+and the light that seemed to be sputtering to its death will flame
+up again. He will not quench the smoking wick, if only we carry it
+to Him; but as the priests in the Temple walked all through the
+night to trim the golden lamps, so He who walks amidst the seven
+candlesticks will see to each.
+
+IV. And now one last word. That process of gradual extinction may be
+going on, and may have been going on for a long while, and the
+virgin that carries the lamp be quite unaware of it.
+
+How could a sleeping woman know whether her lamp was burning or not?
+How can a drowsy Christian tell whether his spiritual life is bright
+or not? To be unconscious of our approximation to this condition is,
+I am afraid, one of the surest signs that we are in it. I suppose
+that a paralysed limb is quite comfortable. At any rate, paralysis
+of the spirit may be going on without our knowing anything about it.
+So, dear friends, do not put these poor words of mine away from you
+and say, 'Oh! they do not apply to me.'
+
+I am quite sure that the people to whom they do apply will be the
+last people to take them to themselves. And while I quite believe,
+thank God! that there are many of us who may feel and know that our
+lamps are not going out, sure I am that there are some of us whom
+everybody but themselves knows to be carrying a lamp that is so far
+gone out that it is smoking and stinking in the eyes and noses of
+the people that stand by. Be sure that nobody was more surprised
+than were the five foolish women when they opened their witless,
+sleepy eyes, and saw the state of things. So, dear friends, 'let
+your loins be girt about, and your lamps burning; and ye yourselves
+like unto men that wait for their Lord.'
+
+
+
+
+'THEY THAT WERE READY'
+
+
+    'They that were ready went in with him to the marriage.'
+    --MATT. xxv. 10.
+
+It is interesting to notice the variety of aspects in which, in this
+long discourse, Jesus sets forth His Second Coming. It is like the
+flood that swept away a world. It is like a thief stealing through
+the dark, and breaking up a house. It is like a master reckoning
+with his servants. These three metaphors suggest solemn, one might
+almost say alarming, images. But then this parable comes in and
+tells how that coming is like that of a bridegroom to the bride's
+house, with joy and music. I am afraid that the average Christian,
+when he thinks at all of Christ's coming, takes these three first
+aspects rather than the last one, and so loses what is meant to be a
+bright hope and a great stimulus. It is not in human nature to think
+much about a terrible future. It is not in human nature to avoid
+thinking a great deal about a blessed future. And although one does
+not wish to preach carelessness, or the ignoring of the solemn side
+of that coming, sure I am that our Christian lives would be stronger
+and purer, brighter and better able to front the solemn side, if the
+blessed side of it were more often the object of our contemplation.
+
+Turning to the words of my text, which seem to me to be the very
+centre and heart of this parable, I ask:--
+
+I. What makes readiness?
+
+There have been many answers given to that question. One has been
+that to be ready means to be perpetually having before us the
+thought of the coming of the Lord, and that has been taken to be the
+meaning of the watchfulness which is enjoined in the context. But
+the parable itself points in an altogether different direction. Who,
+according to it, were ready? The five who had lamps and oil. To have
+these was readiness.
+
+It is beautiful to notice how these five who _were_ ready when
+the Master came had 'slumbered and slept' like the other five. Ah!
+that touch in the picture shows that 'He knoweth our frame; He
+remembereth that we are dust.' It is not in human nature to keep up
+permanently a tension of expectation for a far-off good; and in
+profound knowledge of the weakness of humanity, our Lord, in this
+parable, says: 'While the Bridegroom tarried they _all_ slumbered'--and
+yet the five were ready when the Bridegroom came. In like manner,
+Christian men and women who have no expectation at all that the
+Second Coming of the Lord will occur during their lifetimes, may
+nevertheless be ready, if they have the burning lamps and the store
+of oil. The question then comes to be, What is meant by these?
+
+Perhaps harm has been done by insisting upon too minute and specific
+interpretation. But, at the same time, we must not forget that, from
+the very beginning of the Jewish Revelation, from the time when the
+seven-branched candlestick was appointed for the Tabernacle, right
+down to the day when the Apocalyptic Seer saw in Patmos the Son of
+Man walking in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks, the
+metaphor has had one meaning. The aggregate of God's people are
+intended to be, as Jesus told us immediately after He had drawn the
+character of a true disciple, in the wonderful outlines of the
+Beatitudes, 'the light of the world,' and they will be so in the
+measure in which the gentle radiance of that character shines
+through their lives, as the light of a lamp through frosted glass.
+But the aggregate is made up of units, and individual Christians are
+to shine 'as lights in the world,' and their separate brightnesses
+are to coalesce in the clustered light of the whole Church. What
+makes an individual Christian a light is a Christ-like life, derived
+from that Life which was 'the Light of men.' The lamp which the five
+wise virgins bear is the same as the light which the consistent
+Christian is. The inner self illuminated from Christ, the source of
+all our illumination, lights up the outward life, which each of us
+may be conceived as carrying in our hands. It is not ourselves, and
+yet it is ourselves made visible. It is not ourselves, but Christ in
+us; and so we shine as lights in the world, only by 'holding forth
+the word of life.'
+
+That modification of the figure by Paul is profoundly true and
+important, for after all we are not so much lights as candelabra,
+and only as we bear aloft the flashing light of Christ shall we
+shine 'in a naughty world.' Our lamps, then, are Christ-like
+characters derived from Christ, and to have and bear these is the
+first element in being ready for the Bridegroom.
+
+Dear friends, remember that this whole parable is spoken to
+professing Christians and real members of Christ's Church; and that
+there is no meaning in it unless it is possible to quench the light
+of the lamp. Remember that our Lord said once, 'Let your loins be
+girt,' and put that as the necessary condition of lamps burning.
+'Let your loins be girt' with resolved effort of faith and
+dependence, and make sure that you have the provision for the
+continuance of the light. So, and only so, shall any man be of the
+happy company of them that were ready.
+
+II. Note that this readiness is the condition of entrance.
+
+'They that were ready went in with Him to the marriage.' Now faith
+alone unites a man to Jesus Christ, and makes him an heir of
+salvation. But faith alone, if that were possible, would not admit a
+man to the marriage-feast. Of course the supposed case is an
+impossible case, for as James has taught us in his plain moral way,
+faith which is alone dies, or perhaps never lived. But what our Lord
+tells us here is that moral character, which is of such a sort as to
+shine in the world's darkness, is the condition of entrance. People
+say that salvation is by faith. Yes, that is true; but salvation is
+by works also, only that the works are made possible through faith.
+In the very necessity and nature of things nothing but the readiness
+which consists in continued Christ-like character will ever allow a
+man to pass the threshold. Now do you believe that? Or are you
+saying, 'I trust to Jesus Christ, and so I am sure I shall go to
+Heaven.' No, you will not, unless your faith is making you heavenly,
+in your temper and conduct. For to talk about the next world as a
+place of retribution is but an imperfect statement of the case. It
+is not a place of retribution so much as of outcome, and the apostle
+gives a completer view when he says, 'Whatsoever a man soweth, that
+shall he also reap.' That future life is not the reward of goodness
+so much as the necessary consequence of holiness. Holiness and
+blessedness are, in some measure, separated here; there they are two
+names for the one condition. 'No man shall see the Lord,' without
+that holiness. 'They that were ready went in.' Of course they did.
+Am I ready? That question means, Am I, by my faith in Jesus Christ,
+receiving into my heart the anointing which that great anointed One
+gives us? Am I living a life that is a light in the world? If so,
+and not else, my entrance is sure.
+
+We have seen what this readiness consists in, and how it is the
+condition of entrance. There is one last thought--
+
+III. To delay preparation is madness.
+
+There is nothing in all Christ's parables more tragical,  more
+pathetic, than this picture of the hapless five  when they woke up
+to find their lamps going out.  They heard the procession coming,
+the sound of feet drawing nearer, and the music borne every moment
+more loudly on the midnight air. And there were they, with dying
+lamps and empty oil-cans. Their shock, their alarm, their
+bewilderment, are all expressed in that preposterous request of
+theirs, Give us of your oil.'
+
+The answer of the wise virgins has been said to be cold and
+unfeeling. It is not that; it is simply a plain statement of facts.
+The oil that belongs to me cannot be given to you. That is the first
+lesson taught us by the request of the foolish and the answer of the
+wise. 'If thou be wise, thou shalt be wise for thyself; and if thou
+scornest, thou alone shalt bear it.' 'Every man shall bear his own
+burden.' There is no possible transference of moral character or
+spiritual gifts in that fashion. The awful individuality of each
+soul, and its unshareable personal responsibility, come solemnly to
+view in the words which superficial readers pass by: 'Not so, lest
+there be not enough for us and you.' You cannot share your brother's
+oil. You may share many of his possessions; not this.
+
+'Go to them that sell, and buy for yourselves.' The question of
+whether there was time to buy was not for the five wise to answer.
+There was not much chance that the would-be buyers would find a shop
+open and anybody waiting to sell them oil at twelve o'clock at
+night. But they risked it; and when they came back they were too
+late.
+
+Now, dear friends, all the lessons of this parable may be taken by
+us, though we do not believe, and think we have good reason for not
+believing, that the literal return of Jesus Christ is to take place
+in our time. It does not matter very much, in so far as the teaching
+of this parable is concerned, whether the Bridegroom comes to us, or
+whether we go to the Bridegroom. I do not for a moment say that
+there is no such thing as coming to Jesus Christ in the last hours
+of life, and becoming ready to enter even then, but I do say that it
+is a very rare case, and that there is a terrible risk in delaying
+till then. But I pray you to remember that our parable is addressed
+to, and contemplates the case of, not people who are away from Jesus
+Christ, but Christians, and that it is to them that its message is
+chiefly brought. It is they whom it warns not to put off making sure
+that they have provision for the continuance of the Christ-life. We
+have, day by day, to go to Him that sells and 'buy for ourselves.'
+And we know, what it did not fall within our Lord's purpose to say
+in this parable, that the price of the oil is the surrender of
+ourselves, and the opening of our hearts to the entrance of that
+divine Spirit. Then there will be no fear but that the lamp will
+hold out to burn, and no fear but that 'when the Bridegroom, with
+His feastful friends, passes to bliss, at the mid-hour of night,' we
+shall gain our entrance.
+
+
+
+
+TRADERS FOR THE MASTER
+
+
+    'For the kingdom of heaven la as a man travelling into a
+    far country, who called his own servants, and delivered
+    unto them his goods. 15. And unto one he gave five
+    talents, to another two, and to another one; to every
+    man according to his several ability; and straightway
+    took his journey. 16. Then he that had received the five
+    talents went and traded with the same, and made them
+    other five talents. 17. And likewise he that had received
+    two, he also gained other two. 18. But he that had
+    received one went and digged in the earth, and hid his
+    lord's money. 19. After a long time the lord of those
+    servants cometh, and reckoneth with them. 20. And so he
+    that had received five talents came and brought other
+    five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me
+    five talents: behold, I have gained beside them five
+    talents more. 21. His lord said unto him, Well done,
+    thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful
+    over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many
+    things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord. 22. He also
+    that had received two talents came and said, Lord, thou
+    deliveredst unto me two talents: behold, I have gained
+    two other talents beside them. 23. His lord said unto
+    him, Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast
+    been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler
+    over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.
+    24. Then to which had received the one talent came and
+    said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man,
+    reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where
+    thou hast not strawed: 25. And I was afraid, and went
+    and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast
+    that is thine. 26. His lord answered and said unto him,
+    Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I
+    reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not
+    strawed: 27. Thou oughtest therefore to have put my
+    money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should
+    have received mine own with usury. 28. Take therefore
+    the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten
+    talents. 29. For unto every one that hath shall be given,
+    and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not
+    shall be taken away even that which he hath. 30. And
+    cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness:
+    there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.'
+    --MATT. xxv. 14-30.
+
+The parable of the Ten Virgins said nothing about their working
+whilst they waited. This one sets forth that side of the duties of
+the servants in their master's absence, and so completes the former.
+It is clearly in its true historical connection here, and is closely
+knit to both the preceding and following context. It is a strange
+instance of superficial reading that it should ever have been
+supposed to be but another version of Luke's parable of the pounds.
+The very resemblances of the two are meant to give force to their
+differences, which are fundamental. They are the converse of each
+other. That of the pounds teaches that men who have the same gifts
+intrusted to them may make a widely different use of these, and will
+be rewarded differently, in strictly graduated proportion to their
+unlike diligence. The lesson of the parable before us, on the other
+hand, is that men with dissimilar gifts may employ them with equal
+diligence; and that, if they do, their reward shall be the same,
+however great the endowments of one, and slender those of another. A
+reader who has missed that distinction must be very shortsighted, or
+sworn to make out a case against the Gospels.
+
+I. We may consider the lent capital and the business done with it.
+
+Masters nowadays do not give servants their money to trade with,
+when they leave home; but the incident is true to the old-world
+relations of master and slave. Our Lord's consciousness of His near
+departure, which throbs in all this context, comes out emphatically
+here. He is preparing His disciples for the time when they will have
+to work without Him, like the managers of some branch house of
+business whose principal has gone abroad. What are the 'talents'
+with which He will start them on their own account? We have taken
+the word into common language, however little we remember the
+teaching of the parable as to the hand that gives 'men of talent'
+their endowments. But the natural powers usually called by the name
+are not what Christ means here, though the principles of the parable
+may be extended to include them. For these powers are the 'ability'
+according to which the talents are given. But the talents themselves
+are the spiritual knowledge and endowments which are properly the
+gifts of the ascended Lord to His Church. Two important lessons as
+to these are conveyed. First, that they are distributed in varying
+measure, and that not arbitrarily, by the mere will of the giver,
+but according to his discernment of what each servant can profitably
+administer. The 'ability' which settles their amount is not more
+closely defined. It may include natural faculty, for Christ's gifts
+usually follow the line of that; and the larger the nature, the more
+of Him it can contain. But it also includes spiritual receptiveness
+and faithfulness, which increase the absorbing power. The capacity
+to receive will also be the capacity to administer, and it will be
+fully filled.
+
+The second lesson taught is that spiritual gifts are given for
+trading with. In other words, they are here considered not so much
+as blessings to the possessor as his stock-in-trade, which he can
+employ for the Master's enrichment. We are all tempted to think of
+them mostly as given us for our own blessing and joy; and the
+reminder is never unseasonable that a Christian receives nothing for
+himself alone. God hath shined into our hearts, that we may give to
+others the light of the knowledge which has flashed glad day into
+our darkness. The Master intrusts us with a portion of His wealth,
+not for expending on ourselves, but for trading with.
+
+A third principle here is that the right use of His gifts increases
+them in our hands. 'Money makes money.' The five talents grow to
+ten, the two to four. The surest way to increase our possession of
+Christ's grace is to try to impart it. There is no better way of
+strengthening our own faith than to seek to make others share in it.
+Christian convictions, spoken, are confirmed, but muffled in silence
+are weakened. 'There is that scattereth and yet increaseth.' Seed
+heaped and locked up in a granary breeds weevils and moths; flung
+broadcast over the furrows, it multiplies into seed that can be sown
+again, and bread that feeds the sower. So we have in this part of
+the parable almost the complete summary of the principles on which,
+the purposes for which, and the results to faithful use with which,
+Christ gives His gifts.
+
+The conduct of the slenderly endowed servant who hides his talent
+will be considered farther on.
+
+II. We note the faithful servants' balance-sheet and reward.
+
+Our Lord again sounds the note of delay--'After a long time'--an
+indefinite phrase which we know carries centuries in its folds, how
+many more we know not nor are intended to know. The two faithful
+servants present their balance-sheet in identical words, and receive
+the same commendation and reward. Their speech is in sharp contrast
+with the idle one's excuse, inasmuch as it puts a glad acknowledgment
+of the lord's giving in the forefront, as if to teach that the
+thankful recognition of his liberality underlies all joyful and
+successful service, and deepens while it makes glad the sense of
+responsibility. The cords of love are silken; and he who begins with
+setting before himself the largeness of Christ's gifts to him, will
+not fail in using these so as to increase them. In the light of that
+day, the servant sees more clearly than when he was at work the
+results of his work. We do not know what the year's profits have
+been till stock-taking and balancing-time comes. Here we often say,
+'I have laboured in vain.' There we shall say, 'I have gained five
+talents.'
+
+The verbatim repetition of the same words to both servants teaches
+the great lesson of this parable as contrasted with that of the
+pounds, that where there has been the same faithful work, with
+different amounts of capital, there will be the same reward. Our
+Master does not care about quantity, but about quality and motive.
+The slave with a few shillings, enough to stock meagrely a little
+stall, may show as much business capacity, diligence, and fidelity,
+as if he had millions to work with. Christ rewards not actions, but
+the graces which are made visible in actions; and these can be as
+well seen in the tiniest as in the largest deeds. The light that
+streams through a pin-prick is the same that pours through the
+widest window. The crystals of a salt present the same facets,
+flashing back the sun at the same angles, whether they be large or
+microscopically small. Therefore the judgment of Christ, which is
+simply the utterance of fact, takes no heed of the extent but only
+of the kind of service, and puts on the same level of recompense all
+who, with however widely varying powers, were one in spirit, in
+diligence, and devotion. The eulogium on the servants is not
+'successful' or 'brilliant,' but 'faithful,' and both alike get it.
+
+The words of the lord fall into three parts. First comes his
+generous and hearty praise,--the brief and emphatic monosyllable
+'Well,' and the characterisation of the servants as 'good and
+faithful.' Praise from Christ's lips is praise indeed; and here He
+pours it out in no grudging or scanty measure, but with warmth and
+evident delight. His heart glows with pleasure, and His commendation
+is musical with the utterance of His own joy in His servants. He
+'rejoices over them with singing'; and more gladly than a fond
+mother speaks honeyed words of approval to her darling, of whose
+goodness she is proud, does He praise these two. When we are tempted
+to disparage our slender powers as compared with those of His more
+conspicuous servants, and to suppose that all which we do is nought,
+let us think of this merciful and loving estimate of our poor
+service. For such words from such lips, life itself were wisely
+flung away; but such words from such lips will be spoken in
+recognition of many a piece of service less high and heroic than a
+martyr's. 'Good and faithful' refers not to the more general notion
+of goodness, but to the special excellence of a servant, and the
+latter word seems to define the former. Fidelity is the grace which
+He praises,--manifested in the recognition that the capital was a
+loan, given to be traded with for Him, and to be brought back
+increased to Him. He is faithful who ever keeps in view, and acts
+on, the conditions on which, and the purposes for which, he has
+received his spiritual wealth; and 'he who is faithful in that which
+is least, is faithful also in much.'
+
+The second part of the lord's words is the appointment to higher
+office, as the reward of faithfulness. Here on earth, the tools
+come, in the long run, to the hands that can use them, and the best
+reward of faithfulness in a narrower sphere is to be lifted to a
+wider. Promotion means more to do; and if the world were rightly
+organised, the road to advancement would be diligence; and the
+higher a man climbed, the wider would be the horizon of his labour.
+It is so in Christ's kingdom, and should be so in His visible
+Church. It will be so in heaven. Clearly this saying implies the
+active theory of the future life, and the continuance in some
+ministry of love, unknown to us, of the energies which were trained
+in the small transactions of earth. 'If five talents are "a few
+things," how great the "many things" will be!' In the parable of the
+pounds, the servant is made a ruler; here being 'set over' seems
+rather still to point to the place of a steward or servant. The
+sphere is enlarged, but the office is unaltered. The manager who
+conducted a small trade rightly will be advanced to the
+superintendence of a larger business.
+
+  'We doubt not that for one so true
+   There must be other, nobler work to do,'
+
+and that in that work the same law will continue to operate, and
+faithfulness be crowned with ever-growing capacities and tasks
+through a dateless eternity.
+
+The last words of the lord pass beyond our poor attempts at
+commenting. No eye can look undazzled at the sun. When Christ was
+near the Cross, He left His disciples a strange bequest at such a
+moment,--His joy; and that is their brightest portion here, even
+though it be shaded with many sorrows. The enthroned Christ welcomes
+all who have known 'the fellowship of His sufferings' into the
+fulness of His heavenly joy, unshaded, unbroken, unspeakable; and
+they pass into it as into an encompassing atmosphere, or some broad
+land of peace and abundance. Sympathy with His purposes leads to
+such oneness with Him that His joy is ours, both in its occasions
+and in its rapture. 'Thou makest them drink of the river of Thy
+pleasures,' and the lord and the servant drink from the same cup.
+
+III. The excuse and punishment of the indolent servant.
+
+His excuse is his reason. He did think hardly of his lord, and, even
+though he had His gift in his hand to confute him, he slandered Him
+in his heart as harsh and exacting. To many men the requirements of
+religion are more prominent than its gifts, and God is thought of as
+demanding rather than as 'the giving God.' Such thoughts paralyse
+action. Fear is barren, love is fruitful. Nothing grows on the
+mountain of curses, which frowns black over against the sunny slopes
+of the mountain of blessing with its blushing grapes. The indolence
+was illogical, for, if the master was such as was thought, the more
+reason for diligence; but fear is a bad reasoner, and the absurd gap
+between the premises and the conclusion is matched by one of the
+very same width in every life that thinks of God as rigidly
+requiring obedience, which, therefore, it does _not_ give!
+Still another error is in the indolent servant's words. He flings
+down the hoarded talent with 'Lo, thou hast thine own.' He was
+mistaken. Talents hid are not, when dug up, as heavy as they were
+when buried. This gold does rust, and a life not devoted to God is
+never carried back to Him unspoiled.
+
+The lord's answer again falls into three parts, corresponding to
+that to the faithful servants. First comes the stern characterisation
+of the man. As with the others' goodness, his badness is defined
+by the second epithet. It is slothfulness. Is that all? Yes; it does
+not need active opposition to pull down destruction on one's head.
+Simple indolence is enough, the negative sin of not doing or being
+what we ought. Ungirt loins, unlit lamps, unused talents, sink a man
+like lead. Doing nothing is enough for ruin.
+
+The remarkable answer to the servant's charge seems to teach us that
+timid souls, conscious of slender endowments, and pressed by the
+heavy sense of responsibility, and shrinking from Christian
+enterprises, for fear of incurring heavier condemnation, may yet
+find means of using their little capital. The bankers, who invest
+the collective contributions of small capitalists to advantage, may,
+or may not, be intended to be translated into the Church; but, at
+any rate, the principle of united service is here recommended to
+those who feel too weak for independent action. Slim houses in a row
+hold each other up; and, if we cannot strike out a path for
+ourselves, let us seek strength and safety in numbers.
+
+The fate of the indolent servant has a double horror. It is loss and
+suffering. The talent is taken from the slack hands and coward heart
+that would not use it, and given to the man who had shown he could
+and would. Gifts unemployed for Christ are stripped off a soul
+yonder. How much will go from many a richly endowed spirit, which
+here flashed with unconsecrated genius and force! We do not need to
+wait for eternity to see that true possession, which is use,
+increases powers, and that disuse, which is equivalent to not
+possessing, robs of them. The blacksmith's arm, the scout's eye, the
+craftsman's delicate finger, the student's intellect, the
+sensualist's passions, all illustrate the law on its one side; and
+the dying out of faculties and tastes, and even of intuitions and
+conscience, by reason of simple disuse, are melancholy instances of
+it on the other. But the solemn words of this condemnation seem to
+point to a far more awful energy in its working in the future, when
+everything that has not been consecrated by employment for Jesus
+shall be taken away, and the soul, stripped of its garb, shall 'be
+found naked.' How far that process of divesting may affect
+faculties, without touching the life, who can tell? Enough to see
+with awe that a spirit may be cut, as it were, to the quick, and
+still exist.
+
+But loss is not all the indolent servant's doom. Once more, like the
+slow toll of a funeral bell, we hear the dread sentence of ejection
+to the 'mirk midnight' without, where are tears undried and passion
+unavailing. There is something very awful in the monotonous
+repetition of that sentence so often in these last discourses of
+Christ's. The most loving lips that ever spoke, in love, shaped this
+form of words, so heart-touching in its wailing, but decisive,
+proclamation of blackness, homelessness, and sorrow, and cannot but
+toll them over and over again into our ears, in sad knowledge of our
+forgetfulness and unbelief,--if perchance we may listen and be
+warned, and, having heard the sound thereof, may never know the
+reality of that death in life which is the sure end of the indolent
+who were blind to His gifts, and therefore would not listen to His
+requirements.
+
+
+
+
+WHY THE TALENT WAS BURIED
+
+    'Then he which had received the one talent came and
+    said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man,
+    reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where
+    thou hast not strawed: 25. And I was afraid, and went
+    and hid thy talent in the earth.'-MATT. xxv. 24, 25.
+
+That was a strangely insolent excuse for indolence. To charge an
+angry master to his face with grasping greed and injustice was
+certainly not the way to conciliate him. Such language is quite
+unnatural and incongruous until we remember the reality which the
+parable was meant to shadow--viz., the answers for their deeds which
+men will give at Christ's judgment bar. Then we can understand how,
+by some irresistible necessity, this man was compelled, even at the
+risk of increasing the indignation of the master, to turn himself
+inside out, and to put into harsh, ugly words the half-conscious
+thoughts which had guided his life and caused his unfaithfulness.
+'Every one of us shall give account of himself to God.' The
+unabashed impudence of such an excuse for idleness as this is but
+putting into vivid and impressive form this truth, that then a man's
+actions in their true character, and the ugly motives that underlie
+them, and which he did not always honestly confess to himself, will
+be clear before him. It will be as much of a surprise to the men
+themselves, in many cases, as it could be to listeners. Thus it
+becomes us to look well to the under side of our lives, the unspoken
+convictions and the unformulated motives which work all the more
+mightily upon us because, for the most part, they work in the dark.
+This is Christ's explanation of one very operative and fruitful
+cause of the refusal to serve Him.
+
+I. I ask you, then, to consider, first, the slander here and the
+truth that contradicts it.
+
+'I knew thee that thou art an hard man,' says he, 'reaping where
+them hast not sown' (and he was standing with the unused talent in
+his hand all the while), 'and gathering where thou hast not
+strawed.' That is to say, deep down in many a heart that has never
+said as much to itself, there lies this black drop of gall--a
+conception of the divine character rather as demanding than as
+giving, a thought of Him as exacting. What He requires is more
+considered than what He bestows. So religion is thought to be mainly
+a matter of doing certain things and rendering up certain
+sacrifices, instead of being regarded, as it really is, as mainly a
+matter of receiving from God. Christ's authority makes me bold to
+say that this error underlies the lives of an immense number of
+nominal Christians, of people who think themselves very good and
+religious, as well as the lives of thousands who stand apart from
+religion altogether. And I want, not to drag down any curtain by my
+own hand, but to ask you to lift away the veil which hides the ugly
+thing in your hearts, and to put your own consciousness to the bar
+of your own conscience, and say whether it is not true that the
+uppermost thought about God, when you think about Him at all, is,
+'Thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown.'
+
+It is not difficult to understand why such a thought of God should
+rise in a heart which has no delight in Him nor in His service.
+There is a side of the truth as to God's relations to man which
+gives a colour of plausibility to the slander. Grave and stringent
+requirements are made by the divine law upon each of us; and our
+consciences tell us that they have not been kept. Therefore we seek
+to persuade ourselves that they are too severe. Then, further, we
+are, by reason of our own selfishness, almost incapable of rising to
+the conception of God's pure, perfect, disinterested love; and we
+are far too blind to the benefits that He pours upon us all every
+day of our lives. And so from all these reasons taken together, and
+some more besides, it comes about that, for some of us, the blessed
+sun in the heavens, the God of all mercy and love, has been darkened
+into a lurid orb shorn of all its beneficent beams, and hangs
+threatening there in our misty sky. 'I knew Thee that Thou art an
+hard man.' Ah! I am sure that if we would go down into the deep
+places of our own hearts, and ask ourselves what our real thought of
+God is, many of us would acknowledge that it is something like that.
+
+Now turn to the other side. What is the truth that smites this
+slander to death? That God is perfect, pure, unmingled, infinite
+love. And what is love? The infinite desire to impart itself. His
+'nature and property' is to be merciful, and you can no more stop
+God from giving than you can shut up the rays of the sun within
+itself. To be and to bestow are for Him one and the same thing. His
+love is an infinite longing to give, which passes over into
+perpetual acts of beneficence. He never reaps where He has not sown.
+Is there any place where He has not sown? Is there any heart on
+which there have been no seeds of goodness scattered from His rich
+hand? The calumniator in the text was speaking his slanders with
+that in his hand which should have stopped his mouth. He who
+complained that the hard master was asking for fruit of what He had
+not given would have had nothing at all, if he had not obtained the
+one talent from His hand. And there is no place in the whole wide
+universe of God where His love has not scattered its beneficent
+gifts. There are no fallow fields out of cultivation and unsown, in
+His great farm. He never asks where He has not given.
+
+He never asks until after He has given. He begins with bestowing,
+and it is only after the vineyard has been planted on the very
+fruitful hill, and the hedge built round about it, and the winepress
+digged, and the tower erected, and miracles of long-suffering mercy
+and skilful patience have been lavished upon it, that then He looks
+that it should bring forth grapes. God's gifts precede His
+requirements. He ever sows before He reaps. More than that, He gives
+_what_ He asks, helping us to render to Him the hearts that He
+desires. He, by His own merciful communications, makes it possible
+that we should lay at His feet the tribute of loving thanks. Just as
+a parent will give a child some money in order that the child may go
+and buy the giver a birthday present, so God gives to us hearts, and
+enriches them with many bestowments. He scatters round about us good
+from His hand, like drops of a fragrant perfume from a blazing
+torch, in order that we may catch them up and have some portion of
+the joy which is especially His own--the joy of giving. It would be
+a poor affair if our sole relation to God were that of receiving. It
+would be a tyrannous affair if our sole relation to God were that of
+rendering up. But both relations are united, and if it be 'more
+blessed to give than to receive,' the Giver of all good does not
+leave us without the opportunity of entering in even to that
+superlative blessing. We have to come to Him and say, when we lay
+the gifts, either of our faculties or of our trust, of our riches or
+of our virtues, at His feet, 'All things come of Thee, and of Thine
+own have we given Thee.'
+
+He asks for our sakes, and not for His own. 'If I were hungry I
+would not tell thee, for the cattle upon a thousand hills are Mine.
+Offer unto God praise, and pay thy vows unto the Most High.' It is
+blessed to us to render. He is none the richer for all our giving,
+as He is none the poorer for all His. Yet His giving to us is real,
+and our giving is real and a joy to Him. That is the truth lifted up
+against the slander of the natural heart. God is love, pure giving,
+unlimited and perpetual disposition to bestow. He gives all things
+before He asks for anything, and when He asks for anything it is
+that we may be blessed.
+
+But you say, 'That is all very well--where do you learn all that about
+God?' My answer is a very simple one. I learn it, and I believe there
+is no other place to learn it, at the Cross of Jesus Christ. If that
+be the very apex of the divine love and self-revelation; if, looking
+upon it, we understand God better than by any other means, then there
+can be no question but that instead of gathering where He has not
+strawed, and reaping where He has not sown, God is only, and always,
+and utterly, and to every man, infinite love that bestows itself. My
+heart says to me many a time, 'God's laws are hard, God's judgment is
+strict. God requires what you cannot give. Crouch before Him, and be
+afraid.' And my faith says, 'Get thee behind me, Satan!' 'He that
+spared not His own Son, ... how shall He not with Him also freely give
+us all things?' The Cross of Christ is the answer to the slander, and
+the revelation of the giving God.
+
+II. Secondly, mark here the fear that dogs such a thought, and the
+love that casts out the fear.
+
+'I was afraid.' Yes, of course. If a man is not a fool, his emotions
+follow his thoughts, and his thoughts ought to shape his emotions.
+And wherever there is the twilight of uncertainty upon the great
+lesson that the Cross of Jesus Christ has taught us, _there_
+there will be, however masked and however modified by other
+thoughts, deep in the human heart, a perhaps unspoken, but not
+therefore ineffectual, dread of God. Just as the misconception of
+the divine character does influence many a life in which it has
+never been spoken articulately, and needs some steady observation of
+ourselves to be detected, so is it with this dread of Him. Carry the
+task of self-examination a little further, and ask yourselves
+whether there does not lie coiled in many of your hearts this dread
+of God, like a sleeping snake which only needs a little warmth to be
+awakened to sting. There are all the signs of it. There are many of
+you who have a distinct indisposition to be brought close up to the
+thought of Him. There are many of you who have a distinct sense of
+discomfort when you are pressed against the realities of the
+Christian religion. There are many of you who, though you cover it
+over with a shallow confidence, or endeavour to persuade yourselves
+into speculative doubts about the divine nature, or hide it from
+yourselves by indifference, yet know that all that is very thin ice,
+and that there is a great black pool down below---a dread at the
+heart, of a righteous Judge somewhere, with whom you have somewhat
+to do, that you cannot shake off. I do not want to appeal to fear,
+but it goes to one's heart to see the hundreds and thousands of
+people round about us who, just because they are afraid of God, will
+not think about Him, put away angrily and impatiently solemn words
+like these that I am trying to speak, and seek to surround
+themselves with some kind of a fool's paradise of indifference, and
+to shut their eyes to facts and realities. You do not confess it to
+yourselves. What kind of a thought must that be about your relation
+to God which you are afraid to speak? Some of you remember the awful
+words in one of Shakespeare's plays: 'Now I, to comfort him, bid him
+he should not think of God. I hoped there was no need to trouble
+himself with any such thoughts yet.' What does that teach us? 'I
+knew Thee that Thou art an hard man; and I was afraid.'
+
+Dear friend, there are two religions in this world: there is the
+religion of fear, and there is the religion of love; and if you have
+not the one, you must have the other, if you have any at all. The
+only way to get perfect love that casts out fear is to be quite sure
+of the Father-love in heaven that begets it. And the only way to be
+sure of the infinite love in the heavens that kindles some little
+spark of love in our hearts here, is to go to Christ and learn the
+lesson that He reveals to us at His Cross. Love will annihilate the
+fear; or rather, if I may take such a figure, will set a light to
+the wreathing smoke that rises, and flash it all up into a ruddy
+flame. For the perfect love that casts out fear sublimes it into
+reverence and changes it into trust. Have you got that love, and did
+you get it at Christ's Cross?
+
+III. Lastly, mark the torpor of fear and the activity of love. 'I
+was afraid, and I went and hid thy talent in the earth.'
+
+Fear paralyses service, cuts the nerve of activity, makes a man
+refuse obedience to God. It was a very illogical thing of that
+indolent servant to say, 'I knew that you were so hard in exacting
+what was due to you that therefore I determined _not_ to give
+it to you.' Is it more illogical and more absurd than what hundreds
+of men and women round about us do to-day, when they say, 'God's
+requirements are so great that I do _not_ attempt to fulfil
+them'? One would have thought that he would have reasoned the other
+way, and said, 'Because I knew that Thy requirements were so great
+and severe, therefore I put myself with all my powers to my work.'
+Not so. Logical or illogical, the result remains, that that thought
+of God, that black drop of gall, in many a heart, stops the action
+of the hand. Fear is barren, or if it produces anything it is
+nothing to the purpose, and it brings gifts that not even God's love
+can accept, for there is no love in them. Fear is barren; Love is
+fruitful--like the two mountains of Samaria, from one of which the
+rolling burden of the curses of the Law was thundered, and from the
+other of which the sweet words of promise and of blessing were
+chanted in musical response. On the one side are black rocks,
+without a blade of grass on them, the Mount of Cursing; on the other
+side are blushing grapes and vineyards, the Mount of Blessing. Love
+moves to action, fear paralyses into indolence. And the reason why
+such hosts of you do nothing for God is because your hearts have
+never been touched with the thorough conviction that He has done
+everything for you, and asks you but to love Him back again, and
+bring Him your hearts. These dark thoughts are like the frost which
+binds the ground in iron fetters, making all the little flowers that
+were beginning to push their heads into the light shrink back again.
+And love, when it comes, will come like the west wind and the
+sunshine of the Spring; and before its emancipating fingers the
+earth's fetters will be cast aside, and the white snowdrops and the
+yellow crocuses will show themselves above the ground. If you want
+your hearts to bear any fruit of noble living, and holy
+consecration, and pure deeds, then here is the process--Begin with
+the knowledge and belief of 'the love which God hath to us'; learn
+that at the Cross, and let it silence your doubts, and send them
+back to their kennels, silenced. Then take the next step, and love
+Him back again. 'We love Him because He first loved us.' That love
+will be the productive principle of all glad obedience, and you will
+keep His commandments, and here upon earth find, as the faithful
+servant found, that talents used increase; and yonder will receive
+the eulogium from His lips whom to please is blessedness, by whom to
+be praised is heaven's glory, 'Well done! good and faithful
+servant.'
+
+
+
+
+THE KING ON HIS JUDGMENT THRONE
+
+
+    'When the Son of Man shall come in His glory, and all
+    the holy angels with Him, then shall He sit upon the
+    throne of His glory: 32. And before Him shall be
+    gathered all nations: and He shall separate them one
+    from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the
+    goats: 33. And He shall set the sheep on His right
+    hand, but the goats on the left. 34. Then shall the
+    King say unto them on His right hand, Come, ye blessed
+    of My Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from
+    the foundation of the world: 35. For I was an hungred,
+    and ye gave Me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave Me
+    drink: I was a stranger, and ye took Me in: 36. Naked,
+    and ye clothed Me: I was sick, and ye visited Me: I was
+    in prison, and ye came unto Me. 37. Then shall the
+    righteous answer Him, saying, Lord, when saw we Thee an
+    hungred, and fed Thee? or thirsty, and gave Thee drink?
+    38. When saw we Thee a stranger, and took Thee in! or
+    naked, and clothed Thee! 39. Or when saw we Thee sick,
+    or in prison, and came unto Thee? 10. And the King
+    shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you,
+    Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of
+    these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me. 41. Then
+    shall He say also unto them on the left hand, Depart
+    from Me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for
+    the devil and his angels: 42. For I was an hungred, and
+    ye gave Me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave Me no
+    drink: 43. I was a stranger, and ye took Me not in:
+    naked, and ye clothed Me not: sick, and in prison, and
+    ye visited Me not. 44. Then shall they also answer Him,
+    saying, Lord, when saw we Thee an hungred, or athirst,
+    or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did
+    not minister unto Thee? 45. Then shall He answer them,
+    saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it
+    not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to Me.
+    46. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment:
+    but the righteous into life eternal.'--MATT. xxv. 31-46.
+
+The teachings of that wonderful last day of Christ's ministry, which
+have occupied so many of our pages, are closed with this tremendous
+picture of universal judgment. It is one to be gazed upon with
+silent awe, rather than to be commented on. There is fear lest, in
+occupying the mind in the study of the details, and trying to pierce
+the mystery it partly unfolds, we should forget our own individual
+share in it. Better to burn in on our hearts the thought, 'I shall
+be there,' than to lose the solemn impression in efforts to unravel
+the difficulties of the passage. Difficulties there are, as is to be
+expected in even Christ's revelation of so unparalleled a scene.
+Many questions are raised by it which will never be solved till we
+stand there. Who can tell how much of the parabolic element enters
+into the description? We, at all events, do not venture to say of
+one part, 'This is merely drapery, the sensuous representation of
+spiritual reality,' and of another, 'That is essential truth.' The
+curtain is the picture, and before we can separate the elements of
+it in that fashion, we must have lived through it. Let us try to
+grasp the main lessons, and not lose the spirit in studying the
+letter.
+
+I. The first broad teaching is that Christ is the Judge of all the
+earth. Sitting there, a wearied man on the Mount of Olives, with the
+valley of Jehoshaphat at His feet, which the Jew regarded as the
+scene of the final judgment, Jesus declared Himself to be the Judge
+of the world, in language so unlimited in its claims that the
+speaker must be either a madman or a god. Calvary was less than
+three days off, when He spoke thus. The contrast between the vision
+of the future and the reality of the present is overwhelming. The
+Son of Man has come in weakness and shame; He will come in His
+glory, that flashing light of the self-revealing God, of which the
+symbol was the 'glory' which shone between the cherubim, and which
+Jesus Christ here asserts to belong to Him as '_His_ glory.'
+Then, heaven will be emptied of its angels, who shall gather round
+the enthroned Judge as His handful of sorrowing followers were
+clustered round Him as He spoke, or as the peasants had surrounded
+the meek state of His entry yesterday. Then, He will take the place
+of Judge, and 'sit,' in token of repose, supremacy, and judgment,
+'on the throne of His glory,' as He now sat on the rocks of Olivet.
+Then, mankind shall be massed at His feet, and His glance shall part
+the infinite multitudes, and discern the character of each item in
+the crowd as easily and swiftly as the shepherd's eye picks out the
+black goats from among the white sheep. Observe the difference in
+the representation from those in the previous parables. There, the
+parting of kinds was either self-acting, as in the case of the
+foolish maidens; or men gave account of _themselves_, as in the
+case of the servants with the talents. Here, the separation is the
+work of the Judge, and is completed before a word is spoken. All
+these representations must be included in the complete truth as to
+the final judgment. It is the effect of men's actions; it is the
+result of their compelled disclosing of the deepest motives of their
+lives; it is the act of the perfect discernment of the Judge. Their
+deeds will judge them; they will judge themselves; Christ will
+judge.
+
+Singularly enough, every possible interpretation of the extent of
+the expression 'all nations' has found advocates. It has been taken
+in its widest and plainest meaning, as equivalent to the whole race;
+it has been confined to mankind exclusive of Christians, and it has
+been confined to Christians exclusive of heathens. There are
+difficulties in all these explanations, but probably the least are
+found in the first. It is most natural to suppose that 'all nations'
+means all nations, unless that meaning be impossible. The absence of
+the limitation to the 'kingdom of heaven,' which distinguishes this
+section from the preceding ones having reference to judgment, and
+the position of the present section as the solemn close of Christ's
+teachings, which would naturally widen out into the declaration of
+the universal judgment, which forms the only appropriate climax and
+end to the foregoing teachings, seem to point to the widest meaning
+of the phrase. His office of universal Judge is unmistakably taught
+throughout the New Testament, and it seems in the highest degree
+unnatural to suppose that He did not speak of it in these final
+words of prophetic warning. We may therefore, with some confidence,
+see in the magnificent and awful picture here drawn the vision of
+universal judgment. Parabolic elements there no doubt are in the
+picture; but we have no governing revelation, free from these, by
+which we can check them, and be sure of how much is form and how
+much substance. This is clear, 'that we must all appear before the
+judgment-seat of Christ'; and this is clear, that Jesus Christ put
+forth, when at the very lowest point of His earthly humiliation,
+these tremendous claims, and asserted His authority as Judge over
+every soul of man. We are apt to lose ourselves in the crowd. Let us
+pause and think that 'all' includes 'me.'
+
+II. Note the principles of Christ's universal judgment. It is
+important to remember that this section closes a series of
+descriptions of the judgment, and must not be taken as if, when
+isolated, it set forth all the truth. It is often harped upon by
+persons who are unfriendly to evangelical teaching, as if it were
+Christ's only word about judgment, and interpreted as if it meant
+that, no matter what else a man was, if only he is charitable and
+benevolent, he will find mercy. But this is to forget all the rest
+of our Lord's teaching in the context, and to fly in the face of the
+whole tenor of New Testament doctrine. We have here to do with the
+principles of judgment which apply equally to those who have, and to
+those who have not, heard the gospel. The subjects of the kingdom
+are shown the principles more immediately applicable to them, in the
+previous parables, and here they are reminded that there is a
+standard of judgment absolutely universal. All men, whether
+Christians or not, are judged by 'the things done in the body,
+whether they be good or bad.' So Christ teaches in His closing words
+of the Sermon on the Mount, and in many another place. 'Every tree
+that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the
+fire.' The productive source of good works is not in question here;
+stress is laid on the fruits, rather than on the root. The gospel is
+as imperative in its requirements of righteousness as the law is,
+and its conception of the righteousness which it requires is far
+deeper and wider. The subjects of the kingdom ever need to be
+reminded of the solemn truth that they have not only, like the wise
+maidens, to have their lights burning and their oil vessels filled,
+nor only, like the wise servants, to be using the gifts of the
+kingdom for their lord, but, as members of the great family of man,
+have to cultivate the common moralities which all men, heathen and
+Christian, recognise as binding on all, without which no man shall
+see the Lord. The special form of righteousness which is selected as
+the test is charity. Obviously it is chosen as representative of all
+the virtues of the second table of the law. Taken in its bare
+literality, this would mean that men's relations to God had no
+effect in the judgment, mid that no other virtues but this of
+charity came into the account. Such a conclusion is so plainly
+repugnant to all Christ's teaching, that we must suppose that love
+to one's neighbour is here singled out, just as it is in His summary
+of 'the law and the prophets,' as the crown and flower of all
+relative duties, and as, in a very real sense, being 'the fulfilling
+of the law.' The omission of any reference to the love of God
+sufficiently shows that the view here is rigidly limited to acts,
+and that all the grounds of judgment are not meant to be set forth.
+
+But the benevolence here spoken of is not the mere natural
+sentiment, which often exists in great energy in men whose moral
+nature is, in other respects, so utterly un-Christlike that their
+entrance into the kingdom prepared for the righteous is
+inconceivable. Many a man has a hundred vices and yet a soft heart.
+It is very much a matter of temperament. Does Christ so contradict
+all the rest of His teaching as to say that such a man is of 'the
+sheep,' and 'blessed of the Father'? Surely not. Is every piece of
+kindliness to the distressed, from whatever motive, and by
+whatsoever kind of person done, regarded by Him as done to Himself?
+To say so, would be to confound moral distinctions, and to dissolve
+all righteousness into a sentimental syrup. The deeds which He
+regards as done to Himself, are done to His 'brethren.' That
+expression carries us into the region of motive, and runs parallel
+with His other words about 'receiving a prophet,' and 'giving a cup
+of cold water to one of these little ones,' because they are His.
+Seeing that all nations are at the bar, the expression, 'My
+brethren,' cannot be confined to the disciples, for many of those
+who are being judged have never come in contact with Christians, nor
+can it be reasonably supposed to include all men, for, however true
+it is that Christ is every man's brother, the recognition of kindred
+here must surely be confined to those at the right hand. Whatever be
+included under the 'righteous,' that is included under the
+'brethren.' We seem, then, led to recognise in the expression a
+reference to the motive of the beneficence, and to be brought to the
+conclusion that what the Judge accepts as done to Himself is such
+kindly help and sympathy as is extended to these His kindred, with
+some recognition of their character, and desire after it. To
+'receive a prophet' implies that there is some spiritual affinity
+with him in the receiver. To give help to His brethren, because they
+are so, implies some affinity with Him or feeling after likeness to
+Him and them. Now, if we hold fast by the universality of the
+judgment here depicted, we shall see that this recognition must
+necessarily have different degrees in those who have heard of Christ
+and in those who have not. In the former, it will be equivalent to
+that faith which is the root of all goodness, and grasps the Christ
+revealed in the gospel. In the latter, it can be no more than a
+feeling after Him who is the 'light that lighteneth every man that
+cometh into the world.' Surely there are souls amid the darkness of
+heathenism yearning toward the light, like plants grown in the dark.
+By ways of His own, Christ can reach such hearts, as the river of
+the water of life may percolate through underground channels to many
+a tree which grows far from its banks.
+
+III. Note the surprises of the judgment. The astonishment of the
+righteous is not modesty disclaiming praise, but real wonder at the
+undreamed-of significance of their deeds. In the parable of the
+talents, the servants unveiled their inmost hearts, and accurately
+described their lives. Here, the other side of the truth is brought
+into prominence, that, at that day, we shall be surprised when we
+hear from His lips what we have really done. True Christian
+beneficence has consciously for its motive the pleasing of Christ;
+but still he who most earnestly strove, while here, to do all as
+unto Jesus, will be full of thankful wonder at the grace which
+accepts his poor service, and will learn, with fresh marvelling, how
+closely He associates Himself with His humblest servant. There is an
+element of mystery hidden from ourselves in all our deeds. Our love
+to Christ's followers never goes out so plainly to Him that, while
+here, we can venture to be sure that He takes it as done for Him. We
+cannot here follow the flight of the arrow, nor know what meaning He
+will attach to, or what large issues He will evolve from, our poor
+doings. So heaven will be full of blessed surprises, as we reap the
+fruit growing 'in power' of what we sowed 'in weakness,' and as
+doleful will be the astonishment which will seize those who see, for
+the first time, in the lurid light of that day, the true character
+of their lives, as one long neglect of plain duties, which was all a
+defrauding the Saviour of His due. Mere doing nothing is enough to
+condemn, and its victims will be shudderingly amazed at the fatal
+wound it has inflicted on them.
+
+IV. The irrevocableness of the judgment. That is an awful contrast
+between the 'Come! ye blessed,' and 'Depart! ye cursed.' That is a
+more awful parallel between 'eternal punishment' and 'eternal life.'
+It is futile to attempt to alleviate the awfulness by emptying the
+word 'eternal' of reference to duration. It no doubt connotes
+quality, but its first meaning is ever-during. There is nothing here
+to suggest that the one condition is more terminable than the other.
+Rather, the emphatic repetition of the word brings the unending
+continuance of each into prominence, as the point in which these two
+states, so wofully unlike, are the same. In whatever other passages
+the doctrine of universal restoration may seem to find a foothold,
+there is not an inch of standing-room for it here. Reverently
+accepting Christ's words as those of perfect and infallible love,
+the present writer feels so strongly the difficulty of bringing all
+the New Testament declarations on this dread question into a
+harmonious whole, that he abjures for himself dogmatic certainty,
+and dreads lest, in the eagerness of discussing the duration (which
+will never be beyond the reach of discussion), the solemn reality of
+the fact of future retribution should be dimmed, and men should
+argue about 'the terror of the Lord' till they cease to feel it.
+
+
+
+
+THE DEFENCE OF UNCALCULATING LOVE
+
+
+    'Now when Jesus was in Bethany, in the house of Simon
+    the leper, 7. There came unto him a woman having an
+    alabaster box of very precious ointment, and poured
+    it on His head, as He sat at meat. 8. But when His
+    disciples saw it, they had indignation, saying, To what
+    purpose is this waste? 9. For this ointment might have
+    been sold for much, and given to the poor. 10. When
+    Jesus understood it, He said unto them, Why trouble ye
+    the woman? for she hath wrought a good work upon Me.
+    11. For ye have the poor always with you; but Me ye
+    have not always. 12. For in that she hath poured this
+    ointment on My body, she did it for My burial.
+    13. Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel
+    shall be preached in the whole world, there shall also
+    this, that this woman hath done, be told for a memorial
+    of her. 14. Then one of the twelve, called Judas
+    Iscariot, went unto the chief priests, 15. And said
+    unto them, What will ye give me, and I will deliver Him
+    unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty
+    pieces of silver. 16. And from that time he sought
+    opportunity to betray Him.'--MATT. xxvi. 6-16.
+
+John tells us that the 'woman' was Mary, and the objector Judas.
+Both the deed and the cavil are better understood by knowing whence
+they came. Lazarus was a guest, and as his sister saw him sitting
+there by Jesus her heart overflowed, and she could not but catch up
+her most precious possession, and lavish it on His head and feet.
+Love's impulses appear absurd to selfishness. How could Judas
+understand Mary? Detracting comments find ready ears. One sneer will
+cool down to contempt and blame the feelings of a company. People
+are always eager to pick holes in conduct which they uneasily feel
+to be above their own reach. Poor Mary! she had but yielded to the
+uncalculating impulse of her great love, and she finds herself
+charged with imprudence, waste, and unfeeling neglect of the poor.
+No wonder that her gentle heart was 'troubled.' But Jesus threw the
+shield of His approval over her, and that was enough. Never mind how
+Judas and better men than he may find fault, if Jesus smiles
+acceptance.
+
+His great words set forth, first, the vindication of the act,
+because of its motive. Anything done with no regard to any end but
+Himself is, in His eyes, 'good.' The perfection of conduct is that
+it shall all be referred to Jesus. That 'altar' sanctifies gift and
+giver. Conversely, whatever has no reference to Him lacks the
+highest beauty of goodness. A pebble in the bed of a sunlit stream
+has its veins of colour brought out; lift it out, and, as it dries,
+it dulls. So our deeds plunged into that great river are heightened
+in loveliness. Everything which has 'For Christ's sake' stamped on
+it is thereby hallowed. That is the unfailing recipe for making a
+life fair. Mary was thinking only of Jesus and of her love to Him,
+therefore what she did was sweet to Him. The greater part of a deed
+is its motive, and the perfect motive is love to Jesus.
+
+But, further, Christ defends the side of Mary's deed which the
+critics fastened on. They posed as being more practical and
+benevolent than she was. They were utilitarians, she was wasteful.
+Their objection sounds sensible, but it belongs to the low levels of
+life. One flash of lofty love would have killed it. Christ's reply
+to it draws a contrast between constant duties and special,
+transient moments. It is coloured, too, by His consciousness of His
+near end, and has an undertone of sadness in that 'Me ye have not
+always.' There are high tides of Christian emotion, when the
+question of what good this thing will do is submerged, and the only
+question is, 'What best thing shall I render to the Lord?' The
+critics were not more beneficent, but less inflamed with love to
+Jesus, and the leader of them only wished that the proceeds of the
+ointment had come into his hands, where some of it would have stuck.
+We hear the same sort of taunt today,--What is the sense of all this
+money being spent on missions and religious objects? How much more
+useful it would be if expended on better dwellings for the poor or
+hospitals or technical schools! But there is a place in Christ's
+treasury for useless deeds, if they are the pure expression of love
+to Him, and Mary's alabaster box, which did no good at all, lies
+beside the cups that held cold water which slaked some thirsty lips.
+Uncalculating impulse, which only knows that it would fain give all
+to the Lover of souls, is not merely excused, but praised, by Jesus.
+Lovers on earth do not concern themselves about the usefulness of
+their gifts, and the divine Lover rejoices over what cold-blooded
+spectators, who do not in the least understand the ways of loving
+hearts, find useless 'waste.' The world would put all the emotions
+of Christian hearts, and all the heroisms of Christian martyrs, and
+all the sacrifices of Christian workers, into the same class. Jesus
+accepts them all.
+
+Again, He breathes a meaning into the gift beyond what the giver
+meant. Mary did not regard her anointing  as preparatory to His
+burial, but He had His thoughts fixed on it, and He sought to
+prepare the disciples for the coming storm. How far away from the
+simple festivities in Simon's house were His thoughts! What a gulf
+between the other guests and Him! But Jesus always puts significance
+into the service which He accepts, and surprises the givers by the
+far-reaching issues of their gifts. We know not what He may make our
+poor deeds mean. Results are beyond our vision. Therefore let us
+make sure of what is within our horizon--namely, motives. If we do
+anything for His sake, He will take care of what it comes to. That
+is true even on earth, and still more true in heaven. 'Lord, when
+saw we Thee an hungred, and fed Thee?' What surprises will wait
+Christ's humble servants in heaven, when they see what was the true
+nature and the widespread consequences of their humble deeds! 'Thou
+sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, ... but God
+giveth it a body as it hath pleased Him.'
+
+Again, Mark gives an additional clause in Christ's words, which
+brings out the principle that the measure of acceptable service is
+ability. 'She hath done what she could' is an apology, or rather a
+vindication, for the shape of the gift. Mary was not practical, and
+could not 'serve' like Martha; she probably had no other precious
+thing that she could give, but she could love, and she could bestow
+her best on Jesus. But the saying implies a stringent demand, as
+well as a gracious defence. Nothing less than the full measure of
+ability is the measure of Christian obligation. Power to its last
+particle is duty. Jesus does not ask how much His servants do or
+give, but He does ask that they should do and give all that they
+can. He wishes us to be ourselves in serving Him, and to shape our
+methods according to character and capabilities, but He also wishes
+us to give Him our whole selves. If anything is kept back, all that
+is given is marred.
+
+Jesus' last word gives perpetuity to the service which He accepts.
+Mary is promised immortality for her deed, and the promise has been
+fulfilled, and here are we, all these centuries after, looking at
+her as she breaks the box and pours it on His head. Jesus is not
+unrighteous to forget any work of love done for Him. The fragrance
+of the ointment soon passed away, and the shreds of the broken cruse
+were swept into the dust-bin, with the other relics of the feast;
+but all the world knows of that act of all-surrendering love, and it
+smells sweet and blossoms for evermore.
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW PASSOVER
+
+
+    'Now the first day of the feast of unleavened bread the
+    disciples came to Jesus, saying unto Him, Where wilt
+    Thou that we prepare for Thee to eat the passover?
+    18. And He said, Go into the city to such a man, and
+    say unto him, The Master saith, My time is at hand; I
+    will keep the passover at thy house with My disciples.
+    19. And the disciples did as Jesus had appointed them;
+    and they made ready the passover. 20. Now when the even
+    was come, He sat down with the twelve. 21. And as they
+    did eat, He said, Verily I say unto you, That one of
+    you shall betray Me. 22. And they were exceeding
+    sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto Him,
+    Lord, is it I? 23. And He answered and said, He that
+    dippeth his hand with Me in the dish, the same shall
+    betray Me. 21. The Son of Man goeth as it is written
+    of Him; but woe unto that man by whom the Son of Man is
+    betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not
+    been born. 25. Then Judas, which betrayed Him, answered
+    and said, Master, is it I? He said unto him, Thou hast
+    said 26. And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and
+    blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples,
+    and said, Take, eat; this is My body. 27. And He took
+    the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying,
+    Drink ye all of it; 28. For this is My blood of the new
+    testament, which is shed for many for the remission
+    of sins. 29. But I say unto you, I will not drink
+    henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day
+    when I drink it new with you in My Father's kingdom.
+    30. And when they had sung an hymn, they went out into
+    the Mount of Olives.'--MATT. xxvi. 17-30.
+
+The Tuesday of Passion Week was occupied by the wonderful discourses
+which have furnished so many of our meditations. At its close Jesus
+sought retirement in Bethany, not only to soothe and prepare His
+spirit but to 'hide Himself' from the Sanhedrin. There He spent the
+Wednesday. Who can imagine His thoughts? While He was calmly
+reposing in Mary's quiet home, the rulers determined on His arrest,
+but were at a loss how to effect it without a riot. Judas comes to
+them opportunely, and they leave it to him to give the signal.
+Possibly we may account for the peculiar secrecy observed as to the
+place for the last supper, by our Lord's knowledge that His steps
+were watched, and by His earnest wish to eat the Passover with the
+disciples before He suffered. The change between the courting of
+publicity and almost inviting of arrest at the beginning of the
+week, and the evident desire to postpone the crisis till the fitting
+moment which marks the close of it, is remarkable, and most
+naturally explained by the supposition that He wished the time of
+His death to be that very hour when, according to law, the paschal
+lamb was slain. On the Thursday, then, he sent Peter and John into
+the city to prepare the Passover; the others being in ignorance of
+the place till they were there, and Judas being thus prevented from
+carrying out his purpose till after the celebration.
+
+The precautions taken to ensure this have left their mark on
+Matthew's narrative, in the peculiar designation of the host,--'Such
+a man!' It is a kind of echo of the mystery which he so well
+remembered as round the errand of the two. He does not seem to have
+heard of the token by which they knew the house, viz., the man with
+the pitcher whom they were to meet. But he does know that Peter and
+John got secret instructions, and that he and the others wondered
+where they were to go. Had there been a previous arrangement with
+this unnamed 'such an one,' or were the token and the message alike
+instances of Christ's supernatural knowledge and authority? It is
+difficult to say. I incline to the former supposition, which would
+be in accordance with the distinct effort after secrecy which marks
+these days; but the narratives do not decide the question. At all
+events, the host was a disciple, as appears from the authoritative
+'the Master saith'; and, whether he had known beforehand that 'this
+day' incarnate 'salvation would come to his house' or no, he eagerly
+accepts the peril and the honour. His message is royal in its tone.
+The Lord does not ask permission, but issues His commands. But He is
+a pauper King, not having where to lay His head, and needing another
+man's house in which to gather His own household together for the
+family feast of the Passover. What profound truths are wrapped up in
+that 'My time is come'! It speaks of the voluntariness of His
+surrender, the consciousness that His Cross was the centre point of
+His work, His superiority to all external influences as determining
+the hour of His death, and His submission to the supreme appointment
+of the Father. Obedience and freedom, choice and necessity, are
+wonderfully blended in it.
+
+So, late on that Thursday evening, the little band left Bethany for
+the last time, in a fashion very unlike the joyous stir of the
+triumphal entry. As the evening is falling, they thread their way
+through the noisy streets, all astir with the festal crowds, and
+reach the upper room, Judas vainly watching for an opportunity to
+slip away on his black errand. The chamber, prepared by unknown
+hands, has vanished, and the hands are dust; but both are immortal.
+How many of the living acts of His servants in like manner seem to
+perish, and the doers of them to be forgotten or unknown! But He
+knows the name of 'such an one,' and does not forget that he opened
+his door for Him to enter in and sup.
+
+The fact that Jesus put aside the Passover and founded the Lord's
+Supper in its place, tells much both about _His_ authority and
+_its_ meaning. What must He have conceived of Himself, who bade
+Jew and Gentile turn away from that God-appointed festival, and
+think not of Moses, but of Him? What did He mean by setting the
+Lord's Supper in the place of the Passover, if He did not mean that
+He was the true Paschal Lamb, that His death was a true sacrifice,
+that in His sprinkled blood was safety, that His death inaugurated
+the better deliverance of the true Israel from a darker prison-house
+and a sorer bondage, that His followers were a family, and that 'the
+children's bread' was the sacrifice which He had made? There are
+many reasons for the doubling of the commemorative emblem, but this
+is obviously one of the chief--that, by the separation of the two in
+the rite, we are carried back to the separation in fact; that is to
+say, to the violent death of Christ. Not His flesh alone, in the
+sense of Incarnation, but His body broken and His blood shed, are
+what He wills should be for ever remembered. His own estimate of the
+centre point of His work is unmistakably pronounced in His
+institution of this rite.
+
+But we may consider the force of each emblem separately. In many
+important points they mean the same things, but they have each their
+own significance as well. Matthew's condensed version of the words
+of institution omits all reference to the breaking of the body and
+to the memorial character of the observance, but both are implied.
+He emphasises the reception, the participation, and the significance
+of the bread. As to the latter, 'This is My body' is to be
+understood in the same way as 'the field is the world,' and many
+other sayings. To speak in the language of grammarians, the copula
+is that of symbolic relationship, not that of existence; or, to
+speak in the language of the street, 'is' here means, as it often
+does, 'represents.' How could it mean anything else, when Christ sat
+there in His body, and His blood was in His veins? What, then, is
+the teaching of this symbol? It is not merely that He in His
+humanity is the bread of life, but that He in His death is the
+nourishment of our true life. In that great discourse in John's
+Gospel, which embodies in words the lessons which the Lord's Supper
+teaches by symbols, He advances from the general statement, 'I am
+the Bread of Life,' to the yet more mysterious and profound teaching
+that His flesh, which at some then future point He will 'give for
+the life of the world,' is the bread; thus distinctly foreshadowing
+His death, and asserting that by that death we live, and by
+partaking of it are nourished. The participation in the benefits of
+Christ's death, which is symbolised by 'Take, eat,' is effected by
+living faith. We feed on Christ when our minds are occupied with His
+truth, and our hearts nourished by His love, when it is the 'meat'
+of our wills to do His will, and when our whole inward man fastens
+on Him as its true object, and draws from Him its best being. But
+the act of reception teaches the great lesson that Christ must be in
+us, if He is to do us any good. He is not 'for us' in any real
+sense, unless He be 'in us.' The word rendered in John's Gospel
+'eateth' is that used for the ruminating of cattle, and wonderfully
+indicates the calm, continual, patient meditation by which alone we
+can receive Christ into our hearts, and nourish our lives on Him.
+Bread eaten is assimilated to the body, but this bread eaten
+assimilates the eater to itself, and he who feeds on Christ becomes
+Christ-like, as the silk-worm takes the hue of the leaves on which
+it browses. Bread eaten to-day will not nourish us to-morrow,
+neither will past experiences of Christ's sweetness sustain the
+soul. He must be 'our daily bread' if we are not to pine with
+hunger.
+
+The wine carries its own special teaching, which clearly appears in
+Matthew's version of the words of institution. It is 'My blood,' and
+by its being presented in a form separate from the bread which is
+His body suggests a violent death. It is 'covenant blood,' the seal
+of that 'better covenant' than the old, which God makes now with all
+mankind, wherein are given renewed hearts which carry the divine law
+within themselves; the reciprocal and mutually blessed possession of
+God by men and of men by God, the universally diffused knowledge of
+God, which is more than head knowledge, being the consciousness of
+possessing Him; and, finally, the oblivion of all sins. These
+promises are fulfilled, and the covenant made sure, by the shed
+blood of Christ. So, finally, it is 'shed for many, for the
+remission of sins.' The end of Christ's death is pardon which can
+only be extended on the ground of His death. We are told that Christ
+did not teach the doctrine of atonement. Did He establish the Lord's
+Supper? If He did (and nobody denies that), what did He mean by it,
+if He did not mean the setting forth by symbol of the very same
+truth which, stated in words, is the doctrine of His atoning death?
+This rite does not, indeed, explain the _rationale_ of the
+doctrine; but it is a piece of unmeaning mummery, unless it preaches
+plainly the fact that Christ's death is the ground of our
+forgiveness.
+
+Bread is the 'staff of life,' but blood is the life. So 'this cup'
+teaches that 'the life' of Jesus Christ must pass into His people's
+veins, and that the secret of the Christian life is 'I live; yet not
+I, but Christ liveth in me.' Wine is joy, and the Christian life is
+not only to be a feeding of the soul on Christ as its nourishment,
+but a glad partaking, as at a feast, of His life and therein of His
+joy. Gladness of heart is a Christian duty, 'the joy of the Lord is
+your strength' and should be _our_ joy; and though here we eat
+with loins girt, and go out, some of us to deny, some of us to flee,
+all of us to toil and suffer, yet we may have His joy fulfilled in
+ourselves, even whilst we sorrow.
+
+The Lord's Supper is predominantly a memorial, but it is also a
+prophecy, and is marked as such by the mysterious last words of
+Jesus, about drinking the new wine in the Father's kingdom. They
+point the thoughts of the saddened eleven, on whom the dark shadow
+of parting lay heavily, to an eternal reunion, in a land where 'all
+things are become new,' and where the festal cup shall be filled
+with a draught that has power to gladden and to inspire beyond any
+experience here. The joys of heaven will be so far analogous to the
+Christian joys of earth that the same name may be applied to both;
+but they will be so unlike that the old name will need a new
+meaning, and communion with Christ at His table in His kingdom, and
+our exuberance of joy in the full drinking in of His immortal life,
+will transcend the selectest hours of communion here. Compared with
+that fulness of joy they will be 'as water unto wine,'--the new wine
+of the kingdom.
+
+
+
+
+'IS IT I?'
+
+
+    'And they were exceeding sorrowful, and began every one
+    of them to say unto Him, Lord, is it I? 25. Then Judas,
+    which betrayed Him, answered and said, Master, is it I?
+    He said unto him, Thou hast said.'-MATT. xxvi. 22, 25.
+
+    'He then lying on Jesus' breast saith unto Him, Lord,
+    who is it?'--JOHN xiii. 25.
+
+The genius of many great painters has portrayed the Lord's Supper,
+but the reality of it was very different from their imaginings. We
+have to picture to ourselves some low table, probably a mere tray
+spread upon the ground, round which our Lord and the twelve
+reclined, in such a fashion as that the head of each guest came
+against the bosom of him that reclined above him; the place of
+honour being at the Lord's left hand, or higher up the table than
+Himself, and the second place being at His right, or below Himself.
+
+So there would be no eager gesticulations of disciples starting to
+their feet when our Lord uttered the sad announcement, 'One of you
+shall betray Me!' but only horror-struck amazement settled down upon
+the group. These verses, which we have put together, show us three
+stages in the conversation which followed the sad announcement. The
+three evangelists give us two of these; John alone omits these two,
+and only gives us the third.
+
+First, we have their question, born of a glimpse into the
+possibilities of evil in their hearts, 'Lord, is it I?'
+
+The form of that question in the original suggests that they
+expected a negative answer, and might be reproduced in English:
+'Surely it is not I?' None of them could think that he was the
+traitor, yet none of them could be sure that he was not. Their
+Master knew better than they did; and so, from a humble knowledge of
+what lay in them, coiled and slumbering, _but there_, they
+would not meet His words with a contradiction, but with a question.
+His answer spares the betrayer, and lets the dread work in their
+consciences for a little longer, for their good. For many hands
+dipped in the dish together, to moisten their morsels; and to say,
+'He that dippeth with Me in the dish, the same shall betray Me,' was
+to say nothing more than 'One of you at the table.'
+
+Then comes the second stage. Judas, reassured that he has escaped
+detection for the moment, and perhaps doubting whether the Master
+had anything more than a vague suspicion of treachery, or knew who
+was the traitor, shapes his lying lips with loathsome audacity into
+the same question, but yet not quite the same, The others had said,
+'Is it I, Lord?' he falters when he comes to that name, and dare not
+say 'Lord!' That sticks in his throat. 'Rabbi!' is as far as he can
+get. 'Is it I, Rabbi?' Christ's answer to him, 'Thou hast said,' is
+another instance of patient longsuffering. It was evidently a
+whisper that did not reach the ears of any of the others, for he
+leaves the room without suspicion. Our Lord still tries to save him
+from himself by showing Judas that his purpose is known, and by
+still concealing his name.
+
+Then comes the third stage, which we owe to John's Gospel. Here
+again he is true to his task of supplementing the narrative of the
+three synoptic Gospels. Remembering what I have said about the
+attitude of the disciples at the table, we can understand that
+Peter, if he occupied the principal place at the Lord's left, was
+less favourably situated for speaking to Christ than John, who
+reclined in the second seat at His right, and so he beckoned over
+the Master's head to John. The Revised Version gives the force of
+the original more vividly than the Authorised does: 'He, leaning
+back, as he was, on Jesus' breast, saith unto Him, Lord! who is it?'
+John, with a natural movement, bends back his head on his Master's
+breast, so as to ask and be answered, in a whisper. His question is
+_not_, 'Is it I?' He that leaned on Christ's bosom, and was
+compassed about by Christ's love, did not need to ask that. The
+question now is, 'Who is it?' Not a question of presumption, nor of
+curiosity, but of affection; and therefore answered: 'He it is to
+whom I shall give the sop, when I have dipped it.'
+
+The morsel dipped in the dish and passed by the host's hand to a
+guest, was a token of favour, of unity and confidence. It was one
+more attempt to save Judas, one more token of all-forgiving
+patience. No wonder that that last sign of friendship embittered his
+hatred and sharpened his purpose to an unalterable decision, or, as
+John says: 'After the sop, Satan entered into him.' For then, as
+ever, the heart which is not melted by Christ's offered love is
+hardened by it.
+
+Now, if we take these three stages of this conversation we may learn
+some valuable lessons from them. I take the first form of the
+question as an example of that wholesome self-distrust which a
+glimpse into the slumbering possibilities of evil in our hearts
+ought to give us all. I take the second on the lips of Judas, as an
+example of the very opposite of that self-distrust, the fixed
+determination to do a wrong thing, however clearly we know it to be
+wrong. And I take the last form of the question, as asked by John,
+as an illustration of the peaceful confidence which comes from the
+consciousness of Christ's love, and of communion with Him. Now a
+word or two about each of these.
+
+I. First, we have an example of that wholesome self-distrust, which
+a glimpse into the possibilities of evil that lie slumbering in all
+our hearts ought to teach every one of us.
+
+Every man is a mystery to himself. In every soul there lie, coiled
+and dormant, like hibernating snakes, evils that a very slight rise
+in the temperature will wake up into poisonous activity. And let no
+man say, in foolish self-confidence, that any form of sin which his
+brother has ever committed is impossible for him. Temperament
+shields us from much, no doubt. There are sins that 'we are inclined
+to,' and there are sins that 'we have no mind to.' But the identity
+of human nature is deeper than the diversity of temperament, and
+there are two or three considerations that should abate a man's
+confidence that _anything_ which one man has done it is impossible
+that he should do. Let me enumerate them very briefly. Remember, to
+begin with, that all sins are at bottom but varying forms of one root.
+The essence of every evil is selfishness, and when you have that, it
+is exactly as with cooks who have the 'stock' by the fireside. They
+can make any kind of soup out of it, with the right flavouring. We
+have got the mother tincture of all wickedness in each of our hearts;
+and therefore do not let us be so sure that it cannot be manipulated
+and flavoured into any form of sin. All sin is one at bottom, and this
+is the definition of it--living to myself instead of living to God.
+So it may easily pass from one form of evil into another, just as
+light and heat, motion and electricity, are all--they tell us--various
+forms and phases of one force. Just as doctors will tell you that
+there are types of disease which slip from one form of sickness
+into another, so if we have got the infection about us it is a matter
+very much of accidental circumstances what shape it takes. And no
+man with a human heart is safe in pointing to any sin, and saying,
+'_That_ form of transgression I reckon alien to myself.'
+
+And then let me remind you, too, that the same consideration is
+reinforced by this other fact, that all sin is, if I may so say,
+gregarious; is apt not only to slip from one form into another, but
+that any evil is apt to draw another after it. The tangled mass of
+sin is like one of those great fields of seaweed that you some times
+come across upon the ocean, all hanging together by a thousand slimy
+growths; which, if lifted from the wave at any point, drags up yards
+of it inextricably grown together. No man commits only one kind of
+transgression. All sins hunt in couples. According to the grim
+picture of the Old Testament, about another matter, 'None of them
+shall want his mate. The wild beasts of the desert shall meet with
+the wild beasts of the islands.' One sin opens the door for another,
+'and seven other spirits worse than himself' come and make holiday
+in the man's heart.
+
+Again, any evil is possible to us, seeing that all sin is but
+yielding to tendencies common to us all. The greatest transgressions
+have resulted from yielding to such tendencies. Cain killed his
+brother from jealousy; David besmirched his name and his reign by
+animal passion; Judas betrayed Christ because he was fond of money.
+Many a man has murdered another one simply because he had a hot
+temper. And you have got a temper, and you have got the love of
+money, and you have got animal passions, and you have got that which
+may stir you up into jealousy. Your neighbour's house has caught
+fire and been blown up. Your house, too, is built of wood, and
+thatched with straw, and you have as much dynamite in your cellars
+as he had in his. Do not be too sure that you are safe from the
+danger of explosion.
+
+And, again, remember that this same wholesome self-distrust is
+needful for us all, because all transgression is yielding to
+temptations that assail all men. Here are one hundred men in a
+plague-stricken city; they have all got to draw their water from the
+same well. If five or six of them died of cholera it would be very
+foolish of the other ninety-five to say, 'There is no chance of our
+being touched.' We all live in the same atmosphere; and the
+temptations that have overcome the men that have headed the count of
+crimes appeal to you. So the lesson is, 'Be not high-minded, but
+fear.'
+
+And remember, still further, that the same solemn consideration is
+enforced upon us by the thought that men will gradually drop down to
+the level which, before they began the descent, seemed to be
+impossible to them. 'Is thy servant a dog that he should do this
+thing?' said Hazael when the crime of murdering his master first
+floated before him. Yes, but he did it. By degrees he came down to
+the level to which he thought that he would never sink. First the
+imagination is inflamed, then the wish begins to draw the soul to
+the sin, then conscience pulls it back, then the fatal decision is
+made, and the deed is done. Sometimes all the stages are hurried
+quickly through, and a man spins downhill as cheerily and fast as a
+diligence down the Alps. Sometimes, as the coast of a country may
+sink an inch in a century until long miles of the flat seabeach are
+under water, and towers and cities are buried beneath the barren
+waves, so our lives may be gradually lowered, with a motion
+imperceptible but most real, bringing us down within high-water
+mark, and at last the tide may wash over what was solid land.
+
+So, dear friends, there is nothing more foolish than for any man to
+stand, self-confident that any form of evil that has conquered his
+brother has no temptation for him. It may not have for you, under
+present circumstances; it may not have for you to-day; but, oh!
+we have all of us one human heart, and 'he that trusteth in his own
+heart is a fool.' 'Blessed is the man that feareth always.' Humble
+self-distrust, consciousness of sleeping sin in my heart that may very
+quickly be stirred into stinging and striking; rigid self-control over
+all these possibilities of evil, are duties dictated by the plainest
+common-sense.
+
+Do not say, 'I know when to stop.' Do not say, 'I can go so far; it
+will not do me any harm.' Many a man has said that, and many a man
+has been ruined by it. Do not say, 'It is natural to me to have
+these inclinations and tastes, and there can be no harm in yielding
+to them.' It is perfectly natural for a man to stoop down over the
+edge of a precipice to gather the flowers that are growing in some
+cranny in the cliff; and it is as natural for him to topple over,
+and be smashed to a mummy at the bottom. God gave you your
+dispositions and your whole nature 'under lock and key,'--keep them
+so. And when you hear of, or see, great criminals and great crimes,
+say to yourself, as the good old Puritan divine said, looking at a
+man going to the scaffold, 'But for the grace of God there go I!'
+And in the contemplation of sins and apostasies, let us each look
+humbly at our own weakness, and pray Him to keep us from our
+brother's evils which may easily become ours.
+
+II. Secondly, we have here an example of precisely the opposite
+sort, namely, of that fixed determination to do evil which is
+unshaken by the clearest knowledge that it is evil.
+
+Judas heard his crime described in its own ugly reality. He heard
+his fate proclaimed by lips of absolute love and truth; and
+notwithstanding both, he comes unmoved and unshaken with his
+question. The dogged determination in his heart, that dares to see
+his evil stripped naked and is 'not ashamed,' is even more dreadful
+than the hypocrisy and sleek simulation of friendship in his face.
+
+Now most men turn away with horror from even the sins that they are
+willing to do, when they are put plainly and bluntly before them. As
+an old mediaeval preacher once said, 'There is nothing that is
+weaker than the devil stripped naked.' By which he meant exactly
+this--that we have to dress wrong in some fantastic costume or
+other, so as to hide its native ugliness, in order to tempt men to
+do it. So we have two sets of names for wrong things, one of which
+we apply to our brethren's sins, and the other to the same sins in
+ourselves. What I do is 'prudence,' what you do of the same sort is
+'covetousness'; what I do is 'sowing my wild oats,' what you do is
+'immorality' and 'dissipation'; what I do is 'generous living,' what
+you do is 'drunkenness' and 'gluttony'; what I do is 'righteous
+indignation,' what you do is 'passionate anger.' And so you may go
+the whole round of evil. Very bad are the men who can look at their
+deed, described in Its own inherent deformity, and yet say, 'Yes;
+that is it, and I am going to do it.' 'One of you shall betray Me.'
+'Yes; I will betray you!' It must have taken something to look into
+the Master's face, and keep the fixed purpose steady.
+
+Now I ask you to think, dear friends, of this, that that obstinate
+condition of dogged determination to do a wrong thing, knowing it to
+be a wrong thing, is a condition to which all evil steadily tends.
+We may not come to it in this world--I do not know that men ever do
+so wholly; but we are all getting towards it in regard to the
+special wrong deeds and desires which we cherish and commit. And
+when a man has once reached the point of saying to evil, 'Be thou my
+good,' then he is a 'devil' in the true meaning of the word; and
+wherever he is, he is in hell! And the one unpardonable sin is the
+sin of clear recognition that a given thing is contrary to God's
+will, and unfaltering determination, notwithstanding, to do it. That
+is the only sin that cannot be pardoned, 'either in this world or in
+the world to come.'
+
+And so, my brother, seeing that such a condition is possible, and
+that all the paths of evil, however tentative and timorous they may
+be at first, and however much the sin may be wrapped up with excuses
+and forms and masks, tend to that condition, let us take that old
+prayer upon our lips, which befits both those who distrust
+themselves because of slumbering sins, and those who dread being
+conquered by manifest iniquity:--'Who can understand his errors?
+Cleanse Thou me from secret faults. Keep back Thy servant also from
+presumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over me.'
+
+III. Now, lastly, we have in the last question an example of the
+peaceful confidence that comes from communion with Jesus Christ.
+
+John leaned on the Master's bosom. 'He was the disciple whom Jesus
+loved.' And so compassed with that great love, and feeling absolute
+security within the enclosure of that strong hand, his question is
+not, 'Is it I?' but 'Who is it?' From which I think we may fairly
+draw the conclusion that to feel that Christ loves me, and that I am
+compassed about by Him, is the true security against my falling into
+any sin.
+
+It was not John's love to Christ, but Christ's to John that made his
+safety. He did not say: 'I love Thee so much that I cannot betray
+Thee.' For all our feelings and emotions are but variable, and to
+build confidence upon them is to build a heavy building upon
+quicksand; the very weight of it drives out the foundations. But he
+thought to himself--or he felt rather than he thought--that all
+about him lay the sweet, warm, rich atmosphere of his Master's love;
+and to a man who was encompassed by that, treachery was impossible.
+
+Sin has no temptation so long as we actually enjoy the greater
+sweetness of Christ's felt love. Would thirty pieces of silver have
+been a bribe to John? Would anything that could have terrified
+others have frightened him from his Master's side whilst he felt His
+love? Will a handful of imitation jewellery, made out of coloured
+glass and paste, be any temptation to a man who bears a rich diamond
+on his finger? And will any of earth's sweetness be a temptation to
+a man who lives in the continual consciousness of the great rich
+love of Christ wrapping him round about? Brethren, not ourselves,
+not our faith, not our emotion, not our religious experience;
+nothing that is in us, is any security that we may not be tempted,
+and yield to the temptation, and deny or betray our Lord. There is
+only one thing that is a security, and that is that we be folded to
+the heart, and held by the hand, of that loving Lord. Then--then we
+may be confident that we shall not fall; for 'the Lord is able to
+make us stand.'
+
+Such confidence is but the other side of our self-distrust; is the
+constant accompaniment of it, must have that self-distrust for its
+condition and prerequisite, and leads to a yet deeper and more
+blessed form of that self-distrust. Faith in Him and 'no confidence
+in the flesh' are but the two sides of the same coin, the obverse
+and the reverse. The seed, planted in the ground, sends a little
+rootlet down, and a little spikelet up, by the same vital act. And
+so in our hearts, as it were, the downward rootlet is self-despair,
+and the upward shoot is faith in Christ. The two emotions go
+together--the more we distrust ourselves the more we shall rest upon
+Him, and the more we rest upon Him, and feel that all our strength
+comes, not from our foot, but from the Rock on which it stands, the
+more we shall distrust our own ability and our own faithfulness.
+
+Therefore, dear brethren, looking upon all the evil that is around
+us, and conscious in some measure of the weakness of our own hearts,
+let us do as a man would do who stands upon the narrow ledge of a
+cliff, and look sheer down into the depth below, and feels his head
+begin to reel and turn giddy; let us lay hold of the Guide's hand,
+and if we cleave by Him, He will hold up our goings that our
+footsteps slip not. Nothing else will. No length of obedient service
+is any guarantee against treachery and rebellion. As John Bunyan
+saw, there was a backdoor to hell from the gate of the Celestial
+City. Men have lived for years consistent professing Christians, and
+have fallen at last. Many a ship has come across half the world, and
+gone to pieces on the harbour bar. Many an army, victorious in a
+hundred fights, has been annihilated at last. No depths of religious
+experience, no heights of religious blessedness, no attainments of
+past virtue and self-sacrifice, are any guarantees for to-morrow.
+Trust in nothing and in nobody, least of all in yourselves and your
+own past. Trust only in Jesus Christ.
+
+'Now unto Him that is able to keep us from falling, and to present
+us faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy; to
+the only wise God our Saviour be glory and majesty, dominion and
+power, both now and for ever.' Amen.
+
+
+
+
+'THIS CUP'
+
+
+    'And Jesus took the cup, and grave thanks, and gave it
+    to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; 28. For this is My
+    blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for
+    the remission of sins'--MATT. xxvi. 27, 28.
+
+The comparative silence of our Lord as to the sacrificial character
+of His death has very often been urged as a reason for doubting that
+doctrine, and for regarding it as no part of the original Christian
+teaching. That silence may be accounted for by sufficient reasons.
+It has been very much exaggerated, and those who argue from it
+against the doctrine of the Atonement have forgotten that Jesus
+Christ founded the Lord's Supper.
+
+That rite shows us what He thought, and what He would have us think,
+of His death; and in the presence of its testimony it seems to me
+impossible to deny that His conception of it was distinctly
+sacrificial. By it He points out the moment of His whole career
+which He desires that men should remember. Not His words of
+tenderness and wisdom; not His miracles, amazing and gracious as
+these were; not the flawless beauty of His character, though it
+touches all hearts and wins the most rugged to love, and the most
+degraded to hope; but the moment in which He gave His life is what
+He would imprint for ever on the memory of the world.
+
+And not only so, but in the rite he distinctly tells us in what
+aspect He would have that death remembered. Not as the tragic end of
+a noble career which might be hallowed by tears such as are shed
+over a martyr's ashes; not as the crowning proof of love; not as the
+supreme act of patient forgiveness; but as a death for us, in which,
+as by the blood of the sacrifice, is secured the remission of sins.
+
+And not only so, but the double symbol in the Lord's Supper--whilst
+in some respects the bread and wine speak the same truths, and
+certainly point to the same Cross--has in each of its parts special
+lessons intrusted to it, and special truths to proclaim. The bread
+and the wine both say:--'Remember Me and My death.' Taken in
+conjunction they point to that death as violent; taken separately
+they each suggest various aspects of it, and of the blessings that
+will flow to us therefrom. And it is my present purpose to bring
+out, as briefly and as clearly as I can, the special lessons which
+our Lord would have us draw from that cup which is the emblem of His
+shed blood.
+
+I. First, then, observe that it speaks to us of a divine treaty or
+covenant.
+
+Ancient Israel had lived for nearly 2000 years under the charter of
+their national existence which, as we read in the Old Testament, was
+given on Sinai amidst thunderings and lightnings--'Now, therefore,
+if ye will obey My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ye shall
+be a peculiar treasure unto Me above all people; for all the earth
+is Mine, and ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests and an holy
+nation.'
+
+And that covenant, or agreement, or treaty, on the part of God, was
+ratified by a solemn act, in which the blood of the sacrifice,
+divided into two portions, was sprinkled, one half upon the altar,
+and the other half, after their acceptance of the conditions and
+obligations of the covenant, on the people, who had pledged
+themselves to obedience.
+
+And now, here is a Galilean peasant, in a borrowed upper room,
+within four-and-twenty hours of His ignominious death which might
+seem to blast all His work, who steps forward and says, 'I put away
+that ancient covenant which knits this nation to God. It is
+antiquated. I am the true offering and sacrifice, by the blood of
+which, sprinkled on altar and on people, a new covenant, built upon
+better promises, shall henceforth be.'
+
+What a tremendous piece of audacity, except on the one hypothesis
+that He that spake was indeed the Word of God; and that He was
+making that which Himself had established of old, to give way to
+that which He establishes now! The new covenant which Christ seals
+in His blood, is the charter, the better charter, under the
+conditions of which, not a nation but the world may find an external
+salvation which dwarfs all the deliverances of the past. That idea
+of a covenant confirmed by Christ's blood may sound to many hearers
+dry and hard. But if you will try to think what great truths are
+wrapped up in the theological phraseology, you will find them very
+real and very strong. Is it not a grand thought that between us and
+the infinite divine Nature there is established a firm and unmovable
+agreement? Then He has revealed His purposes; we are not left to
+grope in darkness, at the mercy of 'peradventures' and 'probablies';
+nor reduced to consult the ambiguous oracles of nature or of
+Providence, or the varying voices of our own hearts, or painfully
+and dubiously to construct more or less strong bases for confidence
+in a loving God out of such hints and fragments of revelation as
+these supply. He has come out of His darkness, and spoken articulate
+words, plain words, faithful words, which bind Him to a distinctly
+defined course of action. Across the great ocean of possible modes
+of action for a divine nature He has, if I may so say, buoyed out
+for Himself a channel, so as that we know His path, which is in the
+deep waters. He has limited Himself by the utterance of a faithful
+word, and we can now come to Him with His own promise, and cast it
+down before Him, and say: 'Thou hast spoken, and Thou art bound to
+fulfil it.' We have a covenant wherein God has shown us His hand,
+has told us what He is going to do and has thereby pledged Himself
+to its performance.
+
+And, still further, in order to get the full sweetness of this
+thought, to break the husk and reach to the kernel, you must
+remember what, according to the New Testament, are the conditions of
+this covenant. The old agreement was, 'If ye will obey My voice and
+do My commandments, then,'--so and so will happen. The old condition
+was, 'Do and live; be righteous and blessed!' The new condition is:
+'Take and have; believe and live!' The one was law, the other is
+gift; the one was retribution, the other is forgiveness. One was
+outward, hard, rigid law, fitly 'graven with a pen of iron on the
+rocks for ever'; the other is impulse, love, a power bestowed that
+will make us obedient; and the sole condition that we have to render
+is the condition of humble and believing acceptance of the divine
+gift. The new covenant, in the exuberant fulness of its mercy, and
+in the tenderness of its gracious purposes, is at once the
+completion and the antithesis of the ancient covenant with its
+precepts and its retribution.
+
+And, still further, this 'new covenant,' of which the essence is
+God's bestowment of Himself on every heart that wills to possess
+Him; this new covenant, according to the teaching of these words of
+my text and of the symbol to which they refer, is ratified and
+sealed by that great sacrifice. The blood was sprinkled on the
+altar; the blood was sprinkled on the people, which being translated
+into plain, unmetaphorical language is simply this, that Christ's
+death remains for ever present to the divine mind as the great
+reason and motive which modifies His government, and which ensures
+that His love shall ever find its way to every seeking soul. His
+death is the token; His death is the reason; His death is the pledge
+of the unending and the inexhaustible mercy of God bestowed upon
+each of us. 'He that spared not His own Son, shall He not with Him
+also freely give us all things?' The outward rite with its symbol is
+the exhibition in visible form of that truth, that the blood of
+Jesus Christ seals to the world the infinite mercy of God.
+
+And, on the other hand, that same blood of the covenant, sprinkled
+upon the other parties to the treaty, even our poor sinful hearts,
+binds them to the fulfilment of the condition which belongs to them.
+That is to say, by the power of that sacrifice there are evoked in
+our poor souls, faith, love, surrender. It, and it alone, knits us
+to God; it, and it alone, binds us to the fulfilment of the
+covenant. My brother, have you entered into that sweet, solemn,
+sacred alliance and union with God? Have you accepted and fulfilled
+the conditions? Is your heart 'sprinkled with the blood so freely
+shed for you'; and have you thereby been brought into living
+alliance with the God who has pledged His being and His name to be
+the all-sufficient God to you?
+
+II. Still further, this cup speaks to us of the forgiveness of sins.
+
+One theory, and one theory only, as it seems to me, of the meaning
+of Christ's death, is possible if these words of my text ever
+dropped from Christ's lips, or if He ever instituted the rite to
+which they refer; He must have believed that His death was a
+sacrifice, without which the sins of the world were not forgiven;
+and by which forgiveness came to us all.
+
+And I do not think that we rightly conceive the relation between the
+sacrifices of barbarous heathen tribes, or the sacrifices appointed
+in Israel, and the great sacrifice on the Cross, if we say that our
+Lord's death is only figuratively accommodated to these in order to
+meet lower or grosser conceptions, but rather, I take it, that the
+accommodation is the other way. In all nations beyond the limits of
+Israel the sacrifices of living victims spoke not only of surrender
+and dependence, but likewise of the consciousness of demerit and
+evil on the part of the offerers, and were at once a confession of
+sin, a prayer for pardon, and a propitiation of an offended God. And
+I believe that the sacrifices in Israel were intended and adapted
+not only to meet the deep-felt want of human nature, common to them
+as to all other tribes, but also were intended and adapted to point
+onwards to Him in whose death a real want of mankind was met, in
+whose death a real sacrifice was offered, in whose death an angry
+God was not indeed propitiated, but in whose death the loving Father
+of our souls Himself provided the Lamb for the offering, without
+which, for reasons deeper than we can wholly fathom, it was
+impossible that sin should be remitted.
+
+I insist upon no theory of an Atonement. I believe there is no
+Gospel, worth calling so, worth the preaching, worth your believing,
+or that will ever move the world or purify society, except the
+Gospel which begins with the fact of an Atonement, and points to the
+Cross as the altar on which the Sacrifice for the sins of the world,
+without whose death pardon is impossible, has died for us all.
+
+Oh! dear friends, do not let yourselves be confused by the
+difficulties that beset all human and incomplete statements of the
+philosophy of the death of Christ; but getting away from these,
+cleave you to the fact that your sins were laid upon Christ, and
+that He has died for us all; that His death is a sacrifice; His body
+broken for us; and for the remission of our sins, His blood freely
+shed. Thus, and only thus, will you come to the understanding either
+of the sweetness of His love or of the power of His example; then,
+and only then, shall we know why it was that He elected to be
+remembered, out of all the moments of His life, by that one when He
+hung in weakness upon the Cross, and out of the darkness came the
+cry, 'My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?'
+
+III. And now, again, let me remind you that this cup speaks likewise
+of a life infused.
+
+'The blood is the life,' says the physiology of the Hebrews. The
+blood is the life, and when men drink of that cup they symbolise the
+fact that Christ's own life and spirit are imparted to them that
+love Him. 'Except ye eat the flesh, and drink the blood of the Son
+of Man, ye have no life in you.' The very heart of Christ's gift to
+us is the gift of His own very life to be the life of our lives. In
+deep, mystical reality He Himself passes into our being, and the
+'law of the spirit of life makes us free from the law of sin and
+death,' so that we may say: 'He that is joined to the Lord is one
+spirit,' and the humble believing soul may rejoice in this: 'I live,
+yet not I, but Christ liveth in Me.' This is, in one aspect, the
+very deepest meaning of this Communion rite. As physicians sometimes
+tried to restore life to an almost dead man by the transfusion into
+his shrunken veins of the fresh warm blood from a young and healthy
+subject, so into our fevered life, into our corrupted blood, there
+is poured the full tide of the pure and perfect life of Jesus Christ
+Himself, and we live, not by our own power, nor for our own will,
+nor in obedience to our own caprices, but by Him and in Him, and
+with Him and for Him. This is the heart of Christianity, the
+possession within us of the life, the immortal life of Him that died
+for us.
+
+My brother have you that great gift in your heart? Be sure of this,
+that unless the life of Christ is in you by faith, ye are dead,
+'dead in trespasses and in sins'; dead, and sure to rot away and
+disintegrate into corruption. The cup of blessing which we drink
+speaks to us of the transfusion into our spirits of the Spirit of
+Jesus Christ.
+
+IV. And lastly, it speaks of a festal gladness.
+
+The bread says nothing to us of the remission of sins. The broken
+bread proclaims, indeed, our nourishment from Jesus, but falls short
+of the deep and solemn truth that it is the very life-blood of
+Christ Himself which nourishes us and vitalises us. And the bread,
+in like manner, proclaims indeed the fact that we are fed on Him,
+but says nothing of the joy of that feeding. The wine is the symbol
+of that, and it proclaims to us that the Christian life here on
+earth, just because it is the feeding on and the drinking in of
+Jesus Christ, ought ever to be a life of blessedness, of abounding
+joy, by whatsoever darkness, burdens, cares, toils, sorrows, and
+solitude it may be shaded and saddened. They who live on Christ,
+they who drink in of His spirit, they should be glad in all
+circumstances, they, and they alone. We sit at a table, though it be
+in the wilderness, though it be in the presence of our enemies,
+where there ought to be joy and the voice of rejoicing.
+
+But beyond that, as our Master Himself taught these apostles in that
+upper room, this cup points onwards to a future feast. At that
+solemn hour Jesus stayed His own heart with the vision of the
+perfected kingdom and the glad festival then. So this Communion has
+a prophetic element in it, and links on with predictions and
+parables which speak of the 'marriage supper' of the great King, and
+of the time when we shall sit at His table in His kingdom.
+
+For the past the Lord's Supper speaks of the one sufficient oblation
+and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. For the present it
+speaks of life produced and sustained by communion with Jesus
+Christ. And for the future it speaks of the unending, joyful
+satisfaction of all desires in the 'upper room' of the heavens.
+
+How unlike, and yet how like to that scene in the upper room at
+Jerusalem! From it the sad disciples went out, some of them to deny
+their Master; all of them to struggle, to sin, to lose Him from
+their sight, to toil, to sorrow, and at last to die. From that other
+table we shall go no more out, but sit there with Him in full
+fruition of unfailing blessedness and participation of His immortal
+life for evermore.
+
+Dear brethren, these are the lessons, these the hopes, which this
+'blood of the new covenant' teaches and inspires. Have you entered
+into that covenant with God? Have you made sure work of the
+forgiveness of your sins through His blood? Have you received into
+your spirits His immortal life? Then you may humbly be confident
+that, after life's weariness and lonesomeness are past, you will be
+welcomed to the banqueting hall by the Lord of the feast, and sit
+with Him and His servants who loved Him at that table and be glad.
+
+
+
+
+'UNTIL THAT DAY'
+
+
+    'I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine,
+    until that day when I drink it new with you in my
+    Father's kingdom.'--MATT. xxvi. 29.
+
+This remarkable saying of our Lord's is recorded in all of the
+accounts of the institution of the Lord's Supper. The thought
+embodied in it ought to be present in the minds of all who partake
+of that rite. It converts what is primarily a memorial into a
+prophecy. It bids us hope as well as, and because we, remember. The
+light behind us is cast forward on to the dimness before. So the
+Apostle Paul, in his solitary reference to the Communion--which,
+indeed, is an entirely incidental one, and evoked simply by the
+corruptions in the Corinthian Church, emphasises this prophetic and
+onward-looking aspect of the backward-looking rite when he says, 'Ye
+do show the Lord's death _till He come_.'
+
+Now, it seems to me that those of us who so strongly hold that the
+Communion is primarily a simple memorial service, with no mysterious
+or magical efficacy of any sort about it, do rather ignore in our
+ordinary thoughts the other aspect which is brought out in my text;
+and that comparative ignoring seems to me to be but a part of a very
+lamentable and general tendency of this day, whereby the prospect of
+a future life has become somewhat dimmed and does not fill the place
+either in ordinary Christian thinking, or as a motive for Christian
+service which the proportion of faith, and the relative importance
+of the present and the future suggest that it ought to fill. The
+Christianity of this day has so much to do with the present life,
+and the thought of the Gospel as a power in the present has been so
+emphasised, in legitimate reaction from the opposite exaggeration,
+that there is great need, as I believe, to preach to Christian people
+the wisdom of making more prominent in their faith their immortal
+hope. I wish, then, to turn now to this aspect of the rite which we
+regard as a memorial, and try to emphasise its forward-looking
+attitude, and the large blessed truths that emerge if we consider that.
+
+I. First, let me say just a word about the twin aspect of the
+Communion as a memorial prophecy, or prophetic remembrance.
+
+Now, I need not remind you, I suppose, that according to the view
+which, as I believe, the New Testament takes, and which certainly we
+Nonconformists take, of all the rites of external worship, every one
+of them is a prophecy, because every act in which our sense is
+brought in to reinforce the spirit--and by outward forms, be they
+vocal, or be they manual, or be they of any other sort, we try to
+express and to quicken spiritual emotions and intellectual
+convictions--declares its own imperfection, digs its own grave, and
+prophecies its own resurrection in a nobler and better fashion. Just
+because these outward symbols of bread and wine do, through the
+senses, quicken the faith and the love of the spirit, they declare
+themselves to be transitory, and they point onwards to the time when
+that which is perfect shall absorb, and so destroy, that which is in
+part, and when sense shall be no longer necessary as the ally and
+humble servant of spirit. 'I saw no temple therein.' Temples, and
+rites, and services, and holy days, and all the external apparatus
+of worship, are but scaffolding, and just as the scaffolding round a
+building is a prophecy of its own being pulled down when the
+building is reared and completed, so we cannot partake of these
+external symbols rightly, unless we recognise their transiency, and
+feel that they say to us, 'A mightier than I cometh after me, the
+latchet of whose shoe I am not worthy to unloose.' The light that
+shines in the dark heralds the day and its own extinction.
+
+So, looking back we must look forward, and partaking of the symbol,
+we must reach out to the time when the symbol shall be antiquated,
+the reality having come. The Passover of Israel did not more truly
+point onwards to the true Lamb of Sacrifice, and to the true
+Passover that was slain for us, and to its own elevation into the
+Lord's Supper of the Christian Church, than the Lord's Supper of the
+Christian Church points onwards to the 'marriage supper of the
+Lamb,' and its own cessation.
+
+But then, again, let me remind you that this prophetic aspect is
+inherent in the memorial aspect of the Communion, because what we
+remember necessarily demands the coming of what we hope. That is to
+say, if Jesus Christ be what the Lord's Supper says that He is, and
+if He has done what that broken bread and poured out wine proclaim,
+according to His own utterance, that He has done, then clearly that
+death which was for the life of the world, that death which was the
+seal of a covenant, that body broken for the remission of sins, that
+wine partaken of as a reception into ourselves of the very life-blood
+of Jesus Christ, do all demand something far nobler and more perfect
+than the broken, incomplete obedience and loyalties and communions
+which Christian men here exercise and possess.
+
+If He died, as the rite says that He did, and if dying He left such
+a commentary upon His act as that ordinance affords, then He cannot
+have done with the world; then the powers that were set in motion by
+His death cannot pause nor cease their action until they have
+reached their appropriate culmination in effecting all that it was
+in them to effect. If, leaving His people, He said to them, 'Never
+forget My death for you, My broken body, and My shed blood,' He
+therein said that the time will come, must come, when all the powers
+of the Cross shall be incorporated in humanity, and when the parted
+shall be reunited. The Communion would stand as the expression of
+Christ's mistaken estimate of His own importance, if there were not
+beyond the grave the perfecting of it, and the full appropriation
+and joyful possession of all which the death that it signifies
+brought to mankind.
+
+Therefore, dear brethren, it seems to me that the best way by which
+Christians can deepen their confidence and brighten their hope in
+the perfect reunion and blessedness of the heavens, is to increase
+the firmness of their faith in, and the depth of their apprehension
+of, the sacrifice of the Cross. If the Cross demands the Crown, then
+our surest way to realise as certain our own possession of that
+Crown is to cling very close to that Cross. The more we look
+backwards to it the more will it fling its light into all the dark
+places that are in front of us, and flush the heavens up to the
+seventh and beyond, with the glories that stream from it. Hold fast
+by the Cross, and the more fully, believingly, joyously,
+unfalteringly, we recognise in it the foundation of our salvation,
+the more gladly, clearly, operatively, shall we cherish the hope
+that 'the headstone shall be brought forth with shoutings,' and that
+the imperfect symbolical communion of earth will grow and greaten
+into complete and real union in eternal bliss.
+
+Let me urge, then, this, that, as a matter of fact, a faith in
+eternal glory goes with and fluctuates in the same degree and manner
+as does the faith in the past sacrifice that Christ has made. He,
+and He alone, as I believe, turns nebulae into solidity, and makes
+of the more or less tremulous anticipation of a more or less dim and
+distant future, a calm, still certainty. We know that He will come
+because, and in proportion as, we believe that He has come. Keep
+these two things, then, always together, the memory and the hope.
+They stand like two great piers, one on either side of a narrow,
+dark glen, and suspended from them is stretched the bridge, along
+which the happy pilgrims may travel and enter into rest.
+
+II. And now, let us turn for a moment to the lovely vision of that
+future which is suggested by our text.
+
+The truest way, I was going to say the only way, by which we can
+have any conceptions of a condition of being of which we have no
+experience, is to fall back upon the experiences which we have, and
+use them as symbols and metaphors. The curtain is the picture. So
+our Lord here, in accordance with the necessary limitations of our
+human knowledge, contents Himself with using what lay at His hand,
+and taking it as giving faint shadows and metaphorical suggestions
+as to spiritual blessedness yonder.
+
+There is one other way, as it seems to me, by which we can in any
+measure body forth to ourselves that unknown condition of things,
+and that is to fall back upon our present experiences in another
+fashion, and negative all of them which involve pain and limitation
+and incompleteness. There shall be no night--no sorrow--no tears--no
+sighing, and the like. These negatives of the strong and stinging
+griefs and limitations of the present are perhaps our second-best
+way of coming to some prophetic vision of that great future.
+
+Remembering, then, that we are dealing with pure metaphor, and that
+the exact translation of the metaphor into reality is not yet
+possible for us, let us take one or two very plain thoughts out of
+this great saying--'Until I drink it new with you in My Father's
+kingdom.'
+
+Then, we have to think of the completion of the Christian life
+beyond, which is also the completion of the results of Christ's
+death on the Cross, as being, according to the very frequent
+metaphor both of the Old and the New Testament, a prolonged
+festival. I do not need to speak of the details of the thoughts that
+thence emerge. Let me sum them up as briefly as may be. They include
+the satisfaction of every desire and the nourishment of all
+strength, and food for every faculty. When we think of the hungry
+hearts that all men carry, and how true it is that even the wisest
+and the holiest of us are 'spending our money for that which is not
+bread, and our labour for that which satisfieth not'; when we think
+of how the choicest foods that life can provide, even for the
+noblest hunger of noble hearts, are too often to us but as a feeding
+on ashes that will leave grit between the teeth and a foul taste
+upon the palate, surely it is blessed to think that we may, after
+all life's disappointments, cherish the hope of a perfect fruition,
+and that yonder, if not here, it will be fully true that 'God never
+sends mouths but He sends meat to feed them.' That is not so in this
+world, for we all carry hungers which impel us forward to nobler
+living, and which it would not be good for us to have satisfied
+here. But, unless the whole universe is a godless chaos, there must
+be somewhere a state in which a man shall have all that he wants,
+and shall want only what he ought.
+
+The emblem of a feast suggests also society. The solitary travellers
+who have been toiling and moiling through the desert all the day
+long, snatching up a hasty mouthful as they march, and lonely many a
+time, come together at last, and sit together there joyous and
+united. Deep down in our hearts some of us have gashes that always
+bleed. We know losses and loneliness, and we can feel, I hope, how
+blessed is the thought that all the wanderers shall sit there
+together, and rejoice in each other's communion, 'and so shall
+_we_ ever be with the Lord.'
+
+But besides satisfaction and society the figure suggests repose.
+That rest is not indolence, for we have to carry other metaphors
+with us in order to come to the full significance of this one, and
+the festal imagery is not all that we have to take into account; for
+we read, 'I grant unto you a kingdom, and ye shall sit on twelve
+thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel,' as well as 'ye shall
+eat and drink with Me at My table in My kingdom.' So repose, which
+is consistent and coexistent with the intensest activity, is the
+great hope that comes out of these metaphors. But for many of us--I
+suppose for all of us elderly people--who are about weary of work
+and worry, there is no deeper hope than the hope of rest. 'I have
+had labour enough for one,' says one of our poets. And I think there
+is something in most of our hearts that echoes that and rejoices to
+hear that, after the long march, 'ye shall sit with Me at My table.'
+
+But besides satisfaction, society, and rest, the figure suggests
+gladness. Wine is the emblem of the joyous side of a feast, just as
+bread is the emblem of the necessary nourishment. And it is
+_new_ wine; joy raised to a higher power, transformed and
+glorified; and yet the old emotion in a new form. As for that
+gladness, 'eye hath not seen, neither hath it entered into the heart
+of man to conceive, the things that God hath prepared for them that
+love Him.' Only all we weary, heavy-laden, saddened, anxious,
+disappointed, tormented people may hope for these festal joys, if we
+are Christ's. The feast will last when all the troubles and the
+cares which helped us to it are dead and buried and forgotten.
+
+These four things, brethren--satisfaction, society, rest, new
+gladness--are proclaimed and prophesied to each of us, if we will,
+by this memorial rite.
+
+Again, there comes from this aspect of the Communion the thought
+that the blessed condition of the Christian soul hereafter is a
+feast on a sacrifice. We must distinguish between the sense in which
+our Lord drinks with us, and the sense in which we alone partake of
+that feast of which He provides the viands. But just as in the
+symbolic ordinance of the Communion the very essence of it is that
+what was offered as sacrifice is now incorporated into the
+participant's spiritual being, and becomes part of himself, and the
+life of his life, so, in the future, all the blessedness of the
+clustered and constellated joys of that life, which is one eternal
+festival, shall arise from the reception into perfected spirits with
+ever-growing greatness and blessedness of the Christ that died and
+ever lives for them. That heavenly glory, to its highest pinnacle of
+aspiration, to its most rapt completeness of gladness, is all the
+consequence of Christ's death on the Cross. That death, which we
+commemorate, is the procuring cause of man's entrance into bliss,
+and that death is the subject of the continual, grateful remembrance
+of the saints in the seventh heaven of their glory. Life yonder, as
+all true life here, consists in taking into ourselves the life of
+Jesus Christ, and the law for heaven is the same as the law for
+earth, 'He that eateth Me, even he shall live by Me.'
+
+Lastly, the conception of the future for Christian souls arising
+from this aspect of the Lord's Supper is that it is not only a
+feast, and a feast on a sacrifice, but that it is a feast with the
+King.
+
+'_With you_ I will drink it.' Brethren, we pass beyond metaphor when
+we gather up and condense all the vague brightness and glories of that
+perfect future into this one rapturous, overwhelming, all-embracing
+thought: 'So shall we ever be with the Lord.' I could almost wish
+that Christian people had no other thought of that future than this,
+for surely in its grand simplicity, in its ineffable depth, there lie
+the germs of every blessedness. How poor all the material emblems are
+of which sensuous imaginations make so much, when compared with that
+hope! As the good old hymn has it, which to me says more, in its bold
+simplicity, than all the sentimental enlargements of Scriptural
+metaphors which some people admire so much--
+
+  'It is enough that Christ knows all,
+   And I shall be with Him.'
+
+Strange that He says, 'I will drink it _with you._' Does He
+need sustenance? Does He need any external things in order to make
+His feast? No! and Yes! 'I will sup with Him' as well as 'He with
+me.' And, surely, His meat and drink are the love, the loyalty, the
+obedience, the receptiveness, the society of His redeemed children.
+'The joy of the Lord' comes from 'seeing of the travail of His
+soul,' and His servants do enter into that joy in deep and wondrous
+fashion. We not only shall live on Christ, but He Himself puts to
+His own lips the chalice that He commends to ours, and in marvellous
+condescension to, and identity with, our glorified humanity drinks
+with us the 'new wine' in the Father's kingdom.
+
+
+
+
+GETHSEMANE, THE OIL-PRESS
+
+
+    'Then cometh Jesus with them unto a place called
+    Gethsemane, and saith unto the disciples, Sit ye here,
+    while I go and pray yonder. 37. And He took with Him
+    Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be
+    sorrowful and very heavy. 38. Then saith He unto them,
+    My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry
+    ye here, and watch with Me. 39. And He went a little
+    farther, and fell on His face, and prayed, saying, O My
+    Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me:
+    nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt. 40. And
+    He cometh unto the disciples, and findeth them asleep,
+    and saith unto Peter, What, could ye not watch with Me
+    one hour! 41. Watch and pray, that ye enter not into
+    temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh
+    is weak. 42. He went away again the second time, and
+    prayed, saying, O My Father, if this cup may not pass
+    away from Me, except I drink it, Thy will be done.
+    43. And He came and found them asleep again: for their
+    eyes were heavy. 44. And He left them, and went away
+    again, and prayed the third time, saying the same words.
+    45. Then cometh He to His disciples, and saith unto
+    them, Sleep on now, and take your rest: behold, the
+    hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is betrayed into
+    the hands of sinners. 46. Rise, let us be going: behold,
+    he is at hand that doth betray Me.'--MATT. xxvi. 36-46.
+
+One shrinks from touching this incomparable picture of unexampled
+sorrow, for fear lest one's finger-marks should stain it. There is
+no place here for picturesque description, which tries to mend the
+gospel stories by dressing them in to-day's fashions, nor for
+theological systematisers and analysers of the sort that would
+'botanise upon their mother's grave.' We must put off our shoes, and
+feel that we stand on holy ground. Though loving eyes saw something
+of Christ's agony, He did not let them come beside Him, but withdrew
+into the shadow of the gnarled olives, as if even the moonbeams must
+not look too closely on the mystery of such grief. We may go as near
+as love was allowed to go, but stop where it was stayed, while we
+reverently and adoringly listen to what the Evangelist tells us of
+that unspeakable hour.
+
+I. Mark the 'exceeding sorrow' of the Man of Sorrows. Somewhere on
+the western foot of Olivet lay the garden, named from an oil-press
+formerly or then in it, which was to be the scene of the holiest and
+sorest sorrow on which the moon, that has seen so much misery, has
+ever looked. Truly it was 'an oil-press,' in which 'the good olive'
+was crushed by the grip of unparalleled agony, and yielded precious
+oil, which has been poured into many a wound since then. Eight of
+the eleven are left at or near the entrance, while He passes deeper
+into the shadows with the three. They had been witnesses of His
+prayers once before, on the slopes of Hermon, when He was
+transfigured before them. They are now to see a no less wonderful
+revelation of His glory in His filial submission. There is something
+remarkable in Matthew's expression, 'He began to be sorrowful,'--as
+if a sudden wave of emotion, breaking over His soul, had swept His
+human sensibilities before it. The strange word translated by the
+Revisers 'sore troubled' is of uncertain derivation, and may
+possibly be simply intended to intensify the idea of sorrow; but
+more probably it adds another element, which Bishop Lightfoot
+describes as 'the confused, restless, half-distracted state which is
+produced by physical derangement or mental distress.' A storm of
+agitation and bewilderment broke His calm, and forced from His
+patient lips, little wont to speak of His own emotions, or to seek
+for sympathy, the unutterably pathetic cry, 'My soul is exceeding
+sorrowful'--compassed about with sorrow, as the word means--'even
+unto death.' No feeble explanation of these words does justice to
+the abyss of woe into which they let us dimly look. They tell the
+fact, that, a little more and the body would have sunk under the
+burden. He knew the limits of human endurance, for 'all things were
+made by Him,' and, knowing it, He saw that He had grazed the very
+edge. Out of the darkness He reaches a hand to feel for the grasp of
+a friend, and piteously asks these humble lovers to stay beside Him,
+not that they could help Him to bear the weight, but that their
+presence had some solace in it. His agony must be endured alone,
+therefore He bade them tarry there; but He desired to have them at
+hand, therefore He went but 'a little forward.' They could not bear
+it with Him, but they could 'watch with' Him, and that poor comfort
+is all He asks. No word came from them. They were, no doubt, awed
+into silence, as the truest sympathy is used to be, in the presence
+of a great grief. Is it permitted us to ask what were the fountains
+of these bitter floods that swept over Christ's sinless soul? Was
+the mere physical shrinking from death all? If so, we may reverently
+say that many a maiden and old man, who drew all their fortitude
+from Jesus, have gone to stake or gibbet for His sake, with a calm
+which contrasts strangely with His agitation. Gethsemane is robbed
+of its pathos and nobleness if that be all. But it was not all.
+Rather it was the least bitter of the components of the cup. What
+lay before Him was not merely death, but the death which was to
+atone for a world's sin, and in which, therefore, the whole weight
+of sin's consequences was concentrated. 'The Lord hath made to meet
+on Him the iniquities of us all'; that is the one sufficient
+explanation of this infinitely solemn and tender scene. Unless we
+believe that, we shall find it hard to reconcile His agitation in
+Gethsemane with the perfection of His character as the captain of
+'the noble army of martyrs.'
+
+II. Note the prayer of filial submission. Matthew does not tell us
+of the sweat falling audibly and heavily, and sounding to the three
+like slow blood-drops from a wound, nor of the strengthening angel,
+but he gives us the prostrate form, and the threefold prayer,
+renewed as each moment of calm, won by it, was again broken in upon
+by a fresh wave of emotion. Thrice He had to leave the disciples,
+and came back, a calm conqueror; and twice the enemy rallied and
+returned to the assault, and was at last driven finally from the
+field by the power of prayer and submission. The three Synoptics
+differ in their report of our Lord's words, but all mean the same
+thing in substance; and it is obvious that much more must have been
+spoken than they report. Possibly what we have is only the fragments
+that reached the three before they fell asleep. In any case, Jesus
+was absent from them on each occasion long enough to allow of their
+doing so.
+
+Three elements are distinguishable in our Lord's prayer. There is,
+first, the sense of Sonship, which underlies all, and was never more
+clear than at that awful moment. Then there is the recoil from 'the
+cup,' which natural instinct could not but feel, though sinlessly.
+The flesh shrank from the Cross, which else had been no suffering;
+and if no suffering, then had been no atonement. His manhood would
+not have been like ours, nor His sorrows our pattern, if He had not
+thus drawn back, in His sensitive humanity, from the awful prospect
+now so near. But natural instinct is one thing, and the controlling
+will another. However currents may have tossed the vessel, the firm
+hand at the helm never suffered them to change her course. The will,
+which in this prayer He seems so strangely to separate from the
+Father's, even in the act of submission, was the will which wishes,
+not that which resolves. His fixed purpose to die for the world's
+sin never wavered. The shrinking does not reach the point of
+absolutely and unconditionally asking that the cup might pass. Even
+in the act of uttering the wish, it is limited by that 'if it be
+possible,' which can only mean--possible, in view of the great
+purpose for which He came. That is to be accomplished, at any cost;
+and unless it can be accomplished though the cup be withdrawn, He
+does not even wish, much less will, that it should be withdrawn. So,
+the third element in the prayer is the utter resignation to the
+Father's will, in which submission He found peace, as we do.
+
+He prayed His way to perfect calm, which is ever the companion of
+perfect self-surrender to God. They who cease from their own works
+do 'enter into rest.' All the agitations which had come storming in
+massed battalions against Him are defeated by it. They have failed
+to shake His purpose, they now fail even to disturb His peace. So,
+victorious from the dreadful conflict, and at leisure of heart to
+care for others, He can go back to the disciples. But even whilst
+seeking to help them, a fresh wave of suffering breaks in on His
+calm, and once again He leaves them to renew the struggle. The
+instinctive shrinking reasserts itself, and, though overcome, is not
+eradicated. But the second prayer is yet more rooted in acquiescence
+than the first. It shows that He had not lost what He had won by the
+former; for it, as it were, builds on that first supplication, and
+accepts as answer to its contingent petition the consciousness,
+accompanying the calm, that it was not possible for the cup to pass
+from Him. The sense of Sonship underlies the complete resignation of
+the second prayer as of the first. It has no wish but God's will,
+and is the voluntary offering of Himself. Here He is both Priest and
+Sacrifice, and offers the victim with this prayer of consecration.
+So once more He triumphs, because once more, and yet more
+completely, He submits, and accepts the Cross. For Him, as for us,
+the Cross accepted ceases to be a pain, and the cup is no more
+bitter when we are content to drink it. Once more in fainter fashion
+the enemy came on, casting again his spent arrows, and beaten back
+by the same weapon. The words were the same, because no others could
+have expressed more perfectly the submission which was the heart of
+His prayers and the condition of His victory.
+
+Christ's prayer, then, was not for the passing of the cup, but that
+the will of God might be done in and by Him, and 'He was heard in
+that He feared,' not by being exempted from the Cross, but by being
+strengthened through submission for submission. So His agony is the
+pattern of all true prayer, which must ever deal with our wishes, as
+He did with His instinctive shrinking,--present them wrapped in an
+'if it be possible,' and followed by a 'nevertheless.' The meaning
+of prayer is not to force our wills on God's, but to bend our wills
+to His; and that prayer is really answered of which the issue is our
+calm readiness for all that He lays upon us.
+
+III. Note the sad and gentle remonstrance with the drowsy three.
+'The sleep of the disciples, and of these disciples, and of all
+three, and such an overpowering sleep, remains even after Luke's
+explanation, "for sorrow," a psychological riddle' (_Meyer_).
+It is singularly parallel with the sleep of the same three at the
+Transfiguration--an event which presents the opposite pole of our
+Lord's experiences, and yields so many antithetical parallels to
+Gethsemane. No doubt the tension of emotion, which had lasted for
+many hours, had worn them out; but, if weariness had weighed down
+their eyelids, love should have kept them open. Such sleep of such
+disciples may have been a riddle, but it was also a crime, and
+augured imperfect sympathy. Gentle surprise and the pain of
+disappointed love are audible in the question, addressed to Peter
+especially, as he had promised so much, but meant for all. This was
+all that Jesus got in answer to His yearning for sympathy. 'I looked
+for some to take pity, but there was none.' Those who loved Him most
+lay curled in dead slumber within earshot of His prayers. If ever a
+soul tasted the desolation of utter loneliness, that suppliant
+beneath the olives tasted it. But how little of the pain escapes His
+lips! The words but hint at the slightness of their task compared
+with His, at the brevity of the strain on their love, and at the
+companionship which ought to have made sleep impossible. May we not
+see in Christ's remonstrance a word for all? For us, too, the task
+of keeping awake in the enchanted ground is light, measured against
+His, and the time is short, and we have Him to keep us company in
+the watch, and every motive of grateful love should make it easy;
+but, alas, how many of us sleep a drugged and heavy slumber!
+
+The gentle remonstrance soon passes over into counsel as gentle.
+Watchfulness and prayer are inseparable. The one discerns dangers,
+the other arms against them. Watchfulness keeps us prayerful, and
+prayerfulness keeps us watchful. To watch without praying is
+presumption, to pray without watching is hypocrisy. The eye that
+sees clearly the facts of life will turn upwards from its scanning
+of the snares and traps, and will not look in vain. These two are
+the indispensable conditions of victorious encountering of
+temptation. Fortified by them, we shall not 'enter into' it, though
+we encounter it. The outward trial will remain, but its power to
+lead us astray will vanish. It will still be danger or sorrow, but
+it will not be temptation; and we shall pass through it, as a
+sunbeam through foul air, untainted, and keeping heaven's radiance.
+That is a lesson for a wider circle than the sleepy three.
+
+It is followed by words which would need a volume to expound in all
+their depth and width of application, but which are primarily a
+reason for the preceding counsel, as well as a loving apology for
+the disciples' sleep. Christ is always glad to give us credit for
+even imperfect good; His eye, which sees deeper than ours, sees more
+lovingly, and is not hindered from marking the willing spirit by
+recognising weak flesh. But these words are not to be made a pillow
+for indolent acquiescence in the limitations which the flesh imposes
+on the spirit. He may take merciful count of these, and so may we,
+in judging others, but it is fatal to plead them at the bar of our
+own consciences. Rather they should be a spur to our watchfulness
+and to our prayer. We need these because the flesh is weak, still
+more because, in its weakness toward good, it is strong to evil.
+Such exercise will give governing power to the spirit, and enable it
+to impose its will on the reluctant flesh. If we watch and pray, the
+conflict between these two elements in the renewed nature will tend
+to unity and peace by the supremacy of the spirit; if we do not, it
+will tend to cease by the unquestioned tyranny of the flesh. In one
+or other direction our lives are tending.
+
+Strange that such words had no effect. But so it was, and so deep
+was the apostles' sleep that Christ left them undisturbed the second
+time. The relapse is worse than the original disease. Sleep broken
+and resumed is more torpid and fatal than if it had not been
+interrupted. We do not know how long it lasted, though the whole
+period in the garden must have been measured by hours; but at last
+it was broken by the enigmatical last words of our Lord. The
+explanation of the direct opposition between the consecutive
+sentences, by taking the 'Sleep on now' as ironical, jars on one's
+reverence. Surely irony is out of keeping with the spirit of Christ
+then. Rather He bids them sleep on, since the hour is come, in sad
+recognition that the need for their watchful sympathy is past, and
+with it the opportunity for their proved affection. It is said with
+a tone of contemplative melancholy, and is almost equivalent to 'too
+late, too late.' The memorable sermon of F. W. Robertson, on this
+text, rightly grasps the spirit of the first clause, when it dwells
+with such power on the thought of 'the irrevocable past' of wasted
+opportunities and neglected duty. But the sudden transition to the
+sharp, short command and broken sentences of the last verse is to be
+accounted for by the sudden appearance of the flashing lights of the
+band led by Judas, somewhere near at hand, in the valley. The mood
+of pensive reflection gives place to rapid decision. He summons them
+to arise, not for flight, but that He may go out to meet the
+traitor. Escape would have been easy. There was time to reach some
+sheltering fold of the hill in the darkness; but the prayer beneath
+the silver-grey olives had not been in vain, and these last words in
+Gethsemane throb with the Son's willingness to yield Himself up, and
+to empty to its dregs the cup which the Father had given Him.
+
+
+
+
+THE LAST PLEADING OF LOVE
+
+
+    'And Jesus said unto him, Friend, wherefore art thou
+    come?'--MATT. xxvi. 50.
+
+We are accustomed to think of the betrayer of our Lord as a kind of
+monster, whose crime is so mysterious in its atrocity as to put him
+beyond the pale of human sympathy. The awful picture which the great
+Italian poet draws of him as alone in hell, shunned even there, as
+guilty beyond all others, expresses the general feeling about him.
+And even the attempts which have been made to diminish the greatness
+of his guilt, by supposing that his motive was only to precipitate
+Christ's assumption of His conquering Messianic power, are prompted
+by the same thought that such treason as his is all but
+inconceivable. I cannot but think that these attempts fail, and that
+the narratives of the Gospels oblige us to think of his crime as
+deliberate treachery. But even when so regarded, other emotions than
+wondering loathing should be excited by the awful story.
+
+There had been nothing in his previous history to suggest such sin,
+as is proved by the disciples' question, when our Lord announced
+that one of them should betray Him. No suspicion lighted on him--no
+finger pointed to where he sat. But self-distrust asked, 'Lord, is
+it I?' and only love, pillowed on the Master's breast, and strong in
+the happy sense of His love, was sufficiently assured of its own
+constancy, to change the question into 'Lord! who is it?' The
+process of corruption was unseen by all eyes but Christ's. He came
+to his terrible pre-eminence in crime by slow degrees, and by paths
+which we may all tread. As for his guilt, that is in other hands
+than ours. As for his fate, let us copy the solemn and pitying
+reticence of Peter, and say, 'that he might go to _his own_
+place'--the place that belongs to him, and that he is fit for,
+wherever that may be. As for the growth and development of his sin,
+let us remember that 'we have all of us one human heart,' and that
+the possibilities of crime as dark are in us all. And instead of
+shuddering abhorrence at a sin that can scarcely be understood, and
+can never be repeated, let us be sure that whatever man has done,
+man may do, and ask with humble consciousness of our own deceitful
+hearts, 'Lord, is it I?'
+
+These remarkable and solemn words of Christ, with which He meets the
+treacherous kiss, appear to be a last appeal to Judas. They may
+possibly not be a question, as in our version--but an incomplete
+sentence, 'What thou hast come to do'--leaving the implied command,
+'That do,' unexpressed. They would then be very like other words
+which the betrayer had heard but an hour or two before, 'That thou
+doest, do quickly.' But such a rendering does not seem so
+appropriate to the circumstances as that which makes them a
+question, smiting on his heart and conscience, and seeking to tear
+away the veil of sophistications with which he had draped from his
+own eyes the hideous shape of his crime. And, if so, what a
+wonderful instance we have here of that long-suffering love. They
+are the last effort of the divine patience to win back even the
+traitor. They show us the wrestle between infinite mercy and a
+treacherous, sinful heart, and they bring into awful prominence the
+power which that heart has of rejecting the counsel of God against
+itself. I venture to use them now as suggesting these three things:
+the patience of Christ's love; the pleading of Christ's love; and
+the refusal of Christ's love.
+
+I. The patience of Christ's love.
+
+If we take no higher view of this most pathetic incident than that the
+words come from a man's lips, even then all its beauty will not be
+lost. There are some sins against friendship in which the manner is
+harder to bear than the substance of the evil. It must have been a
+strangely mean and dastardly nature, as well as a coarse and cold one,
+that could think of fixing on the kiss of affection as the concerted
+sign to point out their victim to the legionaries. Many a man who
+could have planned and executed the treason would have shrunk from
+that. And many a man who could have borne to be betrayed by his own
+familiar friend would have found that heartless insult worse to endure
+than the treason itself. But what a picture of perfect patience and
+unruffled calm we have here, in that the answer to the poisonous,
+hypocritical embrace was these moving words! The touch of the traitor's
+lips has barely left His cheek, but not one faint passing flush of
+anger tinges it. He is perfectly self-oblivious--absorbed in other
+thoughts, and among them in pity for the guilty wretch before Him.
+His words have no agitation in them, no instinctive recoil from the
+pollution of such a salutation. They have grave rebuke, but it is
+rebuke which derives its very force from the appeal to former
+companionship. Christ still recognises the ancient bond, and is true
+to it. He will still plead with this man who has been beside Him long;
+and though His heart be wounded yet He is not wroth, and He will not
+cast him off. If this were nothing more than a picture of human
+friendship it would stand alone, above all other records that the
+world cherishes in its inmost heart, of the love that never fails, and
+is not soon angry.
+
+But we, I hope, dear brethren, think more loftily and more truly of
+our dear Lord than as simply a perfect manhood, the exemplar of all
+goodness. How He comes to be that, if He be not more than that, I do
+not understand, and I, for one, feel that my confidence in the
+flawless completeness of His human character lives or dies with my
+belief that He is the Eternal Word, God manifest in the flesh.
+Certainly we shall never truly grasp the blessed meaning of His life
+on earth until we look upon it all as the revelation of God. The
+tears of Christ are the pity of God. The gentleness of Jesus is the
+long-suffering of God. The tenderness of Jesus is the love of God.
+'He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father'; and all that life so
+beautiful but so anomalous as to be all but incredible, when we
+think of it as only the life of a man, glows with a yet fairer
+beauty, and corresponds with the nature which it expresses, when we
+think of it as being the declaration to us by the divine Son of the
+divine Father--our loftiest, clearest, and authentic revelation of
+God.
+
+How that thought lifts these words before us into a still higher
+region! We are now in the presence of the solemn greatness of a
+divine love. If the meaning of this saying is what we have
+suggested, it is pathetic even in the lower aspect, but how
+infinitely that pathos is deepened when we view it in the higher!
+
+Surely if ever there was a man who might have been supposed to be
+excluded from the love of God, it was Judas. Surely if ever there
+was a moment in a human life, when one might have supposed that even
+Christ's ever open heart would shut itself together against any one,
+it was this moment. But no, the betrayer in the very instant of his
+treason has that changeless tenderness lingering around him, and
+that merciful hand beckoning to him still.
+
+And have we not a right to generalise this wonderful fact, and to
+declare its teaching to be--that the love of God is extended to us
+all, and cannot be made to turn away from us by any sins of ours?
+Sin is mighty; it can work endless evils on us; it can disturb and
+embitter all our relations with God; it can, as we shall presently
+have to point out, make it necessary for the tenderest 'grace of God
+to come disciplining'--to 'come with a rod,' just because it comes
+in 'the spirit of meekness.' But one thing it cannot do, and that
+is--make God cease to love us. I suppose all human affection can be
+worn out by constant failure to evoke a response from cold hearts. I
+suppose that it can be so nipped by frosts, so constantly checked in
+blossoming, that it shrivels and dies. I suppose that constant
+ingratitude, constant indifference can turn the warmest springs of
+our love to a river of ice. 'Can a mother forget her child?--Yea,
+she may forget.' But we have to do with a God, whose love is His
+very being; who loves us not for reasons in us but in Himself; whose
+love is eternal and boundless as all His nature; whose love,
+therefore, cannot be turned away by our sin--but abides with us for
+ever, and is granted to every soul of man. Dear brethren, we cannot
+believe too firmly, we cannot trust too absolutely, we cannot
+proclaim too broadly that blessed thought, without which we have no
+hope to feed on for ourselves, or to share with our fellows--the
+universal love of God in Christ.
+
+Is there a _worst_ man on earth at this moment? If there be,
+he, too, has a share in that love. Harlots and thieves, publicans
+and sinners, leprous outcasts, and souls tormented by unclean
+spirits, the wrecks of humanity whom decent society and respectable
+Christianity passes by with averted head and uplifted hands,
+criminals on the gibbet with the rope round their necks--and those
+who are as hopeless as any of these, self-complacent formalists and
+'Gospel-hardened professors'--all have a place in that heart. And
+that, not as undistinguished members of a class, but as separate
+souls, singly the objects of God's knowledge and love. He loves all,
+because He loves each. We are not massed together in His view, nor
+in His regard. He does not lose the details in the whole; as we,
+looking on some great crowd of upturned faces, are conscious of all
+but recognise no single one. He does not love a class--a world--but
+He loves the single souls that make it up--you and me, and every one
+of the millions that we throw together in the vague phrase, 'the
+race.' Let us individualise that love in our thoughts as it
+individualises us in its outflow--and make our own the 'exceeding
+broad' promises, which include us, too. 'God loves _me_; Christ
+gave Himself for _me_. _I_ have a place in that royal, tender
+heart.'
+
+Nor should any sin make us doubt this. He loved us with exceeding
+love, even when we were 'dead in trespasses.' He did not begin to
+love because of anything in us; He will not cease because of
+anything in us. We change; 'He abideth faithful, He cannot deny
+Himself.' As the sunshine pours down as willingly and abundantly on
+filth and dunghills, as on gold that glitters in its beam, and
+jewels that flash back its lustre, so the light and warmth of that
+unsetting and unexhausted source of life pours down 'on the
+unthankful and on the good.' The great ocean clasps some black and
+barren crag that frowns against it, as closely as with its waves it
+kisses some fair strand enamelled with flowers and fragrant with
+perfumes. So that sea of love in which we 'live, and move, and have
+our being,' encircles the worst with abundant flow. He Himself sets
+us the pattern, which to imitate is to be the children of 'our
+Father which is in heaven,' in that He loves His enemies, blessing
+them that curse, and doing good to them that hate. He Himself is
+what He has enjoined us to be, in that He feeds His enemies when
+they hunger, and when they thirst gives them drink, heaping coals of
+fire on their heads, and seeking to kindle in them thereby the glow
+of answering love, not being overcome of their evil, so that He
+repays hate with hate and scorn with scorn, but in patient
+continuance of loving kindness seeking to overcome evil with good.
+He is Himself that 'charity' which 'is not easily provoked, is not
+soon angry, beareth all things, hopeth all things, and never
+faileth.' His love is mightier than all our sins, and waits not on
+our merits, nor is turned away by our iniquities. 'God so loved the
+world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth
+in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.'
+
+II. Then, secondly, we have here--the pleading of Christ's patient
+love.
+
+I have been trying to say as broadly and strongly as I can, that our
+sins do not turn away the love of God in Christ from us. The more
+earnestly we believe and proclaim that, the more needful is it to
+set forth distinctly--and that not as limiting, but as explaining
+the truth--the other thought, that the sin which does not avert,
+does modify the expression of, the love of God. Man's sin compels
+Him to do what the prophet calls his 'strange work'--the work which
+is not dear to His heart, nor natural, if one may so say, to His
+hands--His work of judgment.
+
+The love of Christ has to come to sinful men with patient pleading
+and remonstrance, that it may enter their hearts and give its
+blessings. We are familiar with a modern work of art in which that
+long-suffering appeal is wonderfully portrayed. He who is the Light
+of the world stands, girded with the royal mantle clasped with the
+priestly breastplate, bearing in His hand the lamp of truth, and
+there, amidst the dew of night and the rank hemlock, He pleads for
+entrance at the closed door which has no handle on its outer side,
+and is hinged to open only from within. 'I stand at the door and
+knock. If any man open the door, I will come in.'
+
+And in this incident before us, we see represented not only the
+endless patience of God's pitying love, but the method which it
+needs to take in order to reach the heart.
+
+There is an appeal to the traitor's heart, and an appeal to his
+conscience. Christ would have him think of the relations that have
+so long subsisted between them; and He would have him think, too, of
+the real nature of the deed he is doing, or, perhaps, of the motives
+that impel him. The grave, sad word, by which He addresses him, is
+meant to smite upon his heart. The sharp question which He puts to
+him is meant to wake up his conscience; and both taken together
+represent the two chief classes of remonstrance which He brings to
+bear upon us all--the two great batteries from which He assails the
+fortress of our sins.
+
+There is first, then--Christ's appeal to the heart. He tries to make
+Judas feel the considerations that should restrain him. The
+appellation by which our Lord addresses him does not in the original
+convey quite so strongly the idea of amity, as our word 'Friend'
+does. It is not the same as that which He had used a few hours
+before in the upper chamber, when He said, 'Henceforth I call you
+not servants, but I have called you friends.--Ye are My friends if
+ye do whatsoever I command you.' It is the same as is put into the
+lips of the Lord of the vineyard, remonstrating with his jealous
+labourer, 'Friend, I do thee no wrong.' There is a tone, then, of
+less intimate association and graver rebuke in it than in that name
+with which He honours those who make His will theirs, and His word
+the law of their lives. It does not speak of close confidence, but
+it does suggest companionship and kindness on the part of the
+speaker. There is rebuke in it, but it is rebuke which derives its
+whole force from the remembrance of ancient concord and connection.
+Our Lord would recall to the memory of the betrayer the days in
+which they had taken sweet counsel together. It is as if He had
+said--'Hast thou forgotten all our former intercourse? Thou hast
+eaten My bread, thou hast been Mine own familiar friend, in whom I
+trusted--canst thou lift up thy heel against Me?' What happy hours
+of quiet fellowship on many a journey, of rest together after many a
+day of toil, what forgotten thoughts of the loving devotion and the
+glow of glad consecration that he had once felt, what a long series
+of proofs of Christ's gentle goodness and meek wisdom should have
+sprung again to remembrance at such an appeal! And how black and
+dastardly would his guilt have seemed if once he had ventured to
+remember what unexampled friendship he was sinning against!
+
+Is it not so with us all, dear brethren? All our evils are betrayals
+of Christ, and all our betrayals of Christ are sins against a
+perfect friendship and an unvaried goodness. We, too, have sat at
+His table, heard His wisdom, seen His miracles, listened to His
+pleadings, have had a place in His heart; and if we turn away from
+Him to do our own pleasure, and sell His love for a handful of
+silver, we need not cherish shuddering abhorrence against that poor
+wretch who gave Him up to the cross. Oh! if we could see aright, we
+should see our Saviour's meek, sad face standing between us and each
+of our sins, with warning in the pitying eyes, and His pleading
+voice would sound in our ears, appealing to us by loving
+remembrances of His ancient friendship, to turn from the evil which
+is treason against Him, and wounds His heart as much as it harms
+ours. Take heed lest in condemning the traitor we doom ourselves. If
+we flush into anger at the meanness of his crime, and declare, 'He
+shall surely die,' do we not hear a prophet's voice saying to each,
+'Thou art the man'?
+
+The loving hand laid on the heart-strings is followed by a strong
+stroke on conscience. The heart vibrates most readily in answer to
+gentle touches: the conscience, in answer to heavier, as the breath
+that wakes the chords of an Aeolian harp would pass silent through
+the brass of a trumpet. 'Wherefore art thou come?'--if to be taken
+as a question at all, which, as I have said, seems most natural, is
+either, 'What hast thou come to do?'--or, 'Why hast thou come to do
+it?' Perhaps it maybe fairly taken as including both. But, at all
+events, it is clearly an appeal to Judas to make him see what his
+conduct really is in itself, and possibly in its motive too. And
+this is the constant effort of the love of Christ--to get us to say
+to ourselves the real name of what we are about.
+
+We cloak our sins from ourselves with many wrappings, as they swathe
+a mummy in voluminous folds. And of these veils, one of the thickest
+is woven by our misuse of words to describe the very same thing by
+different names, according as we do it, or another man does it.
+Almost all moral actions--the thing to which we can apply the words
+right or wrong--have two or more names, of which the one suggests
+the better and the other the worse side of the action. For instance
+what in ourselves we call prudent regard for our own interest, we
+call, in our neighbour, narrow selfishness; what in ourselves is
+laudable economy, in him is miserable avarice. We are impetuous, he
+is passionate; we generous, he lavish; we are clever men of
+business, he is a rogue; we sow our wild oats and are gay, he is
+dissipated. So we cheat ourselves by more than half-transparent
+veils of our own manufacture, which we fling round the ugly features
+and misshapen limbs of these sins of ours, and we are made more than
+ever their bond-slaves thereby.
+
+Therefore, it is the office of the truest love to force us to look at
+the thing as it is. It would go some way to keep a man from some of
+his sins if he would give the thing its real name. A distinct conscious
+statement to oneself, 'Now I am going to tell a lie'--'This that I am
+doing is fraud'--'This emotion that I feel creeping with devilish
+warmth about the roots of my heart is revenge'--and so on, would
+surely startle us sometimes, and make us fling the gliding poison
+from our breast, as a man would a snake that he found just lifting
+its head from the bosom of his robe. Suppose Judas had answered the
+question, and, gathering himself up, had looked his Master in the face,
+and said--'What have I come for?' 'I have come to betray Thee for
+thirty pieces of silver!' Do you not think that putting his guilt into
+words might have moved even him to more salutary feelings than the
+remorse which afterwards accompanied his tardy discernment of what he
+_had_ done? So the patient love of Christ comes rebuking, and
+smiting hard on conscience. 'The grace of God that bringeth salvation
+to all men hath appeared disciplining'--and His hand is never more
+gentle than when it plucks away the films with which we hide our sins
+from ourselves, and shows us the 'rottenness and dead men's bones'
+beneath the whited walls of the sepulchres and the velvet of the coffins.
+
+He must begin with rebukes that He may advance to blessing. He must
+teach us what is separating us from Him that, learning it, we may
+flee to His grace to help us. There is no entrance for the truest
+gifts of His patient love into any heart that has not yielded to His
+pleading remonstrance, and in lowly penitence has answered His
+question as He would have us answer it, 'Friend and Lover of my
+soul, I have sinned against Thy tender heart, against the unexampled
+patience of Thy love. I have departed from Thee and betrayed Thee.
+Blessed be Thy merciful voice which hath taught me what I have done!
+Blessed be Thine unwearied goodness which still bends over me! Raise
+me fallen! forgive me treacherous! Keep me safe and happy, ever true
+and near to Thee!'
+
+III. Notice the possible rejection of the pleading of Christ's
+patient love.
+
+Even that appeal was vain. Here we are confronted with a plain
+instance of man's mysterious and awful power of 'frustrating the
+counsel of God'--of which one knows not whether is greater, the
+difficulty of understanding how a finite will _can_ rear itself
+against the Infinite Will, or the mournful mystery that a creature
+should desire to set itself against its loving Maker and Benefactor.
+But strange as it is, yet so it is; and we can turn round upon
+Sovereign Fatherhood bidding us to its service, and say, '_I will
+not_.' He pleads with us, and we can resist His pleadings. He
+holds out the mercies of His hands and the gifts of His grace, and
+we can reject them. We cannot cease to be the objects of His love,
+but we can refuse to be the recipients of its most precious gifts.
+We can bar our hearts against it. Then, of what avail is it to us?
+To go back to an earlier illustration, the sunshine pours down and
+floods a world, what does that matter to us if we have fastened up
+shutters on all our windows, and barred every crevice through which
+the streaming gladness can find its way? We shall grope at noontide
+as in the dark within our gloomy house, while our neighbours have
+light in theirs. What matters it though we float in the great ocean
+of the divine love, if with pitch and canvas we have carefully
+closed every aperture at which the flood can enter? A hermetically
+closed jar, plunged in the Atlantic, will be as dry inside as if it
+were lying on the sand of the desert. It is possible to perish of
+thirst within sight of the fountain. It is possible to separate
+ourselves from the love of God, not to separate the love of God from
+ourselves.
+
+The incident before us carries another solemn lesson--how simple and
+easy a thing it is to repel that pleading love. What did Judas do?
+Nothing; it was enough. He merely held his peace--no more. There was
+no need for him to break out with oaths and curses, to reject his
+Lord with wild words. Silence was sufficient. And for us--no more is
+required. We have but to be passive; we have but to stand still. Not
+to accept is to refuse; non-submission is rebellion. We do not need
+to emphasise our refusal by any action--no need to lift our clenched
+hands in defiance. We have simply to put them behind our backs or to
+keep them folded. The closed hand must remain an empty hand. 'He
+that believeth not is condemned.' My friend, remember that, when
+Christ pleads and draws, to do nothing is to oppose, and to delay is
+to refuse. It is a very easy matter to ruin your soul. You have
+simply to keep still when He says 'Come unto Me'--to keep your eyes
+fixed where they were, when He says, 'Look unto Me, and be ye
+saved,' and all the rest will follow of itself.
+
+Notice, too, how the appeal of Christ's love hardens where it does
+not soften. That gentle voice drove the traitor nearer the verge
+over which he fell into a gulf of despair. It should have drawn him
+closer to the Lord, but he recoiled from it, and was thereby brought
+nearer destruction. Every pleading of Christ's grace, whether by
+providences, or by books, or by His own word, does something with
+us. It is never vain. Either it melts or it hardens. The sun either
+scatters the summer morning mists, or it rolls them into heavier
+folds, from whose livid depths the lightning will be flashing by
+mid-day. You cannot come near the most inadequate exhibition of the
+pardoning love of Christ without being either drawn closer to Him or
+driven further from Him. Each act of rejection prepares the way for
+another, which will be easier, and adds another film to the darkness
+which covers your eyes, another layer to the hardness which incrusts
+your hearts.
+
+Again, that silence, so eloquent and potent in its influence, was
+probably the silence of a man whose conscience was convicted while
+his will was unchanged. Such a condition is possible. It points to
+solemn thoughts, and to deep mysteries in man's awful nature. He
+knew that he was wrong, he had no excuse, his deed was before him in
+some measure in its true character, and yet he would not give it up.
+Such a state, if constant and complete, presents the most frightful
+picture we can frame of a soul. That a man shall not be able to say,
+'I did it ignorantly'; that Christ shall not be able to ground His
+intercession on, 'They know not what they do'; that with full
+knowledge of the true nature of the deed, there shall be no wavering
+of the determination to do it--we may well turn with terror from
+such an awful abyss. But let us remember that, whether such a
+condition in its completeness is conceivable or not, at all events
+we may approach it indefinitely; and we do approach it by every sin,
+and by every refusal to yield to the love that would touch our
+consciences and fill our hearts.
+
+Have you ever noticed what a remarkable verbal correspondence there
+is between these words of our text, and some other very solemn ones
+of Christ's? The question that He puts into the lips of the king who
+came in to see his guests is, '_Friend, how camest thou_ in
+hither, not having on a wedding garment?' The question asked on
+earth shall be repeated again at last. The silence which once
+indicated a convinced conscience and an unchanged will may at that
+day indicate both of these and hopelessness beside. The clear vision
+of the divine love, if it do not flood the heart with joy and evoke
+the bliss of answering love, may fill it with bitterness. It is
+possible that the same revelation of the same grace may be the
+heaven of heaven to those who welcome it, and the pain of hell to
+those who turn from it. It is possible that love believed and
+received may be life, and love recognised and rejected may be death.
+It is possible that the vision of the same face may make some break
+forth with the rapturous hymn, 'Lo, this is our God, we have waited
+for Him!' and make others call on the hills to fall on them and
+cover them from its brightness.
+
+But let us not end with such words. Rather, dear brethren, let us
+yield to His patient beseechings; let Him teach us our evil and our
+sin. Listen to His great love who invites us to plead, and promises
+to pardon--'Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord:
+though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow;
+though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.'
+
+
+
+
+THE REAL HIGH PRIEST AND HIS COUNTERFEIT
+
+
+    'And they that had laid hold on Jesus led Him away to
+    Caiaphas the high priest, where the scribes and the
+    elders were assembled. 58. But Peter followed Him afar
+    off unto the high priest's palace, and went in, and sat
+    with the servants, to see the end. 59. Now the chief
+    priests, and elders, and all the council, sought false
+    witness against Jesus, to put Him to death; 60. But
+    found none: yea, though many false witnesses came, yet
+    found they none. At the last came two false witnesses,
+    61. And said, This fellow said, I am able to destroy
+    the temple of God, and to build it in three days.
+    62 And the high priest arose, and said unto Him,
+    Answerest Thou nothing? what is it which these witness
+    against Thee? 63. But Jesus held His peace. And the
+    high priest answered and said unto Him, I adjure Thee
+    by the living God, that Thou tell us whether Thou be
+    the Christ, the Son of God. 64. Jesus saith unto him,
+    Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter
+    shall ye see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand
+    of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. 65. Then
+    the high priest rent his clothes, saying, He hath spoken
+    blasphemy; what further need have we of witnesses?
+    behold, now ye have heard His blasphemy. 66. What think
+    ye? They answered and said, He is guilty of death.
+    67. Then did they spit in His face, and buffeted Him;
+    and others smote Him with the palms of their hands,
+    68. Saying, Prophesy unto us, Thou Christ, Who is he
+    that smote Thee?'--MATT. xxvi. 57-68.
+
+John's Gospel tells us that Jesus was brought before 'Annas first,'
+probably in the same official priestly residence as Caiaphas, his
+son-in-law, occupied. That preliminary examination brought out
+nothing to incriminate the prisoner, and was flagrantly illegal,
+being an attempt to entrap Him into self-accusing statements. It was
+baffled by Jesus being silent first, and subsequently taking His
+stand on the undeniable principle that a charge must be sustained by
+evidence, not based on self-accusation. Annas, having made nothing
+of this strange criminal, 'sent Him bound unto Caiaphas.'
+
+A meeting of the Sanhedrin had been hastily summoned in the dead of
+night, which was itself an illegality. Now Jesus stands before the
+poor shadow of a judicial tribunal, which, though it was all that
+Rome had left a conquered people, was still entitled to sit in
+judgment on Him. Strange inversion, and awful position for these
+formalists! And with sad persistence of bitter prejudice they
+proceeded to try the prisoner, all unaware that it was themselves,
+not Him, that they were trying.
+
+They began wrongly, and betrayed their animus at once. They were
+sitting there to inquire whether Jesus was guilty or no; they had
+made up their minds beforehand that He was, and their effort now was
+but to manufacture some thin veil of legality for a judicial murder.
+So they 'sought false witness, ... that they might put Him to
+death.' Matthew simply says that no evidence sufficient for the
+purpose was forthcoming; Mark adds that the weak point, was that the
+lies contradicted each other. Christ's presence has a strange,
+solemn power of unmasking our falsehoods, both of thought and deed,
+and it is hard to speak evil of Him before His face. If His
+calumniators were confused when He stood as Prisoner, what will they
+be when He sits as a Judge?
+
+Only Matthew and Mark tell us of the two witnesses whose twisted
+version of the word about 'destroying the Temple and rebuilding it
+in three days' seemed to Caiaphas serious enough to require an
+answer. Their mistake was one which might have been made in good
+faith, but none the less was their travesty 'false witness.' Their
+version of His great word shows how easily the teaching of a lofty
+soul, passed through the popular brain, is degraded, and made to
+mean the opposite of what he had meant by it. For the destruction of
+the Temple had appeared in the saying as the Jews' work, and Jesus
+had presented Himself in it as the Restorer, not the Destroyer, of
+the Temple and of all that it symbolised. We destroy, He rebuilds.
+The murder of Jesus was the suicide of the nation. Caiaphas and his
+council were even now pulling down the Temple. And that murder was
+the destruction, so far as men could effect it, of the true 'Temple
+of His body,' in which the fulness of the Godhead dwelt, and which
+was more gloriously reconstituted in the Resurrection. The risen
+Christ rears the true temple on earth, for through Him the Holy
+Ghost dwells in His Church, which is collectively 'the Temple,' and
+in all believing spirits, which are individually 'the temples' of
+God. So the false witnesses distorted into a lie a great truth.
+
+The Incarnate Word was dumb all the while. He 'was still and
+refrained' Himself. It was the silence of the King before a lawless
+tribunal of rebels, of patient meekness, 'as a sheep before her
+shearers'; of innocence that will not stoop to defend itself from
+groundless accusations; of infinite pity and forbearing love, which
+sees that it cannot win, but will not smite. Jesus is still silent,
+but one day, 'with the breath of His lips shall He slay the wicked.'
+Caiaphas seems to have been annoyed as well as surprised at Jesus'
+silence, for there is a trace of irritation, as at 'contempt of
+court,' in his words. But our Lord's continued silence appears to
+have somewhat awed him, and the dawning consciousness of his dignity
+is, perhaps, the reason for the high priest's casting aside all the
+foolery of false witnessing, and coming at last to the real point,--
+the Messianic claims of Jesus.
+
+Caiaphas was doing his duty as high priest in inquiring into such
+claims, but he was somewhat late in the day, and he had made up his
+mind before he inquired. What he wished to get was a plain assertion
+on which the death sentence could be pronounced. Jesus knew this,
+and yet He answered. But Luke tells us that He first scathingly
+pointed to the unreality and animus of the question by saying, 'If I
+tell you, ye will not believe.' But yet it was fitting that He
+should solemnly, before the supreme court, representative of the
+nation, declare that He was the Messiah, and that, if He was to be
+rejected and condemned, it should be on the ground of that
+declaration. Before Caiaphas He claimed to be Messiah, before Pilate
+He claimed to be King. Each rejected Him in the character that
+appealed to them most. The many-sidedness of the perfect Revealer of
+God brings Him to each soul in the aspect that most loudly addresses
+each. Therefore the love in the appeal and the guilt in its
+rejection are the greater.
+
+But Christ's self-attestation to the council was not limited to the
+mere claim to the name of Messiah. It disclosed the implications of
+that name in a way altogether unlike the conceptions held by
+Caiaphas. When Caiaphas put in apposition 'the Christ' and 'the Son
+of God,' he was not speaking from the ordinary Jewish point of view,
+but from some knowledge, of Christ's teaching, and there are two
+charges combined into one.
+
+But Jesus' answer, while plainly claiming to be the Messiah, expands
+itself in regard to the claim to be 'Son of God,' and shows its
+tremendous significance. It involves participation in divine
+authority and omnipotence. It involves a future coming to be the
+Judge of His judges. It declares that these blind scribes and elders
+will see Him thus exalted, and it asserts that all this is to begin
+then and there ('henceforth'), as if that hour of humiliation was to
+His consciousness the beginning of His manifestation as Lord, or, as
+John has it, 'the hour that the Son of Man should be glorified.' Nor
+must we leave out of sight the fact that it is 'the Son of Man' of
+whom all this is said, for thereby are indicated the raising of His
+perfect humanity to participation in Deity, and the possibility that
+His brethren, too, may sit where He sits. Much was veiled in the
+answer to the council, much is veiled to us. But this remains,--that
+Jesus, at that supreme moment, when He was bound to leave no
+misunderstandings, made the plainest claim to divinity, and could
+have saved His life if He had not done so. Either Caiaphas, in his
+ostentatious horror of such impiety, was right in calling Christ's
+words blasphemy, and not far wrong in inferring that Jesus was not
+fit to live, or He is the everlasting 'Son of the Father,' and will
+'come to be our Judge.'
+
+
+
+
+JESUS CHARGED WITH BLASPHEMY
+
+
+    'Then the high priest rent his clothes, saying, He
+    hath spoken blasphemy; what further need have we of
+    witnesses?'--MATT. xxvi. 65.
+
+Jesus was tried and condemned by two tribunals, the Jewish
+ecclesiastical and the Roman civil. In each case the charge
+corresponded to the Court. The Sanhedrin took no cognisance of, and
+had no concern with, rebellion against Caesar; though for the time
+they pretended loyalty. Pilate had still less concern about Jewish
+superstitions. And so the investigation in each case turned on a
+different question. In the one it was, 'Art Thou the Son of God?' in
+the other, 'Art Thou the King of Israel?' The answer to both was a
+simple 'Yes!' but with very significant differences. Pilate received
+an explanation; the Sanhedrin none. The Roman governor was taught
+that Christ's title of King belonged to another region altogether
+from that of Caesar, and did not in the slightest degree infringe
+upon the dominion that he represented. But 'Son of God' was capable
+of no explanation that could make it any less offensive; and the
+only thing to be done was to accept it or to condemn Him.
+
+So this saying of the high priest differs from other words of our
+Lord's antagonists, which we have been considering in recent pages,
+in that it is no distortion of our Lord's characteristics or
+meaning. It correctly understands, but it fatally rejects, His
+claims; and does not hesitate to take the further step, on the
+ground of these, of branding Him as a blasphemer.
+
+We may turn the high priest's question in another direction: 'What
+further need have we of witnesses?' These horror-stricken judges,
+rending their garments in simulated grief and zeal, and that silent
+Prisoner, knowing that His life was the forfeit of His claims, yet
+saying no word of softening or explanation of them, may teach us
+much. They are witnesses to some of the central facts of the
+revelation of God in Christ. Let us turn to these for a few moments.
+
+I. First, then, they witness to Christ's claims.
+
+The question that was proposed to Jesus, 'Art Thou the Christ, the
+Son of the living God?' was suggested by the facts of His ministry,
+and not by anything that had come out in the course of this
+investigation. It was the summing up of the impression made on the
+ecclesiastical authorities of Judaism by His whole attitude and
+demeanour. And if we look back to His life we shall see that there
+were instances, long before this, on which, on the same ground, the
+same charge was flung at Him. For example, when He would heal the
+paralytic, and, before He dealt with bodily disease, attended to
+spiritual weakness, and said, 'Thy sins be forgiven thee,' ere He
+said, 'Take up thy bed and walk,' there was a group of keen-eyed
+hunters after heresy sitting eagerly on the watch, who snatched at
+the words in a moment, and said, 'Who is this that forgiveth sins?
+No _man_ forgiveth sins, but God only! This man speaketh
+blasphemies!' And they were right. He did claim a divine
+prerogative; and either the claim must be admitted or the charge of
+blasphemy urged.
+
+Again, when He infringed Rabbinical Sabbath law by a cure, and they
+said, 'This Man has broken the Sabbath day,' His vindication was
+worse than His offence, for He answered, 'My Father worketh
+hitherto, and I work.' And then they sought the more to kill Him,
+because He not only brake the Sabbath, but also called God His own
+Father, making Himself equal with God.' And again, when He declared
+that the safety of His sheep in His hands was identical with their
+safety in His Father's hands, and vindicated the audacious
+parallelism by the tremendous assertion, 'I and My Father are One,'
+the charge of blasphemy rang out; and was inevitable, unless the
+claim was true.
+
+These outstanding instances are but, as it were, summits that rise
+above the general level. But the general level is that of One who
+takes an altogether unique position. No one else, professing to lead
+men in paths of righteousness, has so constantly put the stress of
+His teaching, not upon morality, nor religion, nor obedience to God,
+but upon this, 'Believe in Me'; or ever pushed forward His own
+personality into the foreground, and made the whole nobleness and
+blessedness and security and devoutness of a life to hinge upon that
+one thing, its personal relation to Him.
+
+People talk about the sweet and gentle wisdom that flowed from
+Christ's lips, and so on; about the lofty morality, about the beauty
+of pity and tenderness, and all the other commonplaces so familiar
+to us, and we gladly admit them all. But I venture to go a step
+further than all these, and to say that the outstanding
+_differentia_, the characteristic which marks off Christ's
+teaching as something new, peculiar, and altogether _per se_,
+is not its morality, not its philanthropy, not its meek wisdom, not
+its sweet reasonableness, but its tremendous assertions of the
+importance of Himself.
+
+And if I am asked to state the ground upon which such an assertion
+may be vindicated, I would point you to such facts as these, that
+this Man took up a position of equality with, and of superiority to,
+the legislation which He and the people to whom He was speaking
+regarded as being divinely sent, and said, 'Ye have heard that it
+hath been said to them of old time' so and so; 'but I say unto you':
+that this Man declared that to build upon His words was to build
+upon a rock; that this Man declared that He--He--was the legitimate
+object of absolute trust, of utter submission and obedience; that He
+claimed from His followers affiance, love, reverence which cannot be
+distinguished from worship, and that He did not therein conceive
+that He was intercepting anything that belonged to the Father. This
+Man professed to be able to satisfy the desires of every human heart
+when He said, 'If any man thirst let him come to Me and drink.' This
+Man claimed to be able to breathe the sanctity of repose in the
+blessedness of obedience over all the weary and the heavy laden; and
+assured them that He Himself, through all the ages, and in all
+lands, and for all troubles, would give them rest. This Man declared
+that He who stood there, in the quiet homes of Galilee, and went
+about its acres with those blessed feet for our advantage, was to be
+Judge of the whole world. This Man said that His name was 'Son of
+God'; and this Man declared, 'He that hath seen Me hath seen the
+Father.'
+
+And then people say to us, 'Oh! your Gospel narratives, even if they
+be the work of men in good faith, telling what they suppose He said,
+mistook the Teacher; and if we could strip away the accretion of
+mistaken reverence, and come to the historical person, we should
+find no claims like these.'
+
+Well, this is not the time to enter into the large questions which
+that contention involves, but I point you to the incident which
+makes my text, and I say, 'What need we any further witnesses?'
+Nobody denies that Jesus Christ was crucified as the result of a
+combination of Sanhedrin and Pilate. What set the Jewish rulers
+against Him with such virulent and murderous determination? Is there
+anything in the life of Jesus Christ, if it is watered down as the
+people, who want to knock out all the supernatural, desire to water
+it down--is there anything in the life that will account for the
+inveterate acrimony and hostility which pursued Him to the death?
+The fact remains that, whether or not Evangelists and Apostles
+misconceived His teaching when they gave such prominence to His
+personality and His lofty claims, His enemies were under the same
+delusion, if it were a delusion; and the reason why the whole
+orthodox religionism of Judaism rejoiced when He was nailed to the
+Cross was summed up in the taunt which they flung at Him as He hung
+there, 'If He be the Son of God, let Him come down, and we will
+believe Him.'
+
+So, brethren, I put into the witness-box Annas and Caiaphas and all
+their satellites, and I say, 'What need we any further witnesses?'
+He died because He declared that He was the Son of God.
+
+And I beseech you ask yourselves whether we are not being put off
+with a maimed version of His teaching, if there is struck out of it
+this its central characteristic, that He, 'the sage and humble,'
+declared that He was 'likewise One with the Creator.'
+
+II. Secondly, note how we have here the witness that Jesus Christ
+assented always to the loftiest meaning that men attached to His
+claims.
+
+I have already pointed out the remarkable difference between the
+explanations which He condescended to give to the Roman governor as
+to the perfectly innocent meaning of His claim to be the King of
+Israel, and His silence before the Sanhedrin. That silence is only
+explicable because they rightly understood the meaning of the claim
+which they contemptuously and perversely rejected. Jesus Christ knew
+that His death was the forfeit, as I have said, and yet He locked
+His lips and said not a word.
+
+In like manner when, on the other occasion to which I have already
+referred, the Pharisees stumbled at His claims to forgive sins, He
+said nothing to soften down that claim. If He had meant then only
+what some people would desire to make Him mean when He said, 'Thy
+sins be forgiven thee'--viz., that He was simply acting as a
+minister of the divine forgiveness, and assuring a poor sinner that
+God had pardoned him--why in common honesty, in discharge of His
+plain obligations of a teacher, did He not say so--not for His own
+sake, but for the sake of preventing such a tremendous
+misunderstanding of His meaning? But He let them go away with the
+conviction that He intended to claim a divine prerogative, and
+vindicated the assertion by doing what only a divine power could do:
+'That ye may know that the Son of Man hath power enough on earth to
+forgive sins, He saith unto the sick of the palsy, Take up thy bed
+and walk.' There was no need for Him to have wrought a miracle to
+establish His right to tell a poor soul that God forgave sin. And
+the fact that the miracle was supposed to be the demonstration and
+the vindication of His right to declare forgiveness shows that He
+was exercising that prerogative which belongs, as they rightly said,
+to God only.
+
+And in precisely the same manner, the commonest obligations of
+honesty, the plain duty of a misunderstood Teacher, to say nothing
+of the duty of self-preservation, ought to have opened His lips in
+the presence of the Jewish authorities, if they understood wrongly
+and set too high their estimate of the meaning of His claims. His
+silence establishes the fact that they understood these aright.
+
+And so, all through His life, we note this peculiarity, that He
+never puts aside as too lofty for truth men's highest interpretations
+of His claims, nor as too lowly for their mutual relation the lowest
+reverence which bowed before Him. Peter, in the house of Cornelius,
+said, 'Stand up! for I myself also am a man.' Paul and Barnabas, when
+the priests brought out the oxen and garlands to the gates of Lystra,
+could say, 'We also are men of like passions with yourselves.' But
+this meek Jesus lets men fall at His feet; and women wash them with
+their tears and wipe them with the hairs of their head; and souls
+stretch out maimed hands of faith, and grasp Him as their only hope.
+When His apostle said, 'Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,'
+His answer was, 'Blessed art thou, for flesh and blood hath not revealed
+it unto thee,' and when another exclaimed, 'My Lord and my God!' this
+Pattern of all meekness accepted and endorsed the title, and pronounced
+a benediction on all who, not having seen Him, should hereafter attain
+a like faith.
+
+Now I want to know whether that characteristic, which runs through all
+His life, and is inseparable from it, can be vindicated on any ground
+except the ground that He was 'God manifest in the flesh.' Either
+Jesus Christ had a greedy appetite for excessive adoration, was a
+victim to diseased vanity and ever-present self-regard--the most
+damning charge that you can bring against a religious teacher--or He
+accepted love and reverence and trust, because the love and the
+reverence and the trust knit souls to the Incarnate God their Saviour.
+
+III. And so, lastly we have here witness to the only alternative to
+the acceptance of His claims.
+
+He hath spoken 'blasphemy,' not because He had derogated from the
+dignity of divinity, but because He had presumed to participate in
+it. And it seems to me, with all deference, that this rough
+alternative is the only legitimate one. If Jesus Christ did make
+such claims, and His relation to the Jewish hierarchy and His death
+are, as I have shown you, apart even from the testimony of the
+Evangelists, strong confirmation of the fact that He did--if Jesus
+Christ did make such claims, and they were not valid, one of two
+things follows. Either He believed them, and then, what about His
+sanity? or He did not believe them, and then, what about His
+honesty? In either case, what about His claims to be a Teacher of
+religion? What about His claims to be the Pattern of humanity? That
+part of His teaching and character is either the manifestation of
+His glory or it is like one of those fatal black seams that run
+through and penetrate into the substance of a fair white marble
+statue, marring all the rest of its pale and celestial beauty.
+Brethren, it seems to me that, when all is said and done, we come to
+one of three things about Jesus Christ. Either 'He blasphemeth' if
+He said these things, and they were not true, or 'He is beside
+Himself' if He said these things and believed them, or
+
+  'Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ;
+   Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father.'
+
+Now I know that there are many men who, I venture to say, are far
+better than their creed, and who, believing it impossible to accept,
+in their plain meaning, the plain claims of Jesus Christ to
+divinity, do yet cleave to Him with a love and a reverence and an
+obedience which more orthodox men might well copy. And far be it
+from me to say one word which might seem even to quench the faintest
+beam of light that, shining from His perfect character, draws any
+heart, however imperfectly, to Himself. Only, if I speak to any such
+at this time, I beseech them to follow the light which draws them,
+and to see whether their reverence for that fair character should
+not lead them to accept implicitly the claims that came from His own
+lips. I humbly venture to say that if we know anything at all about
+Jesus Christ, we know that He lived declaring Himself to be the
+Everlasting Son of the Father, and that He died because He did so
+declare Himself. And I beseech you to ponder the question whether
+reverence for Him and admiration of His character can be logically
+and reasonably retained, side by side with the repudiation of that
+which is the most distinctive part of His message to men.
+
+Oh, brethren, if it is true that God has come in the flesh, and that
+that sweet, gracious, infinitely beautiful life is really the
+revelation of the heart of God, then what a beam of sunshine falls
+upon all the darkness of this world! Then God is love; then that
+love holds us all; did not shrink from dying for us, and lives for
+ever to bless us. If these claims are true, what should our attitude
+be but that of infinite trust, love, submission, obedience, and the
+shaping of our lives after the pattern of His life?
+
+These rejectors, when they said, 'He speaketh blasphemies,' were
+sealing their own doom, and the ruined Temple and nineteen centuries
+of wandering misery show what comes to men who hear Christ declaring
+that He is the Son of the living God and the Judge of the world, and
+who find nothing in the words but blasphemy. On the other hand, if
+we will answer His question, 'Whom say ye that I am?' as the apostle
+answered it, we shall, like the apostle, receive a benediction from
+His lips, and be set on that faith as on a rock against which the
+'gates of hell' shall not prevail.
+
+
+
+
+'SEE THOU TO THAT!'
+
+
+    'I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent
+    blood. And they said, What is that to us? See thou to
+    that. 24. I am innocent of the blood of this just
+    Person: see ye to it.'--MATT. xxvii. 4, 24.
+
+So, what the priests said to Judas, Pilate said to the priests. They
+contemptuously bade their wretched instrument bear the burden of his
+own treachery. They had condescended to use his services, but he
+presumed too far if he thought that that gave him a claim upon their
+sympathies. The tools of more respectable and bolder sinners are
+flung aside as soon as they are done with. What were the agonies or
+the tears of a hundred such as he to these high-placed and heartless
+transgressors? Priests though they were, and therefore bound by
+their office to help any poor creature that was struggling with a
+wounded conscience, they had nothing better to say to him than this
+scornful gibe, 'What is that to us? See thou to that.'
+
+Pilate, on the other hand, metes to them the measure which they had
+meted to Judas. With curious verbal correspondence, he repeats the
+very words of Judas and of the priests. 'Innocent blood,' said
+Judas. 'I am innocent of the blood of this just Person,' said
+Pilate. 'See thou to that,' answered they. 'See ye to it,' says he.
+He tries to shove off his responsibility upon them, and they are
+quite willing to take it. Their consciences are not easily touched.
+Fanatical hatred which thinks itself influenced by religious motives
+is the blindest and cruellest of all passions, knowing no
+compunction, and utterly unperceptive of the innocence of its
+victim.
+
+And so these three, Judas, the priests, and Pilate, suggest to us, I
+think, a threefold way in which conscience is perverted. Judas
+represents the agony of conscience, Pilate represents the shuffling
+sophistications of a half-awakened conscience, and those priests and
+people represent the torpor of an altogether misdirected conscience.
+
+I. Judas, or the agony of conscience.
+
+'I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood.' We do
+not need to enter at any length upon the difficult question as to
+what were the motives of Judas in his treachery. For my part I do
+not see that there is anything in the Scripture narrative, simply
+interpreted, to bear out the hypothesis that his motives were
+mistaken zeal and affection for Christ; and a desire to force Him to
+the avowal of His Messiahship. One can scarcely suppose zeal so
+strangely perverted as to begin by betrayal, and if the object was
+to make our Lord speak out His claims, the means adopted were
+singularly ill-chosen. The story, as it stands, naturally suggests a
+much less far-fetched explanation.
+
+Judas was simply a man of a low earthly nature, who became a
+follower of Christ, thinking that He was to prove a Messiah of the
+vulgar type, or another Judas Maccabæus. He was not attracted by
+Christ's character and teaching. As the true nature of Christ's work
+and kingdom became more obvious, he became more weary of Him and it.
+The closest proximity to Jesus Christ made eleven enthusiastic
+disciples, but it made one traitor. No man could live near Him for
+three years without coming to hate Him if he did not love Him. Then,
+as ever, He was set for the fall and for the rise of many. He was
+the 'savour of life unto life, or of death unto death.'
+
+But be this as it may, we have here to do with the sudden revulsion
+of feeling which followed upon the accomplished act. This burst of
+confession does not sound like the words of a man who had been
+actuated by motives of mistaken affection. He knows himself a
+traitor, and that fair, perfect character rises before him in its
+purity, as he had never seen it before--to rebuke and confound him.
+
+So this exclamation of his puts into a vivid shape, which may help it to
+stick in our memories and hearts, this thought--what an awful difference
+there is in the look of a sin before we do it and afterwards! Before we
+do it the thing to be gained seems so attractive, and the transgression
+that gains it seems so comparatively insignificant. Yes! and when we
+have done it the two change places; the thing that we win by it seems
+so contemptible--thirty pieces of silver! pitch them over the Temple
+enclosure and get rid of them!--and the thing that we did to win them
+dilates into such awful magnitude!
+
+For instance, suppose we do anything that we know to be wrong, being
+tempted to it by a momentary indulgence of some mere animal impulse.
+By the very nature of the case, that dies in its satisfaction and
+the desire dies along with it. We do not wish the prize any more
+when once we have got it. It lasts but a moment and is past. Then we
+are left alone with the thought of the sin that we have done. When
+we get the prize of our wrong-doing, we find out that it is not as
+all-satisfying as we expected it would be. Most of our earthly aims
+are like that. The chase is a great deal more than the hare. Or, as
+George Herbert has it, 'Nothing between two dishes--a splendid
+service of silver plate, and when you take the cover off there is no
+food to eat--such are the pleasures here.'
+
+Universally, this is true, that sooner or later, when the delirium
+of passion and the rush of temptation are over and we wake to
+consciousness, we find that we are none the richer for the thing
+gained, and oh! so infinitely the poorer for the means by which we
+gained it. It is that old story of the Veiled Prophet that wooed and
+won the hearts of foolish maidens, and, when he had them in his
+power in the inner chamber, removed the silver veil which they had
+thought hid dazzling glory and showed hideous features that struck
+despair into their hearts. Every man's sin does that for him. And to
+you I come now with this message: every wrong thing that you do,
+great or small, will be like some of those hollow images of the gods
+that one hears of in barbarian temples--looked at in front, fair,
+but when you get behind them you find a hollow, full of dust and
+spiders' webs and unclean things. Be sure of this, every sin is a
+blunder.
+
+That is the first lesson that lies in these words of this wretched
+traitor; but again, here is an awful picture for us of the hell upon
+earth, of a conscience which has no hope of pardon. I do not suppose
+that Judas was lost, if he were lost, because he betrayed Jesus
+Christ, but because, having betrayed Jesus Christ, he never asked to
+be forgiven. And I suppose that the difference between the traitor
+who betrayed Him and the other traitor who denied Him, was this,
+that the one, when 'he went out and wept bitterly,' had the thought
+of a loving Master with him, and the other, when 'he went out and
+hanged himself,' had the thought of nothing but that foul deed
+glaring before him. I pray you to learn this lesson--you cannot
+think too much, too blackly, of your own sins, but you may think too
+exclusively of them, and if you do they will drive you to madness of
+despair.
+
+My dear friend, there is no penitence or remorse which is deep
+enough for the smallest transgression; but there is no transgression
+which is so great but that forgiveness for it may come. And we may
+have it for the asking, if we will go to that dear Christ that died
+for us. The consciousness of sinfulness is a wholesome consciousness.
+I would that every man and woman listening to me now had it deep in
+their consciences, and then I would that it might lead us all to that
+one Lord in whom there is forgiveness and peace. Be sure of this,
+that if Judas Iscariot, when his 'soul flared forth in the dark,'
+died without hope and without pardon, it was not because his crime
+was too great for forgiveness, but because the forgiveness had never
+been asked. There is no unpardonable sin except that of refusing the
+pardon that avails for all sin.
+
+II. So much, then, for this first picture and the lessons that come
+out of it. In the next place we take Pilate, as the representative
+of what I have ventured to call the shufflings of a half-awakened
+conscience.
+
+'I am innocent of the blood of this just Person,' says he: 'see ye
+to it.' He is very willing to shuffle off his responsibility upon
+priests and people, and they, for their part, are quite as willing
+to accept it; but the responsibility can neither be shuffled off by
+him nor accepted by them. His motive in surrendering Jesus to them
+was probably nothing more than the low and cowardly wish to humour
+his turbulent subjects, and so to secure an easy tenure of office.
+For such an end what did one poor man's life matter? He had a great
+contempt for the accusers, which he is scarcely at the pains to
+conceal. It breaks out in half-veiled sarcasms, by which he
+cynically indemnifies himself for his ignoble yielding to the
+constraint which they put upon him. He knows perfectly well that the
+Roman power has nothing to fear from this King, whose kingdom rested
+on His witness to the Truth. He knows perfectly well that unavowed
+motives of personal enmity lie at the bottom of the whole business.
+In the words of our text he acquits Christ, and thereby condemns
+himself. If Pilate knew that Jesus was innocent, he knew that he, as
+governor, was guilty of prostituting Roman justice, which was Rome's
+best gift to her subject nations, and of giving up an innocent man
+to death, in order to save himself trouble and to conciliate a
+howling mob. No washing of his hands will cleanse them. 'All the
+perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten that hand. But his words let us
+see how a man may sophisticate his conscience and quibble about his
+guilt.
+
+Here, then, we get once more a vivid picture that may remind us of
+what, alas! we all know in our own experience, how a man's
+conscience may be clearsighted enough to discern, and vocal enough
+to declare, that a certain thing is wrong, but not strong enough to
+restrain from doing it. Conscience has a voice and an eye; alas! it
+has no hands. It shares the weakness of all law, it cannot get
+itself executed. Men will get over a fence, although the board that
+says, 'Trespassers will be prosecuted' is staring them in the face
+in capital letters at the very place where they leap it. Your
+conscience is a king without an army, a judge without officers. 'If
+it had authority, as it has the power, it would govern the world,'
+but as things are, it is reduced to issuing vain edicts and to
+saying, 'Thou shalt not,' and if you turn round and say, 'I will,
+though,' then conscience has no more that it can do.
+
+And then here, too, is an illustration of one of the commonest of
+the ways by which we try to slip our necks out of the collar, and to
+get rid of the responsibilities that really belong to us. 'See ye to
+it' does not avail to put Pilate's crime on the priests' shoulders.
+Men take part in evil, and each thinks himself innocent, because he
+has companions. Half-a-dozen men carry a burden together; none of
+them fancies that he is carrying it. It is like the case of turning
+out a platoon of soldiers to shoot a mutineer--nobody knows whose
+bullet killed him, and nobody feels himself guilty; but there the
+man lies dead, and it was somebody  that did it. So corporations,
+churches, societies, and nations do things that individuals would
+not do, and each man of them wipes his mouth and says, 'I have done
+no harm.' And even when we sin alone we are clever at finding
+scapegoats. 'The woman tempted me, and I did eat,' is the formula
+universally used yet. The schoolboy's excuse, 'Please, sir, it was
+not me, it was the other boy,' is what we are all ready to say.
+
+Now I pray you, brethren, to remember that, whether our consciences
+try to shuffle off responsibility for united action upon the other
+members of the firm, or whether we try to excuse our individual
+actions by laying blame on our tempers, or whether we adopt the
+modern slang, and talk about circumstances and heredity and the
+like, as being reasons for the diminution or the extinction of the
+notion of guilt, it is sophistical trifling; and down at the bottom
+most of us know that we alone are responsible for the volition which
+leads to our act. We could have helped it if we had liked. Nobody
+compelled us to keep in the partnership of evil, or to yield to the
+tempter. Pilate was not forced by his subjects to give the
+commandment that 'it should be as they required.' They had their own
+burden to carry. Each man has to bear the consequences of his
+actions. There are many 'burdens' which we can 'bear for one
+another, and so fulfil the law of Christ'; but every man has to bear
+as his own the burden of the fruits of his deeds. In that harvest,
+he that soweth and he that reapeth are one, and each of us has to
+drink as we ourselves have brewed. You have to pay for your share,
+however many companions you may have had in the act.
+
+So do not you sophisticate your consciences with the delusion that
+your responsibility may be shifted to any other person or thing.
+These may diminish, or may modify your responsibility, and God takes
+all these into account. But after all these have been taken into
+account there is this left--that you yourselves have done the act,
+which you need not have done unless you had so willed, and that
+having done it, you have to carry it on your back for evermore. 'See
+thou to that,' was a heartless word, but it was a true one. 'Every
+one of us shall give an account of himself to God,' and as the old
+Book of Proverbs has it, 'If thou be wise, thou shalt be wise for
+thyself: and if thou scornest, thou alone shalt bear it.'
+
+III. And so, lastly, we have here another group still--the priests
+and people. They represent for us the torpor and misdirection of
+conscience.
+
+'Then answered all the people and said, His blood be on us and on
+our children.' They were perfectly ready to take the burden upon
+themselves. They thought that they were 'doing God service' when
+they slew God's Messenger. They had no perception of the beauty and
+gentleness of Christ's character. They believed Him to be a
+blasphemer, and they believed it to be a solemn religious duty to
+slay Him then and there. Were they to blame because they slew a
+blasphemer? According to Jewish law--no. They were to blame because
+they had brought themselves into such a moral condition that that
+was all which they thought of and saw in Jesus Christ. With their
+awful words they stand before us, as perhaps the crowning instances
+in Scripture history of the possible torpor which may paralyse
+consciences.
+
+I need not dwell, I suppose, even for a moment, upon the thought of
+how the highest and noblest sentiments may be perverted into
+becoming the allies of the lowest crime. 'O Liberty! what crimes
+have been done in thy name!' you remember one of the victims of the
+guillotine said, as her last words. 'O Religion! what crimes have
+been done in _thy_ name!' is one of the lessons to be gathered
+from Calvary.
+
+But, passing that, to come to the thing that is of more consequence
+to each of us, let us take this thought, dear brethren, as to the
+awful possibility of a conscience going fast asleep in the midst of
+the wildest storm of passion, like that unfaithful prophet Jonah,
+down in the hold of the heathen ship. You can lull your consciences
+into dead slumber. You can stifle them so that they shall not speak
+a word against the worst of your sins. You can do so by simply
+neglecting them, by habitually refusing to listen to them. If you
+keep picking all the leaves and buds off the tree before they open,
+it will stop flowering. You can do it by gathering round yourself
+always, and only, evil associations and evil deeds. The habit of
+sinning will lull a conscience faster than almost anything else. We
+do not know how hot a room is, or how much the air is exhausted,
+when we have been sitting in it for an hour and a half. But if we
+came into it from outside we should feel the difference. Styrian
+peasants thrive and fatten upon arsenic, and men may flourish upon
+all iniquity and evil, and conscience will say never a word. Take
+care of that delicate balance within you; and see that you do not
+tamper with it nor twist it.
+
+Conscience may be misguided as well as lulled. It may call evil
+good, and good evil; it may take honey for gall, and gall for honey.
+And so we need something outside of ourselves to be our guide, our
+standard. We are not to be contented that our consciences acquit us.
+'I know nothing against myself, yet I am not hereby justified,' says
+the apostle; 'he that judgeth me is the Lord.' And it is quite
+possible that a man may have no prick of conscience and yet have
+done a very wrong thing. So we want, as it seems to me, something
+outside of ourselves that shall not be affected by our variations.
+Conscience is like the light on the binnacle of a ship. It tosses up
+and down along with the vessel. We want a steady light yonder on
+that headland, on the fixed solid earth, which shall not heave with
+the heaving wave, nor vary at all. Conscience speaks lowest when it
+ought to speak loudest. The worst man is least troubled by his
+conscience. It is like a lamp that goes out in the thickest
+darkness. Therefore we need, as I believe, a revelation of truth and
+goodness and beauty outside of ourselves to which we may bring our
+consciences that they may be enlightened and set right. We want a
+standard like the authorised weights and measures that are kept in
+the Tower of London, to which all the people in the little country
+villages may send up their yard measures and their pound weights,
+and find out if they are just and true. We want a _Bible_, and
+we want a _Christ_ to tell us what is duty, as well as to make
+it possible for us to do it.
+
+These groups which we have been looking at now, show us how very
+little help and sympathy a wounded conscience can get from its
+fellows. The conspirators turn upon each other as soon as the
+detectives are amongst them, and there is always one of them ready
+to go into the witness-box and swear away the lives of the others to
+save his own neck. Wolves tear sick wolves to pieces.
+
+Round us there stand Society, pitiless and stern, and Nature, rigid
+and implacable; not to be besought, not to be turned. And when I, in
+the midst of this universe of fixed law and cause and consequence,
+wail out, 'I have sinned,' a thousand voices say to me, 'What is
+that to us? See thou to that.' And so I am left with my guilt--it
+and I together. There comes One with outstretched, wounded hands,
+and says, 'Cast all thy burden upon Me, and I will free thee from it
+all.' 'Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows!'
+Trust in Him, in His great sacrifice, and you will find that His
+'innocent blood' has a power that will liberate your conscience from
+its torpor, its vain excuses, its agony and despair.
+
+
+
+
+THE SENTENCE WHICH CONDEMNED THE JUDGES
+
+
+    And Jesus stood before the governor: and the governor
+    asked Him, saying, Art Thou the King of the Jews? And
+    Jesus said unto him, Thou sayest. 12. And when He was
+    accused of the chief priests and elders, He answered
+    nothing. 13. Then said Pilate unto Him, Hearest Thou
+    not how many things they witness against Thee? 14. And
+    He answered him to never a word; insomuch that the
+    governor marvelled greatly. 15. Now at that feast the
+    governor was wont to release unto the people a prisoner,
+    whom they would. 16. And they had then a notable
+    prisoner, called Barabbas. 17. Therefore when they were
+    gathered together, Pilate said unto them, Whom will ye
+    that I release unto you? Barabbas, or Jesus which is
+    called Christ? 18. For he knew that for envy they had
+    delivered Him. 19. When he was set down on the judgment
+    seat, his wife sent unto him, saying, Have thou nothing
+    to do with that just man: for I have suffered many
+    things this day in a dream because of Him. 20. But the
+    chief priests and elders persuaded the multitude that
+    they should ask Barabbas, and destroy Jesus. 21. The
+    governor answered and said unto them, Whether of the
+    twain will ye that I release unto you? They said,
+    Barabbas. 22. Pilate saith unto them, What shall I do
+    then with Jesus which is called Christ? They all say
+    unto him, Let Him be crucified. 23. And the governor
+    said, Why, what evil hath He done? But they cried out
+    the more, saying, Let him be crucified. 24. When Pilate
+    saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a
+    tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands
+    before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the
+    blood of this just Person: see ye to it. 25. Then
+    answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us,
+    and on our children. 26. Then released he Barabbas unto
+    them: and when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered Him
+    to be crucified.'--ST. MATT. xxvii. 11-26.
+
+The principal figures in this passage are Pilate and the Jewish
+rulers and people. Jesus is all but passive. They are busy in
+condemning Him, and little know that they are condemning themselves.
+They are unconsciously exemplifying the tragic truth of Christ's
+saying, 'Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken.' They
+do not dislodge it, but their attempt to dislodge it wounds them.
+
+I. Matthew gives a very summary account of our Lord's appearing
+before Pilate, but, brief as it is, and much as it omits, it throws
+up into strong light the two essential points,--Christ's declaration
+that He was the King of the Jews, and His silence while a storm of
+accusations raged around Him. As to the former, it was the only
+charge with which Pilate was properly concerned. He had a right to
+know whether this strange criminal was dangerous to Rome, because He
+claimed kingship, and, if he were satisfied that He was not, his
+bounden duty was to liberate Him. One can understand the scornful
+emphasis which Pilate laid on 'Thou' as he looked on his Prisoner,
+who certainly would not seem to his practical eyes a very formidable
+leader of revolt. There is a world of contempt, amused rather than
+alarmed, in the question, and behind it lies the consciousness of
+commanding legions enough to crush any rising headed by such a
+person. John's account shows the pains which Jesus took to make sure
+of the sense in which the question was asked before He answered it,
+and then to make clear that His kingship bore no menace to Rome.
+That being made plain, He answered with an affirmative. Just as He
+had in unmistakable language claimed before the Sanhedrin to be the
+Messiah, the Son of God, so He claimed before Pilate to be the King
+of Israel, answering each tribunal as to what each had the right to
+inquire into, and thus 'before Pontius Pilate witnessing the good
+confession,' and leaving both tribunals without excuse. Jesus died
+because He would not bate His claims to Messianic dignity. Did He
+fling away His life for a false conception of Himself? He was either
+a dreamer intoxicated with an illusion, and His death was suicide,
+or He was--what?
+
+The one avowal was all that Pilate was entitled to. For the rest Jesus
+locked His lips, and He whose very name was The Word was silent. What
+was the meaning of that silence? It was not disdain, nor unwillingness
+to make Himself known; but it was partly merciful--inasmuch as He knew
+that all speech would have been futile, and would but have added to
+the condemnation of such hearers as Caiaphas, Herod, and Pilate--and
+partly judicial. Still more was it the silence of perfect, unresisting
+submission,--'as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He openeth
+not His mouth.' And it is a pattern for us, as Peter tells us in his
+Epistle; for it is with regard to this very matter of taking unjust
+suffering patiently and without resistance that the apostle says that
+Jesus has 'left us an example.' There are limits to such silent
+endurance of wrong, for Paul defended himself tooth and nail before
+priests and kings; but Christ's followers are strongest by meek
+patience, and descend when they take a leaf out of their enemies' book.
+
+II. The next point is Pilate's weak attempt to save Jesus. Christ's
+silence had impressed Pilate, and, if he had been a true man, he
+would not have stopped at 'marvelling greatly.' He was clearly
+convinced of Christ's innocence of any crime that threatened Roman
+supremacy, and therefore was bound to have given effect to his
+convictions, and let Jesus go. He had read the motives of the
+priests, which were too plain for a shrewd man of the world to be
+blind to them. That Jews should be taken with such a sudden fit of
+loyalty as to yell for the death of a fellow-countryman because he
+was a rebel against Caesar was too absurd to swallow, and Pilate was
+not taken in. He knew that something else was working below ground,
+and hit on 'envy' as the solution. He was not far wrong; for the
+zeal which to the priests themselves seemed to be excited by devout
+regard for God's honour was really kindled by determination to keep
+their own prerogatives, and keen insight into the curtailment of
+these which would follow if this Jesus were recognised as Messiah.
+Pilate's diagnosis coincided with Christ's in the parable: 'This is
+the Heir; come, let us kill Him, and the inheritance shall be ours.'
+
+So, willing to deliver Jesus, and yet afraid to cross the wishes of
+his ticklish subjects, Pilate, like other weak men, tries a trick by
+which he may get his way and seem to give them theirs. He hoped that
+they would choose Jesus rather than Barabbas as the object of the
+customary release. It was ingenious of him to narrow the choice to
+one or other of the two, ignoring all other prisoners who might have
+had the benefit of the custom. But there is also, perhaps, a dash of
+sarcasm, and a hint of his having penetrated the priests' motives,
+in his confining their choice to Jesus or Barabbas; for Barabbas was
+what they had charged Jesus with being,--a rebel; and, if they
+preferred him to Jesus, the hypocrisy of their suspicious loyalty
+would be patent. The same sub-acid tone is obvious in Pilate's twice
+designating our Lord as 'Jesus which is called Christ.' He delights
+to mortify them by pushing the title into their faces, as it were.
+He dare not be just, and he relieves and revenges himself by being
+cynical and mocking.
+
+III. Having referred the choice to the 'multitude,' Pilate takes his
+place on his official seat to wait for, and then to ratify, their
+vote. In that pause, he perhaps felt some compunction at paltering
+with justice, which it was Rome's one virtue to administer. How his
+wife's message would increase his doubt! Was her dream a divine
+warning, or a mere reflection in sleep of waking thoughts? It is
+noticeable that Matthew records several dreams which conveyed God's
+will,--for example, to Joseph and to the Magi, and here may be
+another instance; or some tidings as to Jesus may have reached the
+lady, though not her husband, and her womanly sense of right may
+have shaped the dream, and given her vivid impressions of the danger
+of abetting a judicial murder. But Matthew seems to tell of her
+intervention mainly in order to preserve her testimony to Jesus'
+innocence, and to point out one more of the fences which Pilate
+trampled down in his dread of offending the rulers. A wife's
+message, conveying what both he and she probably regarded as a
+supernatural warning, was powerless to keep him back from his
+disgraceful failure of duty.
+
+IV. While he was fighting against the impression of that message,
+the rulers were busy in the crowd, suggesting the choice of
+Barabbas. It was perhaps his wife's words that stung him to act at
+once, and have done with his inner conflict. So he calls for the
+decision of the alternative which he had already submitted. His
+dignity would suffer, if he had to wait longer for an answer. He got
+it at once, and the unanimous vote was for Barabbas. Probably the
+rulers had skilfully manipulated the people. The multitude is easily
+led by demagogues, but, left to itself, its instincts are usually
+right, though its perception of character is often mistaken. Why was
+Barabbas preferred? Probably just because he had been cast into
+prison for sedition, and so was thought to be a good patriot.
+Popular heroes often win their reputation by very questionable acts,
+and Barabbas was forgiven his being a murderer for the sake of his
+being a rebel. But it was not so much that Barabbas was loved as
+that Jesus was hated, and it was not the multitude so much as the
+rulers that hated him. Many of those now shrieking 'Crucify Him!'
+had shouted 'Hosanna!' a day or two before till they were hoarse.
+The populace was guilty of fickleness, blindness, rashness, too easy
+credence of the crafty calumnies of the rulers. But a far deeper
+stain rests on these rulers who had resisted the light, and were now
+animated by the basest self-interest in the garb of keen regard for
+the honour of God. There were very different degrees of guilt in the
+many voices that roared 'Barabbas!'
+
+Pilate made one more feeble attempt to save Jesus by asking what was
+to be done with Him. The question was an ignoble abdication of his
+judicial office, and perhaps was meant as a salve for his own
+conscience, and an excuse to his wife, enabling him to say, 'I did
+not crucify Him; they did,'--a miserable pretext, the last resort of
+a weak man, who knew that he was doing a wrong and cowardly thing.
+
+V. The same nervous fear and vain attempt to shuffle responsibility
+off himself give tragic interest to his theatrical washing of his
+hands. The one thing that he feared was a riot, which would be like
+a spark in a barrel of gunpowder, if it broke out at the Passover,
+when Jerusalem swarmed with excited crowds. To avoid that, the
+sacrifice of one Jew's life was a small matter, even though he was
+an interesting and remarkable person, and Pilate knew Him to be
+perfectly harmless.
+
+But no washing of hands could shift the guilt from Pilate.
+
+  'Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
+   Clean from my hand? No.'
+
+His vain declaration of innocence is an acknowledgment of guilt, for
+he is forced by conscience to declare that Jesus is a 'righteous
+Man,' and, as such, He should have been under the broad shield of
+Roman justice. We too often deceive ourselves by throwing the blame
+of our sins on companions or circumstances, and try to cheat our
+consciences into silence. But our guilt is ours, however many allies
+we have had, and however strong have been our temptations; and
+though we may say, 'I am innocent,' God will sooner or later say to
+each of us, 'Thou art the man!'
+
+The wild cry of passion with which the multitude accepted the
+responsibility has been only too completely fulfilled in the
+millennium-long Iliad of woes which has attended the Jews. Surely,
+the existence, in such circumstances, for all these centuries, of
+that strange, weird, fated race, is a standing miracle, and the most
+conspicuous proof that 'verily, there is a God that judgeth in the
+earth.' But it is also a prophecy that Israel shall 'turn to the
+Lord,' and that the blood which has so long been on them as a crime,
+carrying its own punishment, will at last be sprinkled on their
+hearts, and take away their sin.
+
+
+
+
+THE CRUCIFIXION
+
+
+    'And when they were come unto a place called Golgotha,
+    that is to say, a place of a skull, 34. They gave Him
+    vinegar to drink mingled with gall: and when He had
+    tasted thereof, He would not drink. 35. And they
+    crucified Him, and parted His garments, casting lots:
+    that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the
+    prophet, They parted My garments among them, and upon
+    My vesture did they cast lots. 36. And sitting down
+    they watched Him there; 37. And set up over His head
+    His accusation written, THIS IS JESUS THE KING OF THE
+    JEWS. 38. Then were there two thieves crucified with
+    Him, one on the right hand, and another on the left
+    39. And they that passed by reviled Him, wagging their
+    heads, 40. And saying, Thou that destroyest the temple,
+    and buildest it in three days, save Thyself. If Thou be
+    the Son of God, come down from the cross. 41. Likewise
+    also the chief priests mocking Him, with the scribes
+    and elders, said, 42. He saved others; Himself He
+    cannot save. If He be the King of Israel, let Him now
+    come down from the cross, and we will believe Him.
+    43. He trusted in God; let Him deliver Him now, if He
+    will have Him: for He said, I am the Son of God.
+    44. The thieves also, which were crucified with Him,
+    cast the same in His teeth. 45. Now from the sixth hour
+    there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth
+    hour. 46. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a
+    loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that
+    is to say, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?
+    47. Some of them that stood there, when they heard
+    that, said. This Man calleth for Elias. 48. And
+    straightway one of them ran, and took a spunge, and
+    filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave
+    Him to drink. 49. The rest said, Let be, let us see
+    whether Elias will come to save Him. 50. Jesus, when He
+    had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost.'
+    --MATT. xxvii. 33-50.
+
+The characteristic of Matthew's account of the crucifixion is its
+representation of Jesus as perfectly passive and silent. His refusal
+of the drugged wine, His cry of desolation, and His other cry at
+death, are all His recorded acts. The impression of the whole is 'as
+a sheep before his shearers is dumb, so He openeth not His mouth.'
+We are bid to look on the grim details of the infliction of the
+terrible death, and to listen to the mockeries of people and
+priests; but reverent awe forbids description of Him who hung there
+in His long, silent agony. Would that like reticence had checked the
+ill-timed eloquence of preachers and teachers of later days!
+
+I. We have the ghastly details of the crucifixion.--Conder's
+suggestion of the site of Calvary as a little knoll outside the
+city, seems possible. It is now a low, bare hillock, with a scanty
+skin of vegetation over the rock, and in its rounded shape and bony
+rockiness explains why it was called 'skull.' It stands close to the
+main Damascus road, so that there would be many 'passers by' on that
+feast day. Its top commands a view over the walls into the temple
+enclosure, where, at the very hour of the death of Jesus, the
+Passover lamb was perhaps being slain. Arrived at the place, the
+executioners go about their task with stolid precision. What was the
+crucifying of another Jew or two to them? Before they lift the cross
+or fasten their prisoner to it, a little touch of pity, or perhaps
+only the observance of the usual custom, leads them to offer a
+draught of wine, in which some anodyne had been mixed, to deaden
+agony. But the cup which He had to drink needed that He should be in
+full possession of all His sensibilities to pain, and of all His
+unclouded firmness of resolve; and so His patient lips closed
+against the offered mercy. He would not drink because He would
+suffer, and He would suffer because He would redeem. His last act
+before He was nailed to the cross was an act of voluntary refusal of
+an opened door of escape from some portion of His pains.
+
+What a gap there is between verses 34 and 35! The unconcerned
+soldiers went on to the next step in their ordinary routine on such
+an occasion,--the fixing of the cross and fastening of the victim to
+it. To them it was only what they had often done before; to Matthew,
+it was too sacred to be narrated, He cannot bring his pen to write
+it. As it were, he bids us turn away our eyes for a moment; and when
+next we look, the deed is done, and there stands the cross, and the
+Lord hanging, dumb and unresisting, on it. We see not Him, but the
+soldiers, busy at their next task. So little were they touched by
+compassion or awe, that they paid no heed to Him, and suspended
+their work to make sure of their perquisites,--the poor robes which
+they stripped from His body. Thus gently Matthew hints at the
+ignominy of exposure attendant on crucifixion, and gives the measure
+of the hard stolidity of the guards. Gain had been their first
+thought, comfort was their second. They were a little tired with
+their march and their work, and they had to stop there on guard for
+an indefinite time, with nothing to do but two more prisoners to
+crucify: so they take a rest, and idly keep watch over Him till He
+shall die. How possible it is to look at Christ's sufferings and see
+nothing! These rude legionaries gazed for hours on what has touched
+the world ever since, and what angels desired to look into, and saw
+nothing but a dying Jew. They thought about the worth of the
+clothes, or about how long they would have to stay there, and in the
+presence of the most stupendous fact in the world's history were all
+unmoved. We too may gaze on the cross and see nothing. We too may
+look at it without emotion, because without faith, or any
+consciousness of what it may mean for us. Only they who see there
+the sacrifice for their sins and the world's, see what is there.
+Others are as blind as, and less excusable than, these soldiers who
+watched all day by the Cross, seeing nothing, and tramped back at
+night to their barrack utterly ignorant of what they had been doing.
+But their work was not quite done. There was still a piece of grim
+mockery to be performed, which they would much enjoy. The 'cause,'
+as Matthew calls it, had to be nailed to the upper part of the
+cross. It was tri-lingual, as John tells us,--in Hebrew, the
+language of revelation; in Greek, the tongue of philosophy and art;
+in Latin, the speech of law and power. The three chief forces of the
+human spirit gave unconscious witness to the King; the three chief
+languages of the western world proclaimed His universal monarchy,
+even while they seemed to limit it to one nation. It was meant as a
+gibe at Him and at the nation, and as Pilate's statement of the
+reason for his sentence; but it meant more than Pilate meant by it,
+and it was fitting that His royal title should hang above His head;
+for the cross is His throne, and He is the King of men because He
+has died for them all. One more piece of work the soldiers had still
+to do. The crucifixion of the two robbers (perhaps of Barabbas'
+gang, though less fortunate than he) by Christ's side was intended
+to associate Him in the public mind with them and their crimes, and
+was the last stroke of malice, as if saying, 'Here is your King, and
+here are two of His subjects and ministers.' Matthew says nothing of
+the triumph of Christ's love, which won the poor robber for a
+disciple even at that hour of ignominy. His one purpose seems to be
+to accumulate the tokens of suffering and shame, and so to emphasise
+the silent endurance of the meek Lamb of God. Therefore, without a
+word about any of our Lord's acts or utterances, he passes on to the
+next group of incidents.
+
+II. The mockeries of people and priests. There would be many coming
+and going on the adjoining road, most of them too busy about their
+own affairs to delay long; for crucifixion was a slow process, and,
+when once the cross has been lifted, there would be little to see.
+But they were not too busy to spit venom at Him as they passed. How
+many of these scoffers, to whom death cast no shield round the
+object of their poor taunts, had shouted themselves hoarse on the
+Monday, and waved palm branches that were not withered yet! What had
+made the change? There was no change. They were running with the
+stream in both their hosannas and their jeers, and the one were
+worth as much as the other. They had been tutored to cry, 'Blessed
+is He that cometh!' and now they were tutored to repeat what had
+been said at the trial about destroying the temple. The worshippers
+of success are true to themselves when they mock at failure. They
+who shout round Jesus, when other people are doing it, are only
+consistent when they join in the roar of execration. Let us take
+care that our worship of Him is rooted in our own personal
+experience, and independent of what rulers or influential minds today
+say of Him.
+
+A common passion levels all distinctions of culture and rank. The
+reverend dignitaries echoed the ferocious ridicule of the mob, whom
+they despised so much. The poorest criminal would have been left to
+die in peace; but brutal laughter surged round the silent sufferer,
+and showers of barbed sarcasms were flung at Him. The throwers
+fancied them exquisite jests, and demonstrations of the absurdity of
+Christ's claims; but they were really witnesses to His claims, and
+explanations of His sufferings. Look at them in turn, with this
+thought in our minds. 'He saved others; Himself He cannot save,' was
+launched as a sarcasm which confuted His alleged miracles by His
+present helplessness. How much it admits, even while it denies!
+Then, He did work miracles; and they were all for others, never for
+His own ends; and they were all for saving, never for destroying.
+Then, too, by this very taunt His claim to be the 'Saviour' is
+presupposed. And so, 'Physician, heal Thyself,' seemed to them an
+unanswerable missile to fling. If they had only known what made the
+'cannot,' and seen that it was a 'will not,' they would have stood
+full in front of the great miracle of love which was before them
+unsuspected, and would have learned that the not saving Himself,
+which they thought blew to atoms His pretensions to save others, was
+really the condition of His saving a world. If He is to save others
+He cannot save Himself. That is the law for all mutual help. The
+lamp burns out in giving light, but the necessity for the death of
+Him who is the life of the world is founded on a deeper 'must.' His
+only way of delivering us from the burden of sin is His taking it on
+Himself. He has to 'bear our griefs and carry our sorrows,' if He is
+to bear away the sin of the world. But the 'cannot' derives all its
+power from His own loving will. The rulers' taunt was a venomous
+lie, as they meant it. If for 'cannot' we read 'will not,' it is the
+central truth of the Gospel.
+
+Nor did they succeed better with their second gibe, which made mirth
+of such a throne, and promised allegiance if He would come down. O
+blind leaders of the blind! That death which seemed to them to
+shatter His royalty really established it. His Cross is His throne
+of saving power, by which He sways hearts and wills, and because of
+it He receives from the Father universal dominion, and every knee
+shall bow to Him. It is just because He did not come down from it
+that we believe on Him. On His head are many crowns; but, however
+many they be, they all grow out of the crown of thorns. The true
+kingship is absolute command over willingly submitted spirits; and
+it is His death which bows us before Him in raptures of glad love
+which counts submission, liberty, and sacrifice blessed. He has the
+right to command because He has given Himself for us, and His death
+wakes all-surrendering and all-expecting faith.
+
+Nor was the third taunt more fortunate. These very religious men had
+read their Bibles so badly that they might never have heard of Job,
+nor of the latter half of Isaiah. They had been poring over the
+letter all their lives, and had never seen, with their microscopes,
+the great figure of the Innocent Sufferer, so plain there. So they
+thought that the Cross demonstrated the hollowness of Jesus' trust
+in God, and the rejection of Him by God. Surely religious teachers
+should have been slow to scoff at religious trust, and surely they
+might have known that failure and disaster even to death were no
+signs of God's displeasure. But, in one aspect, they were right. It
+is a mystery that such a life should end thus; and the mystery is
+none the less because many another less holy life has also ended in
+suffering. But the mystery is solved when we know that God did not
+deliver Him, just because He 'would have Him,' and that the Father's
+delight in the Son reached its very highest point when He became
+obedient until death, and offered Himself 'a sacrifice acceptable,
+well pleasing unto God.'
+
+III. We pass on to the darkness, desolation, and death. Matthew
+represents these three long hours from noon till what answers to our
+3 P.M. as passed in utter silence by Christ. What went on beneath
+that dread veil, we are not meant to know. Nor do we need to ask its
+physical cause or extent. It wrapped the agony from cruel eyes; it
+symbolised the blackness of desolation in His spirit, and by it God
+draped the heavens in mourning for man's sin. What were the
+onlookers doing then? Did they cease their mocking, and feel some
+touch of awe creeping over them?
+
+  'His brow was chill with dying,
+   And His soul was faint with loss.'
+
+The cry that broke the awful silence, and came out of the darkness,
+was more awful still. The fewer our words the better; only we may
+mark how, even in His agony, Jesus has recourse to prophetic words,
+and finds in a lesser sufferer's cry voice for His desolation.
+Further, we may reverently note the marvellous blending of trust and
+sense of desertion. He feels that God has left Him, and yet he holds
+on to God. His faith, as a man, reached its climax in that supreme
+hour when, loaded with the mysterious burden of God's abandonment,
+He yet cried in His agony, 'My God!' and that with reduplicated
+appeal. Separation from God is the true death, the 'wages of sin';
+and in that dread hour He bore in His own consciousness the
+uttermost of its penalty. The physical fact of Christ's death, if it
+could have taken place without this desolation from the
+consciousness of separation from God, would not have been the
+bearing of all the consequences of man's sins. The two must never be
+parted in our grateful contemplations; and, while we reverently
+abjure the attempt to pierce into that which God hid from us by the
+darkness, we must reverently ponder what Christ revealed to us by
+the cry that cleft it, witnessing that He then was indeed bearing
+the whole weight of a world's sin. By the side of such thoughts, and
+in the presence of such sorrow, the clumsy jest of the bystanders,
+which caught at the half-heard words, and pretended to think that
+Jesus was a crazy fanatic calling for Elijah with his fiery chariot
+to come and rescue Him, may well be passed by. One little touch of
+sympathy moistened His dying lips, not without opposition from the
+heartless crew who wanted to have their jest out. Then came the end.
+The loud cry of the dying Christ is worthy of record; for
+crucifixion ordinarily killed by exhaustion, and this cry was
+evidence of abundant remaining vitality. In accordance therewith,
+the fact of death is expressed by a phrase, which, though used for
+ordinary deaths, does yet naturally express the voluntariness of
+Christ. 'He sent away His spirit,' as if He had bid it depart, and
+it obeyed. Whether the expression may be fairly pressed so far or
+no, the fact is the same, that Jesus died, not because He was
+crucified, but because He chose. He was the Lord and Master of
+Death; and when He bid His armour-bearer strike, the slave struck,
+and the King died, not like Saul on the field of his defeat, but a
+victor in and by and over death.
+
+
+
+
+THE BLIND WATCHERS AT THE CROSS
+
+    'And sitting down they watched Him there.'
+    --MATT. xxvii. 36.
+
+Our thoughts are, rightly, so absorbed by the central Figure in this
+great chapter that we pass by almost unnoticed the groups round the
+cross. And yet there are large lessons to be learned from each of
+them. These rude soldiers, four in number, as we infer from John's
+Gospel, had no doubt joined with their comrades in the coarse
+mockery which preceded the sad procession to Calvary; and then they
+had to do the rough work of the executioners, fastening the
+sufferers to the rude wooden crosses, lifting these, with their
+burden, filing them into the ground, then parting the raiment. And
+when all that is done they sit stolidly down to take their ease at
+the foot of the cross, and idly to wait, with eyes that look and see
+nothing, until the sufferers die. A strange picture; and a strange
+thing to think of, how they were so close to the great event in the
+world's history, and had to stare at it for three or four hours, and
+never saw anything!
+
+The lessons that the incident teaches us may be very simply gathered
+together.
+
+I. First we infer from this the old truth of how ignorant men are of
+the real meaning and outcome of what they do.
+
+These four Roman soldiers were foreigners; I suppose that they could
+not speak a word to a man in that crowd. They had no means of
+communication with them. They had had plenty of practice in
+crucifying Jews. It was part of their ordinary work in these
+troublesome times, and this was just one more. Think of what a
+corporal's guard of rough English soldiers, out in Northern India,
+would think if they were bidden to hang a native who was charged
+with rebellion against the British Government. So much, and not one
+whit more, did these men know of what they were doing; and they went
+back to their barracks, stolid and unconcerned, and utterly ignorant
+of what they had been about.
+
+But in part it is so with us all, though in less extreme fashion.
+None of us know the real meaning, and none of us know the possible
+issues and outcome of a great deal of our lives. We are like people
+sowing seed in the dark; it is put into our hands and we sow. We do
+the deed; this end of it is in our power, but where it runs out to,
+and what will come of it, lie far beyond our ken. We are compassed
+about, wherever we go, by this atmosphere of mystery, and enclosed
+within a great ring of blackness.
+
+And so the simple lesson to be drawn from that clear fact, about all
+our conduct, is this--let results alone. Never mind about what you
+cannot get hold of; you cannot see to the other end, and you have
+nothing to do with it. You can see this end; make that right. Be
+sure that the motive is right, and then into whatever unlooked-for
+consequences your act may run out at the further end, you will be
+right. Never mind what kind of harvest is coming out of your deeds,
+you cannot forecast it. 'Thou soweth not that body that shall be,
+but bare grain.... God giveth it a body as it pleaseth Him.' Let
+alone that profitless investigation, the attempt to fashion and
+understand either the significance or the issues of your conduct,
+and stick fast by this--look after your motive for doing it, and
+your temper in doing it; and then be quite sure, 'Thou shalt find it
+after many days,' and the fruit will be 'unto praise and honour and
+glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ.'
+
+II. Take another very simple and equally plain lesson from this
+incident, viz., the limitation of responsibility by knowledge.
+
+These men, as I said, were ignorant of what they were doing, and,
+therefore, they were guiltless. Christ Himself said so: 'They know
+not what they do.' But it is marvellous to observe that whilst the
+people who stood round the cross, and were associated in the act
+that led Jesus there, had all degrees of responsibility, the least
+guilty of the whole were the men who did the actual work of nailing
+Him to the cross, and lifting it with Him upon it. These soldiers
+were not half as much to blame as were many of the men that stood
+by; and just in the measure in which the knowledge or the
+possibility of knowledge increased, just in that measure did the
+responsibility increase. The high priest was a great deal more to
+blame than the Roman soldiers. The rude tool that nailed Christ to
+the cross, the hammer that was held in the hand of the legionary,
+was almost as much to blame as the hand that wielded it. For the
+hand that wielded it had very little more knowledge than it had.
+
+In so far as it was possible that these men might have known
+something of what they were doing, in so far were they to blame; but
+remember what a very, very little light could possibly have shone
+upon these souls. If there is no light there cannot be any shadow;
+and if these men were, as certainly they were, all but absolutely
+ignorant, and never could have been anything else, of what they were
+doing, then they were all but absolutely guiltless. And so you come
+to this, which is only a paradox to superficial thinkers, that the
+men that did the greatest crime in the whole history of the world,
+did it with all but clean hands; and the people that were to be
+condemned were those who delivered 'the Just One' into the hands of
+more lawless, and therefore less responsible, men.
+
+So here is the general principle, that as knowledge and light rise
+and fall, so responsibility rises and falls along with them. And
+therefore let us be thankful that we have not to judge one another,
+but that we have all to stand before that merciful and loving
+tribunal of the God who is a God of knowledge, and by whom actions
+are _weighed_, as the Old Book has it--not _counted_, but weighed. And
+let us be thankful, too, that we may extend our charity to all round
+us, and refrain from thinking of any man or woman that we can pronounce
+upon their criminality, because we do not know the light in which they
+walk.
+
+III. And now the last lesson, and the one that I most desire to lay
+upon your hearts, is this, how possible it is to look at Christ on
+the cross, and see nothing.
+
+For half a day there they sat, and it was but a dying Jew that they
+saw, one of three. A touch of pity came into their hearts once or
+twice, alternating to mockery, which was not savage because it was
+simply brutal; but when it was all over, and they had pierced His
+side, and gone away back to their barracks, they had not the least
+notion that they, with their dim, purblind eyes, had been looking at
+the most stupendous miracle in the whole world's history, had been
+gazing at the thing into which angels desired to look; and had seen
+that to which the hearts and the gratitude of unconverted millions
+would turn for all eternity. They laid their heads down on their
+pillows that night and did not know what had passed before their
+eyes, and they shut the eyes that had served them so ill, and went
+to sleep, unconscious that they had seen the pivot on which the
+whole history of humanity had turned; and been the unmoved witnesses
+of 'God manifest in the flesh,' dying on the cross for the whole
+world, and for them. What should they have seen if they had seen the
+reality? They should have seen not a dying rebel but a dying Christ;
+they should have looked with emotion, they should have looked with
+faith, they should have looked with thankfulness.
+
+Any one who looks at that cross, and sees nothing but a pure and
+perfect man dying upon it, is very nearly as blind as the Roman
+legionaries. Any one to whom it is only an example of perfect
+innocence and patient suffering has only seem an inch into the
+Infinite; and the depths of it are as much concealed from him as
+they were from them. Any one who looks with an unmoved heart,
+without one thrill of gratitude, is nearly as blind as the rough
+soldiers. He that looks and does not say--
+
+  'My faith would lay her hand
+   On that dear head of Thine;
+   While like a penitent I stand
+   And there confess my sin,'
+
+has not learned more of the meaning of the Cross than they did. And
+any one who looks to it, and then turns away and forgets, or who
+looks at it and fails to recognise in it the law of his own life and
+pattern for his own conduct, has yet to see more deeply into it
+before he sees even such portion of its meaning as here we can
+apprehend.
+
+Oh! dear friends, we all of us, as the apostle says in one of his
+letters, have had this Christ 'manifestly set forth before us as if
+painted upon a placard upon a wall' (for that is the meaning of the
+picturesque words that he employs). And if we look with calm,
+unmoved hearts; if we look without personal appropriation of that
+Cross and dying love to ourselves, and if we look without our hearts
+going out in thankfulness and laying themselves at His feet in a
+calm rapture of life-long devotion, then we need not wonder that
+four ignorant heathen men sat and looked at Him for four long hours
+and saw nothing, for we are as blind as ever they were.
+
+You say, 'We see.' Do you see? Do you look? Does the look touch your
+hearts? Have you fathomed the meaning of the fact? Is it to you the
+sacrifice of the living Christ for your salvation? Is it to you the
+death on which all your hopes rest? You say that you see. Do you see
+that in it? Do you see your only ground of confidence and peace? And
+do you so see that, like a man who has looked at the sun for a
+moment or two, when you turn away your head you carry the image of
+what you beheld still stamped on your eyeball, and have it both as a
+memory and a present impression? So is the cross photographed on
+your heart; and is it true about us that every day, and all days, we
+behold our Saviour, and beholding Him are being changed into His
+likeness? Is it true about us that we thus bear about with us in the
+body 'the dying of the Lord Jesus'? If we look to Him with faith and
+love, and make His Cross our own, and keep it ever in our memory,
+ever before us as an inspiration and a hope and a joy and a pattern,
+then we see. If not, 'for judgment am I come into the world, that
+they which see not may see, and that they which see might be made
+blind.' For what men are so blind to the infinite pathos and
+tenderness, power, mystery, and miracle of the Cross, as the men and
+women who all their lives long have heard a Gospel which has been
+held up before their lack-lustre eyes, and have looked at it so long
+that they cannot see it any more?
+
+Let us pray that our eyes may be purged, that we may see, and seeing
+may copy, that dying love of the ever-loving Lord.
+
+
+
+
+TAUNTS TURNING TO TESTIMONIES
+
+
+    '... The chief priests mocking Him ... said, 42. He
+    saved others; Himself He cannot save. If He be the
+    King of Israel, let Him now come down from the cross,
+    and we will believe Him. 43. He trusted in God; let
+    Him deliver Him now, if He will have Him.'
+    --MATT. xxvii. 41-43.
+
+It is an old saying that the corruption of the best is the worst.
+What is more merciful and pitiful than true religion? What is more
+merciless and malicious than hatred which calls itself 'religious'?
+These priests, like many a persecutor for religion since, came to
+feast their eyes on the long-drawn-out agonies of their Victim, and
+their rank tongues blossomed into foul speech. Characteristically
+enough, though they shared in the mockeries of the mob, they kept
+themselves separate. The crowd pressed near enough to the cross to
+speak their gibes _to_ Jesus; the dignified movers of the
+ignorant crowd stood superciliously apart, and talked scoffingly
+_about_ Him. Whilst the populace yelled, 'Thou that destroyest
+the Temple and buildest it in three days, come down,' the chief
+priests, with the scribes, looked at each other with a smile, and
+said, '_He_ saved others; Himself _He_ cannot save.'   Now,
+these brutal taunts have lessons for us. They witness to the popular
+impression of Christ, and what His claims were. He asserted Himself
+to be a worker of miracles, the Messiah-King of Israel, the Son of God,
+therefore He died. And they witness to the misconception which ruled
+in the minds of these priests as to the relation of His claims to the
+Cross. They thought that it had finally burst the bubble, and disposed
+once for all of these absurd and blasphemous pretensions. Was it
+credible that a man who possessed miraculous power should not, in
+this supreme moment, use it to deliver Himself? Did not 'Physician,
+heal Thyself,' come in properly there? Would any of the most besotted
+followers of this pretender retain a rag of belief in His Messiahship
+if He was crucified? Could it be possible that, if there was a God at
+all, He should leave a man that really trusted in Him, not to say
+who was really His Son, to die thus? A cracked mirror gives a distorted
+image. The facts were seen, but their relation was twisted. If we will
+take the guidance of these gibes, and see what is the real explanation
+to the anomaly that they suggest, then we shall find that the taunts
+turn to Him for a testimony, and that 'out of the mouths of mockers
+there is 'perfected praise.' The stones flung at the Master turn to
+roses strewed in His path.
+
+I. So, then, first the Cross shows us the Saviour who could not save
+Himself.
+
+The priests did not believe in Christ's miracles, and they thought
+that this final token of his impotence, as they took it to be, was
+clear proof that the miracles were either tricks or mistakes. They
+saw the two things, they fatally misunderstood the relation between
+them. Let us put the two things together.
+
+Here, on the one hand, is a Man who has exercised absolute authority
+in all the realms of the universe, who has spoken to dead matter,
+and it has obeyed; who by His word has calmed the storm, and hushed
+the winds by His word, has multiplied bread, has transmuted pale water
+into ruddy wine; who has moved omnipotent amongst the disturbed minds
+and diseased bodies of men, who has cast His sovereign word into the
+depth and darkness of the grave, and brought out the dead, stumbling
+and entangled in the grave-clothes. All these are facts on the one
+side. And on the other there is this--that there, passive, and, to
+superficial eyes, impotent, He hangs the helpless Victim of Roman
+soldiers and of Jewish priests. The short and easy vulgar way to
+solve the apparent contradiction was to deny the reality of the one
+of its members; to say 'Miracles? Absurd! He never worked one, or He
+would have been working one now.'
+
+But let their error lead us into truth, and let us grasp the
+relation of the two apparently contradictory facts. 'He saved
+others,' that is certain. He did not 'save Himself,' that is
+as certain. Was the explanation 'cannot'? The priests by 'cannot'
+meant physical impossibility, defect of power, and they were
+wrong. But there is a profound sense in which the word 'cannot'
+is absolutely true. For this is in all time, and in all human
+relations, the law of service--sacrifice; and no man can truly
+help humanity, or an individual, unless he is prepared to
+surrender himself in the service. The lamp burns away in giving
+light. The fire consumes in warming the hearth, and no brotherly
+sympathy or help has ever yet been rendered, or ever will be,
+except at the price of self-surrender. Now, some people think
+that this is the whole explanation of our Lord's history, both
+in His life and in His death. I do not believe that it is the
+whole explanation, but I do believe it carries us some way
+towards the central sanctuary, where the explanation lies. And
+yet it is not complete or adequate, because, to parallel Christ's
+work with the work of any of the rest of us to our brethren,
+however beautiful, disinterested, self-oblivious, and self-consuming
+it may be, seems to me--I say it with deference, though I must here
+remember considerations of brevity and be merely assertive--entirely
+to ignore the unique special characteristic of the work of Jesus
+Christ--viz., that it was the atonement for the sins of the world.
+He could not bear away our sins, unless the burden of them was laid
+on His own back, and He carried our griefs, our sorrows, our diseases,
+and our transgressions. 'He saved others, Himself He cannot save.' But
+the impossibility was purely the result of His own willing and obedient
+love; or, if I put it in more epigrammatic form, the priests' 'cannot'
+was partially true, but if they had said '_would not_' they would
+have hit the mark, and come to full truth. The reason for His death
+becomes clear, and each of the contrasted facts is enhanced, when we
+set side by side the opulence and ease of His manifold miracles and
+the apparent impotence and resourcelessness of the passive Victim on
+the cross.
+
+That 'cannot' did not come from defect of power, but from plenitude
+of love, and it was a 'will not' in its deepest depths. For you will
+find scattered throughout Scripture, especially these Gospels,
+indications from our Lord's own lips, and by His own acts, that, in
+the truest and fullest sense, His sufferings were voluntary. 'No man
+taketh it from me'--He says about His life--'I have power to lay it
+down, and I have power to take it again.' And once He did choose to
+flash out for a moment the always present power, that we might learn
+that when it did not appear, it was not because he could not, but
+because he would not. When the soldiers came to lay their hands upon
+Him, He presented Himself before them, saving them all the trouble
+of search, and when He asked a question, and received the answer
+that it was He of whom they were in search, there came one sudden
+apocalypse of His majesty, and they fell to the ground, and lay
+there prone before Him. They could have had no power at all against
+Him, except He had willed to surrender Himself to them. Again,
+though it is hypercritical perhaps to attach importance to what may
+only be natural idiomatic forms of speech, yet in this connection it
+is not to be overlooked that the language of all the Evangelists, in
+describing the supreme moment of Christ's death, is congruous with
+the idea that He died neither from the exhaustion of crucifixion,
+nor from the thrust of the soldier's spear, but because He would.
+For they all have expressions equivalent to that of one of them, 'He
+gave up His spirit.' Be that as it may, the 'cannot' was a 'will
+not'; and it was neither nails that fastened Him to the tree, nor
+violence that slew Him, but He was fixed there by His own steadfast
+will, and He died because He would. So if we rightly understand the
+'cannot' we may take up with thankfulness the taunt which, as I say,
+is tuned to a testimony, and reiterate adoringly, 'He saved others,
+Himself He cannot save.'
+
+II. The Cross shows us the King on His throne.
+
+To the priests it appeared ludicrous to suppose that a King of
+Israel should, by Israel, be nailed upon the cross. 'Let Him come
+down, and we will believe Him.' They saw the two facts, they
+misconceived their relation. There was a relation between them, and
+it is not difficult for us to apprehend it.
+
+The Cross is Christ's throne. There are two ways in which the
+tragedy of His crucifixion is looked at in the Gospels, one that
+prevails in the three first, another that prevails in the fourth.
+These two seem superficially to be opposite; they are complementary.
+It depends upon your station whether a point in the sky is your
+_zenith_ or your _nadir_. Here it is your zenith; at the antipodes
+it is the nadir. In the first three gospels the aspect of humiliation,
+degradation, inanition, suffering, is prominent in the references to
+the Crucifixion. In the _fourth_ gospel the aspect of glory and
+triumph is uppermost. 'Even so must the Son of Man be lifted up'; 'I,
+if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me'; 'Now the hour is come
+that the Son of Man should be glorified.' And it _is_ His glory, for
+on that Cross Jesus Christ manifests, in transcendent and superlative
+form, at once power and love that are boundless and divine. The Cross
+is the foundation of His kingdom. In his great passage in Philippians
+the Apostle brings together, in the closest causal connection, His
+obedience unto death, the death of the Cross, and His exaltation and
+reception of 'the name that is above every name, that at the name of
+Jesus every knee should bow.' The title over the Cross was meant for
+a gibe. It was a prophecy. By the Cross He becomes the 'King,' and not
+only the 'King of the Jews.' The sceptre that was put in His hand,
+though it was meant for a sneer, was a forecast of a truth, for He
+rules, not with a rod of iron, but with the reed of gentleness; and
+the crown of thorns, that was pressed down on His wounded and
+bleeding head, foretold for our faith the great truth that suffering is
+the foundation of dominion, and that men will bow as to their King
+and Lord before Him who died for them, with a prostration of spirit, a
+loyalty of allegiance, and an alertness of service, which none
+other, monarch or superior, may even dream of attaining. The Cross
+establishes, not destroys, Christ's dominion over men.
+
+Yes; and that Cross wins their faith as nothing else can. The blind
+priests said, 'Let Him come down, and we will believe Him.'
+Precisely because He did not come down, do sad and sorrowful and
+sinful hearts turn to Him from the ends of the earth, and from the
+distances of the ages pour the treasures of their trust and their
+love at His feet. Did you ever think how strange it is, except with
+one explanation, that the gibes of the priests did not turn out to
+be true? Why is it that Christ's shameful death did not burst the
+bubble, as they thought it had done? Why is it that in His case--and
+I was going to say, and it would have been no exaggeration, in His
+case only--the death of the leader did not result in the dispersion
+of the led? Why is it that His fate and future were the opposite of
+that of multitudes of other pseudo-Messiahs, of whom it is true that
+when they were slain their followers came to nought? Why? There is
+only one explanation, I think, and that is that the death was not
+the end, but that He rose again from the dead. My brother, you will
+either have to accept the Resurrection, with all that comes from it,
+or else you will have to join the ranks of the priests, and consider
+that Christ's death blew to atoms Christ's pretensions. If we know
+anything about Him, we know that He asserted miraculous power,
+Messiahship, and a filial relation to God. These things are facts.
+Did He rise or did He not? If He did not, He was an enthusiast. If
+He did, He is the King to whom our hearts can cleave, and to whom
+our loyalty is due.
+
+III. Now, lastly, the Cross shows us the Son, beloved of the Father.
+
+The priests thought that it was altogether incredible that His
+devotion should have been genuine, or His claim to be the Son of God
+should have any reality, since the Cross, to their vulgar eyes,
+disproved them both. Like all coarse-minded people, they estimated
+character by condition, but they who do that make no end of
+mistakes. They had forgotten their own Prophecies, which might have
+told them that 'the Servant of the Lord in whom' His 'heart
+delighted,' was a suffering Servant. But whilst they recognised the
+facts, here again, as in the other two cases, they misconceived the
+relation. We have the means of rectifying the distorted image.
+
+We ought to know, and to be sure, that the Cross of Christ was the
+very token that this was God's 'beloved Son in whom He was well
+pleased.' If we dare venture on the comparison of parts of that
+which is all homogeneous and perfect, we might say that in the
+moment of His death Jesus Christ was more than ever the object of
+the Father's delight.
+
+Why? It is not my purpose now to enlarge upon all the reasons which
+might be suggested. Let me put them together in a sentence or two.
+In that Cross Jesus Christ revealed God as God's heart had always
+yearned to be revealed, infinite in love, pitifulness, forbearance,
+and pardoning mercy. There was the highest manifestation of the
+glory of God. 'What?' you say, 'a poor weak Man, hanging on a cross,
+and dying in the dark--is _that_ the very shining apex of all
+that humanity can know of divinity?' Yes, for it is the pure
+manifestation that God is Love. Therefore the whole sunshine of the
+Father's presence rested on the dying Saviour. It was the hour when
+God most delighted in Him, if I may venture the comparison, for the
+other reasons that then He carried filial obedience to its utmost
+perfection, that then His trust in God was deepest, even at the hour
+when His spirit was darkened by the cloud that the world's sin,
+which He was carrying, had spread thunderous between Him and the
+sunshine of the Father's face. For in that mysterious voice, which
+we can never understand in its depths, there were blended trust and
+desolation, each in its highest degree: 'My God! my God! Why hast
+Thou forsaken Me?' And the Cross was the complete carrying out of
+God's dearest purpose for the world, that He might be 'just, and the
+justifier of him that believeth in Jesus.' Therefore, then--I was
+going to say as never before--was Christ His Son, in whom He
+delighted.
+
+Brethren, let us, led by the errors of these scoffers, grasp the
+truths that they pervert. Let us see that weak Man hanging helpless
+on the cross, whose 'cannot' is the impotence of omnipotence,
+imposed by His own loving will to save a world by the sacrifice of
+Himself. Let us crown Him our King, and let our deepest trust and
+our gladdest obedience be rendered to Him because He did not come
+down from, but 'endured, the cross.' Let us behold with wonder, awe,
+and endless love the Father not withholding His only Son, but
+'delivering Him up to the death for us all,' and from the empty
+grave and the occupied Throne let us learn how the Father by both
+proclaims to all the world concerning Him hanging dying on the
+cross: '_This_ is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.'
+
+
+
+
+THE VEIL RENT
+
+
+    'Behold, the veil of the Temple was rent in twain from
+    the top to the bottom.'--MATT. xxvii. 51.
+
+As I suppose we are all aware, the Jewish Temple was divided into
+three parts: the Outer Court, open to all; the Holy Place, to which
+the ministering priests had daily access to burn incense and trim
+the lamps; and the Holy of Holies, where only the High Priest was
+permitted to go, and that but once a year, on the great Day of
+Atonement. For the other three hundred and sixty-four days the
+shrine lay silent, untrodden, dark. Between it and the less sacred
+Holy Place hung the veil, whose heavy folds only one man was
+permitted to lift or to pass. To all others it was death to peer
+into the mysteries, and even to him, had he gone at another time,
+and without the blood of the sacrifice, death would have ensued.
+
+If we remember all this and try to cast ourselves back in
+imagination to the mental attitude of the ordinary Jew, the incident
+of my text receives its true interpretation. At the moment when the
+loud cry of the dying Christ rung over the heads of the awestruck
+multitude, that veil was, as it were, laid hold of by a pair of
+giant hands and torn asunder, as the Evangelist says, 'from the top
+to the bottom.' The incident was a symbol. In one aspect it
+proclaimed the end of the long years of Israel's prerogative. In
+another it ushered in an epoch of new relations between man and God.
+If Jesus Christ was what He said He was, if His death was what He
+declared it to be, it was fitting that it should be attended by a
+train of subordinate and interpreting wonders. These were, besides
+that of my text, the darkened sun, the trembling earth, the shivered
+rocks, the open graves, the rising saints--all of them, in their
+several ways, illuminating the significance of that death on
+Calvary.
+
+Not less significant is this symbol of my text, and I desire now to
+draw your attention to its meanings.
+
+I. The rent veil proclaims the desecrated temple.
+
+There is a striking old legend, preserved by the somewhat mendacious
+historian of the Jewish people, that, before Jerusalem fell, the
+anxious watchers heard from within the sanctuary a great voice
+saying, 'Let us depart hence!' and through the night were conscious
+of the winnowing of the mighty wings of the withdrawing cherubim.
+And soon a Roman soldier tossed a brand into the most Holy Place,
+and the 'beautiful house where their fathers praised was burned with
+fire.' The legend is pathetic and significant. But that 'departing'
+had taken place forty years before; and at the moment when Jesus
+'gave up the ghost,' purged eyes might have seen the long trail of
+brightness as the winged servitors of the Most High withdrew from
+the desecrated shrine. The veil rent declared that the sacred soil
+within it was now common as any foot of earth in Galilee; and its
+rending, so to speak, made way for a departing God.
+
+That conception, that the death of Christ Jesus was the
+_de-consecration_--if I may coin a word--of the Temple, and the end
+of all its special sanctity, and that thenceforward the Presence had
+departed from it, is distinctly enough taught us by Himself in words
+which move in the same circle of ideas as that in which the symbol
+resides.... You remember, no doubt, that, if we accept the testimony
+of John's Gospel, at the very beginning of our Lord's ministry He
+vindicated His authority to cleanse the sanctuary against the cavils
+of the sticklers for propriety by the enigmatical words, 'Destroy
+this Temple, and in three days I will build it up,' to which the
+Evangelist appends the comment, 'He spake of the Temple of His
+body,' that body in which 'all the fulness of the Godhead' dwelt,
+and which was, and is to-day, all that the Temple shadowed and
+foretold, the dwelling-place of God in humanity, the place of
+sacrifice, the meeting-place between God and man. But just because
+our Lord in these dark words predicted His death and His
+resurrection, He also hinted the destruction of the literal stone
+and lime building, and its rearing again in nobler and more
+spiritual form. When He said, 'Destroy this Temple,' He implied,
+secondarily, the destruction of the house in which He stood, and
+laid that destruction, whensoever it should come to pass, at their
+doors. And, inasmuch as the saying in its deepest depth meant His
+death by their violence and craft, therefore, in that early saying
+of His, was wrapped up the very same truth which was symbolised by
+the rent veil, and was bitterly fulfilled at last. When they slew
+Christ they killed the system under which they lived, and for which
+they would have been glad to die, in a zeal without knowledge; and
+destroyed the very Temple on the distorted charge of being the
+destroyer of which, they handed Him over to the Roman power.
+
+The death of Christ is, then, the desecration and the destruction of
+that Temple. Of course it is; because when a nation that had had
+millenniums of education, of forbearance, of revelation, turned at
+last upon the very climax and brightest central light of all the
+Revelation, standing there amongst them in a bodily form, there was
+nothing more to be done. God had shot His last arrow; His quiver was
+empty. 'Last of all He sent unto them His Son, saying,' with a
+wistful kind of half-confidence, 'They will reverence My Son,' and
+the divine expectation was disappointed, and exhaustless Love was
+empty-handed, and all was over. He could turn to themselves and say,
+'Judge between Me and My vineyard. What more could have been done
+that I have not done to it?' Therefore, there was nothing left but
+to let the angels of destruction loose, and to call for the Roman
+eagles with their broad-spread wings, and their bloody beaks, and
+their strong talons, to gather together round the carcase. When He
+gave up the Ghost, 'the veil of the Temple was rent in twain from
+the top to the bottom.'
+
+A time of repentance was given. It was possible for the most guilty
+participator in that judicial murder to have his gory hands washed
+and made white in the very blood that he had shed; but, failing
+repentance, that death was the death of Israel, and the destruction
+of Israel's Temple. Let us take the lesson, dear brethren. If we
+turn away from that Saviour, and refuse the offered gifts of His
+love, there is no other appeal left in the power of Heaven; and
+there is nothing for it after that except judgment and destruction.
+We can 'crucify the Son of God afresh and put Him to an open shame.'
+And the hearts that are insensitive, as are some of our hearts, to
+that great love and grace, are capable of nothing except to be
+pulverised by means of a judgment. Repentance is possible for us
+all, but, failing that, the continuance of rejection of Christ is
+the pulling down, on our own heads, of the ruins of the Temple, like
+the Israelitish hero in his blindness and despair.
+
+II. Now, secondly, the rent veil means, in another way of looking at
+the incident, light streaming in on the mystery of God.
+
+Let me recall to your imaginations what lay behind that heavy veil.
+In the Temple, in our Lord's time, there was no presence of the
+Shekinah, the light that symbolised the divine presence. There was
+the mercy-seat, with the outstretched wings of the cherubim; there
+were the dimly pictured forms on the tapestry hangings; there was
+silence deep as death; there was darkness absolute and utter, whilst
+the Syrian sun was blazing down outside. Surely that is the symbol
+of the imperfect knowledge or illumination as to the divine nature
+which is over all the world. 'The veil is spread over all nations,
+and the covering over all people.' And surely that sudden, sharp
+tearing asunder of the obscuring medium, and letting the bright
+sunlight stream into every corner of the dark chamber, is for us a
+symbol of the great fact that in the life, and especially in the
+death, of Jesus Christ our Lord, we have light thrown in to the
+depths of God.
+
+What does that Cross tell us about God that the world did not know?
+And how does it tell us? and why does it tell us? It tells us of
+absolute righteousness, of that in the divine nature which cannot
+tolerate sin; of the stern law of retribution which must be wrought
+out, and by which the wages of every sin is death. It tells us not
+only of a divine righteousness which sees guilt and administers
+punishment, but it tells us of a divine love, perfect, infinite,
+utter, perennial, which shrinks from no sacrifice, which stoops to
+the lowest conditions, which itself takes upon it all the miseries
+of humanity, and which dies because it loves and will save men from
+death. And as we look upon that dying Man hanging on the cross, the
+very embodiment and consummation of weakness and of shame, we have
+to say, 'Lo! this is our God! We have waited for Him'--through all
+the weary centuries--'and He will save us.' How does it tell us all
+this? Not by eloquent and gracious thoughts, not by sweet and
+musical words, but by a deed. The only way by which we can know men
+is by what they do. The only way by which we know God is by what He
+does. And so we point to that Cross and say, 'There! not in words,
+not in thoughts, not in speculations, not in hopes and fears and
+peradventures and dim intuitions, but in a solid fact; there is the
+Revelation which lays bare the heart of God, and shows us its very
+throbbing of love to every human soul.' 'The veil was rent in twain
+from the top to the bottom.'
+
+The Cross will reveal God to you only if you believe that Jesus
+Christ was the Incarnate Word. Brethren, if that death was but the
+death of even the very holiest, noblest, sweetest, perfectest soul
+that ever lived on earth and breathed human breath, there is no
+revelation of God in it for us. It tells us what Jesus was, and by a
+very roundabout inference may suggest something of what the divine
+nature is, but unless you can say, as the New Testament says, 'In
+the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
+was God.... And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we
+beheld His glory, the glory as of the only Begotten of the Father,
+full of grace and truth,' I fail to see how the death of Christ can
+be a revelation of the love of God.
+
+I need not occupy time in dilating upon the contrast between this
+solid certitude, and all that the world, apart from Jesus Christ,
+has to lay hold of about God. We want something else than mist on
+which to build, and on which to lay hold. And there is a
+substantial, warm, flesh-and-blood hand, if I may so say, put out to
+us through the mist when we believe in Christ the Son of God, who
+died on the cross for us all. Then, amidst whirling mists and
+tossing seas, there is a fixed point to which we can moor; then our
+confidence is built, not on peradventures or speculations or wishes
+or dreams or hopes, but on a historical fact, and grasping that firm
+we may stand unmoved.
+
+Dear friends, I may be very old-fashioned and very narrow--I suppose
+I am; but I am bound to declare my conviction, which I think every
+day's experience of the tendency of thought only makes more certain,
+that, practically for this generation, the choice lies between
+accepting the life and death of Jesus Christ as the historical
+Revelation of God, or having no knowledge of Him--_knowledge_,
+I say,--of Him at all; you must choose between the barred sanctuary,
+within which lies couched a hidden Something--with a capital S--or
+perhaps a hidden Someone whom you never can know and never will; or
+the rent veil, rent by Christ's death, through which you can pass,
+and behold the mercy-seat and, above the outstretched wings of the
+adoring cherubim, the Father whose name is Love.
+
+III. Lastly, the rent veil permits any and every man to draw near to
+God.
+
+You remember what I have already said as to the jealous guarding of
+the privacy of that inner shrine, and how not only the common herd
+of the laity, but the whole of the priesthood, with the solitary
+exception of its titular head, were shut out from ever entering it.
+In the old times of Israel there was only one man alive at once who
+had ever been beyond the veil. And now that it is rent, what does
+that show but this, that by the death of Jesus Christ any one, every
+one, is welcome to pass in to the very innermost sanctuary, and to
+dwell, nestling as close as he will, to the very heart of the
+throned God? There is a double veil, if I may so say, between man
+and God: the side turned outward is woven by our own sins; and the
+other turned inwards is made out of the necessary antagonism of the
+divine nature to man's sin. There hangs the veil, and when the
+Psalmist asked, 'Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord; or who
+shall stand in His holy place?' he was putting a question which
+echoes despairingly in the very heart of all religions. And he
+answered it as conscience ever answers it when it gets fair play:
+'He that hath clean hands and a pure heart, who hath not lifted up
+his soul unto vanity.' And where or who is he? Nowhere; nobody.
+Access is barred, because it is impossible that a holy and righteous
+God should communicate the selectest gifts of His love, even the
+sense of His favour, and of harmony and fellowship with Him, to
+sinful men, and barred, because it is impossible that men, with the
+consciousness of evil and the burden of guilt sometimes chafing
+their shoulders, and always bowing down their backs, should desire
+to possess, or be capable of possessing, that fellowship and union
+with God. A black, frowning wall, if I may change the metaphor of my
+text, rises between us and God. But One comes with the sacrificial
+vessel in His hand, and pours His blood on the barrier, and that
+melts the black blocks that rise between us and God, and the path is
+patent and permeable for every foot. 'The veil of the Temple was
+rent in twain' when Christ died. That death, because it is a
+sacrifice, makes it possible that the whole fulness of the divine
+love should be poured upon man. That death moves our hearts, takes
+away our sense of guilt, draws us nearer to Him; and so both by its
+operation--not on the love of God--but on the government of God, and
+by its operation on the consciousness of men, throws open the path
+into His very presence.
+
+If I might use abstract words, I would say that Christ's death
+potentially opens the path for every man, which being put into plain
+English--which is better--is just that by the death of Christ every
+man can, if he will, go to God, and live beside Him. And our faith
+is our personal laying hold of that great sacrifice and treading on
+that path. It turns the 'potentiality' into an actuality, the
+possibility into a fact. If we believe on Him who died on the cross
+for us all, then by that way we come to God, than which there is
+none other given under heaven among men.
+
+So all believers are priests, or none of them are. The absolute
+right of direct access to God, without the intervention of any man
+who has an officially greater nearness to Him than others, and
+through whom as through a channel the grace of sacrament comes, is
+contained in the great symbol of my text. And it is a truth that
+this day needs. On the one hand there is agnostic unbelief, which
+needs to see in the rent veil the illumination streaming through it
+on to the depths of God; and on the other hand there is the
+complementary error--and the two always breed each other--the
+superstition which drags back by an anachronism the old Jewish
+notions of priesthood into the Christian Church. It needs to see in
+the rent veil the charter of universal priesthood for all believers,
+and to hearken to the words which declare, 'Ye are a chosen
+generation, a spiritual house, a royal priesthood, that ye should
+offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable unto God by Jesus Christ.'
+That is the lesson that this day wants. 'Having, therefore,
+brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest of all, by the blood of
+Jesus, by a new and living way, which He has consecrated for us
+through the veil, that is His flesh, let us draw near with true
+hearts in full assurance of faith.'
+
+
+
+
+THE PRINCE OF LIFE
+
+
+    'In the end of the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward
+    the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the
+    other Mary to see the sepulchre. 2. And, behold, there
+    was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord
+    descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the
+    stone from the door, and sat upon it. 3. His countenance
+    was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow:
+    4. And for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became
+    as dead men. 5. And the angel answered and said unto the
+    women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which
+    was crucified. 6. He is not here: for He is risen, as He
+    said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. 7. And go
+    quickly, and tell His disciples that He is risen from
+    the dead; and, behold, He goeth before you into Galilee;
+    there shall ye see Him: lo, I have told you. 8. And they
+    departed quickly from the sepulchre with fear and great
+    joy; and did run to bring His disciples word. 9. And as
+    they went to tell His disciples, behold, Jesus met them,
+    saying, All hail. And they came and held Him by the
+    feet, and worshipped Him. 10. Then said Jesus unto them,
+    Be not afraid: go tell My brethren that they go into
+    Galilee, and there shall they see Me. 11. Now, when
+    they were going, behold, some of the watch came into
+    the city, and shewed unto the chief priests all the
+    things that were done. 12. And when they were assembled
+    with the elders, and had taken counsel, they gave large
+    money unto the soldiers, 13. Saying, Say ye, His
+    disciples came by night, and stole Him away while we
+    slept. 14. And if this come to the governor's ears, we
+    will persuade him, and secure you. 15. So they took the
+    money, and did as they were taught: and this saying is
+    commonly reported among the Jews until this day.'
+    --MATT. xxviii. 1-15.
+
+The attempts at harmonising the resurrection narratives are not only
+unsatisfactory, but they tend to blur the distinctive characteristics
+of each account. We shall therefore confine ourselves entirely to
+Matthew's version, and leave the others alone, with the simple
+remark that a condensed report of a series of events does not deny
+what it omits, nor contradict a fuller one. The peculiarities of
+Matthew's last chapter are largely due to the purpose of his gospel.
+ Throughout, it has been the record of the Galilean ministry, the
+picture of the King of Israel, and of His treatment by those who
+should have been His subjects. This chapter establishes the fact of
+His resurrection; but, passing by the Jerusalem appearances of the
+risen Lord, as being granted to individuals and having less bearing
+on His royalty, emphasises two points: His rejection by the
+representatives of the nation, whose lie is endorsed by popular
+acceptance; and the solemn assumption, in Galilee, so familiar to
+the reader, of universal dominion, with the world-wide commission,
+in which the kingdom bursts the narrow national limits and becomes
+co-extensive with humanity. It is better to learn the meaning of
+Matthew's selection of his incidents than to wipe out instructive
+peculiarities in the vain attempt after harmony.
+
+First, notice his silence (in which all the four narratives are
+alike) as to the time and circumstances of the resurrection itself.
+That had taken place before the grey twilight summoned the faithful
+women, and before the earthquake and the angel's descent. No eye saw
+Him rise. The guards were not asleep, for the statement that they
+were is a lie put into their mouths by the rulers; but though they
+kept jealous watch, His rising was invisible to them. 'The prison
+was shut with all safety,' for the stone was rolled away after He
+was risen, 'and the keepers standing before the doors,' but there
+was 'no man within.' As in the evening of that day He appeared in
+the closed chamber, so He passed from the sealed grave. Divine
+decorum required that that transcendent act should be done without
+mortal observers of the actual rising of the Sun which scatters for
+ever the darkness of death.
+
+Matthew next notices the angel ministrant and herald. His narrative
+leaves the impression that the earthquake and appearance of the
+angel immediately preceded the arrival of the women, and the
+'Behold!' suggests that they felt and saw both. But that is a piece
+of chronology on which there may be difference of opinion. The other
+narratives tell of two angels. Matthew's mention of one only may be
+due either to the fact that one was speaker, or to the subjective
+impressions of his informant, who saw but the one, or to variation
+in the number visible at different times. We know too little of the
+laws which determine their appearances to be warranted in finding
+contradiction or difficulty here. The power of seeing may depend on
+the condition of the beholder. It may depend, not as with gross
+material bodies, on optics, but on the volition of the radiant
+beings seen. They may pass from visibility to its opposite, lightly
+and repeatedly, flickering into and out of sight, as the Pleiades
+seem to do. Where there is such store of possibilities, he is rash
+who talks glibly about contradictions.
+
+Of far more value is it to note the purpose served by this waiting
+angel. We heard much of a herald angel of the Lord in the story of
+the Nativity. We hear nothing of him during the life of Christ. Now
+again he appears, as the stars, quenched in the noontide, shine
+again when the sun is out of the sky. He attends as humble servitor,
+in token that the highest beings gazed on that empty grave with
+reverent adoration, and were honoured by being allowed to guard the
+sacred place. Death was an undreaded thing to them, and no hopes for
+themselves blossomed from Christ's grave; but He who had lain in it
+was their King as well as ours, and new lessons of divine love were
+taught them, as they wondered and watched. They come to minister by
+act and word to the weeping women's faith and joy. Their appearance
+paralyses the guards, who would have kept the Marys from the grave.
+They roll away the great circular stone, which women's hands,
+however nerved by love, could not have moved in its grooves. They
+speak tender words to them. There by the empty tomb, the strong
+heavenly and the weak earthly lovers of the risen King meet
+together, and clasp hands of help, the pledge and first-fruits of
+the standing order henceforth, and the inauguration of their office
+of 'ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for ... heirs of
+salvation.' The risen Christ hath made both one. The servants of the
+same King must needs be friends of one another.
+
+The angel's words fall into three parts. First, he calms fears by the
+assurance that the seekers for Christ are dear to Him. 'Fear not _ye_'
+glances at the prostrate watchers, and almost acknowledges the
+reasonableness of their abject terror. To them he could not but be
+hostile, but to hearts that longed for their and his Lord, he and all
+his mighty fellows were brethren. Let us learn that all God's angels
+are our lovers and helpers, if we love and seek for Jesus. Superstition
+has peopled the gulf between God and man with crowds of beings;
+revelation assures us that it is full of creatures who excel in strength.
+Men have cowered before them, but 'whether they be thrones, or
+dominions, or principalities, or powers,' our King was their Creator,
+and is their Sovereign, and, if we serve Him, all these are on our
+side. The true deliverer from superstitious terrors is the risen Christ.
+Again, the angel announces in simplest words the glorious fact, 'He
+is risen,' and helps them to receive it by a double way. He reminds
+them of Christ's own words, which had seemed so mysterious and
+had turned out so simple, so incredible, and now had proved so true.
+He calls them with a smile of welcome to draw near, and with him to
+look into the empty place. The invitation extends to us all, for the
+one assurance of immortality; and the only answer to the despairing
+question, 'If a man die, shall he live again?' which is solid enough
+to resist the corrosion of modern doubt as of ancient ignorance, is
+that empty grave, and the filled throne, which was its necessary
+consequence. By it we measure the love that stooped so low, we
+school our hearts to anticipate without dread or reluctance our own
+lying down there, we fasten our faith on the risen Forerunner, and
+rejoice in the triumphant assurance of a living Christ. If the
+wonder of the women's stunned gaze is no more ours, our calm
+acceptance of the familiar fact need be none the less glad, and our
+estimate of its far-reaching results more complete than their tumult
+of feeling permitted to them.
+
+No wonder that, swiftly, new duty which was privilege followed on
+the new, glad knowledge. It was emphatically 'a day of good
+tidings,' and they could not hold their peace. A brief glance,
+enough for certitude and joy, was permitted; and then, with urgent
+haste, they are sent to be apostles to the Apostles. The possession
+of the news of a risen Saviour binds the possessors to be its
+preachers. Where it is received in any power, it will impel to
+utterance. He who can keep silence has never felt, as he ought, the
+worth of the word, nor realised the reason why he has seen the Cross
+or the empty grave. 'He goeth before you into Galilee; there shall
+ye see.' It was but two complete days and one night since Christ had
+said to the disciples that He would rise again, and, as the Shepherd
+of the scattered flock, go before them into Galilee. How long ago
+since that saying it would seem! The reasons for Matthew's omission
+of all the other appearances of our Lord in Jerusalem, with the
+exception of the one which immediately follows, and for the stress
+he lays on this rendezvous in their native Galilee, have already
+been touched on, and need not detain us now.
+
+The next point in the narrative is the glad interview with the risen
+Jesus. The women had been at the grave but for a few moments. But
+they lived more in these than in years of quiet. Time is very
+elastic, and five minutes or five seconds may change a life. These
+few moments changed a world. Haste, winged by fear which had no
+torment, and by joy which found relief in swift movement, sent them
+running, forgetful of conventional proprieties, towards the
+awakening city. Probably Mary Magdalene had left them, as soon as
+they saw the open grave, and had hurried back alone to tell the
+tidings. And now the crowning joy and wonder comes. How simply it is
+told!--the introductory 'Behold!' just hinting at the wonderfulness,
+and perhaps at the suddenness, of our Lord's appearance, and the
+rest being in the quietest and fewest words possible. Note the deep
+significance of the name 'Jesus' here. The angel spoke of 'the
+Lord,' but all the rest of the chapter speaks of 'Jesus.' The joy
+and hope that flow from the Resurrection depend on the fact of His
+humanity. He comes out of the grave, the same brother of our mortal
+flesh as before. It was no phantom whose feet they clasped, and He
+is not withdrawn from them by His mysterious experience. All through
+the Resurrection histories and the narrative of the forty days, the
+same emphasis attaches to the name, which culminates in the angel's
+assurance at the Ascension, that 'this same Jesus,' in His true
+humanity, who has gone up on high our Forerunner, shall come again
+our Brother and our Judge. 'It is _Christ_ that died, yea
+rather, that is risen again'; but that triumphant assurance loses
+all its blessedness, unless we say too, '_Jesus_ died for our
+sins according to the Scriptures, and ... rose again the third day.'
+
+Note, too, the calmness of His greeting. He uses the common form of
+salutation, as if He had but been absent on some common occasion,
+and met them in ordinary circumstances. He speaks out of His own
+deep tranquillity, and desires to impart it to their agitated
+spirits. He would calm their joy, that it may be the deeper, like
+His own. If we may give any weight to the original meaning of the
+formula of greeting which He employs, we may see blessed prophecy in
+it. The lips of the risen Christ bid us all 'rejoice.' His
+salutation is no empty wish, but a command which makes its own
+fulfilment possible. If our hearts welcome Him, and our faith is
+firm in His risen power and love, then He gives us a deep and
+central gladness, which nothing
+
+  'That is at enmity with joy
+   Can utterly abolish or destroy.'
+
+The rush to His feet, and the silent clasp of adoration, are
+eloquent of a tumult of feeling most natural, and yet not without
+turbid elements, which He does not wholly approve. We have not here
+the prohibition of such a touch which was spoken to Mary, but we
+have substantially the same substitution, by His command, of
+practical service for mere emotion. That carries a lesson always in
+season. We cannot love Christ too much, nor try to get too near Him,
+to touch Him with the hand of our faith. But there have been modes
+of religious emotion, represented by hymns and popular books, which
+have not mingled reverence rightly with love, and have spoken of
+Him, and of the emotions binding us to Him, in tones unwholesomely
+like those belonging to earthly passion. But, apart from that, Jesus
+taught these women, and us through them, that it is better to
+proclaim His Resurrection than to lie at His feet; and that, however
+sweet the blessedness which we find in Him may be, it is meant to
+put a message into our lips, which others need. Our sight of Him
+gives us something to say, and binds us to say it. It was a blessing
+to the women to have work to do, in doing which their strained
+emotions might subside. It was a blessing to the mournful company in
+the upper room to have their hearts prepared for His coming by these
+heralds. It was a wonderful token of His unchanged love, and an
+answer to fears and doubts of how they might find Him, that He sends
+the message to them as brethren.
+
+In the hurry of that Easter morning, they had no time to ponder on
+all that it had brought them. The Resurrection as the demonstration
+of Christ's divinity and of the acceptance of His perfect sacrifice,
+or as the pledge of their resurrection, or as the type of their
+Christian life, was for future experience to grasp. For that day, it
+was enough to pass from despair to joy, and to let the astounding
+fact flood them with sunny hope.
+
+We know the vast sweep of the consequences and consolations of it
+far better than they did. There is no reason, in our distance from
+it, for its diminishing either in magnitude, in certitude, or in
+blessedness in our eyes. No fact in the history of the world stands
+on such firm evidence as the resurrection of Jesus Christ. No age of
+the world ever needed to believe it more than this one does. It
+becomes us all to grasp it for ourselves with an iron tenacity of
+hold, and to echo, in the face of the materialisms and know-nothing
+philosophy of this day, the old ringing confession, 'Now is Christ
+risen from the dead!'
+
+We need say little about the last point in this narrative--the
+obstinate blindness of the rulers, and their transparent lie to
+account for the empty grave. The guard reports to the rulers, not to
+the governor, as they had been handed over by Pilate for special
+service. But they were Roman soldiers, as appears from the danger
+which the rulers provided against, that of their alleged crime
+against military discipline, in sleeping at their post, coming to
+his ears. The trumped-up story is too puerile to have taken in any
+one who did not wish to believe it. How could they tell what
+happened when they were asleep? How could such an operation as
+forcing back a heavy stone, and exhuming a corpse, have been carried
+on without waking them? How could such a timid set of people have
+mustered up courage for such a bold act? What did they do it for?
+Not to bury their Lord. He had been lovingly laid there by reverent
+hands, and costly spices strewn upon the sacred limbs. The only
+possible motive would be that the disciples might tell lies about
+His resurrection. That hypothesis that the Resurrection was a
+deliberately concocted falsehood has proved too strong for the
+stomach of modern unbelief, and has been long abandoned, as it had
+need to be. When figs grow on thistles, such characters as the early
+Christians, martyrs, heroes, saints, will be produced by a system
+which has a lie, known to be one, for its foundation. But the lame
+story is significant in two ways. It confesses, by its desperate
+attempt to turn the corner of the difficulty, that the great rock,
+on which all denials of Christ's resurrection split, is the simple
+question--If He did not rise again, what became of the body? The
+priests' answer is absurd, but it, at all events, acknowledges that
+the grave was empty, and that it is incumbent to produce an
+explanation which reasonable men can accept without laughter.
+
+Further, this last appearance of the rulers in the gospel is full of
+tragic significance, and is especially important to Matthew, whose
+narrative deals especially with Jesus as the King and Messiah of
+Israel. This is the end of centuries of prophecy and patience! This
+is what all God's culture of His vineyard has come to! The
+husbandmen cast the Heir out of the vineyard, and slew him. But
+there was a deeper depth than even that. They would not be persuaded
+when He rose again from the dead. They entrenched themselves in a
+lie, which only showed that they had a glimmering of the truth and
+hated it. And the lie was willingly swallowed by the mass of the
+nation, who thereby showed that they were of the same stuff as they
+who made it. A conspiracy of falsehood, which knew itself to be
+such, was the last act of that august council of Israel. It is an
+awful lesson of the penalties of unfaithfulness to the light
+possessed, an awful instance of 'judicial blindness.' So sets the
+sun of Israel. And therefore Matthew's Gospel turns away from the
+apostate nation, which has rejected its King, to tell, in its last
+words, of His assumption of universal dominion, and of the passage
+of the glad news from Israel to the world.
+
+
+
+
+THE RISEN LORD'S GREETINGS AND GIFTS
+
+
+    'And as they went to tell His disciples, behold, Jesus
+    met them, saying, All hail.'--MATT. xxviii. 9.
+
+    'Then the same day at evening ... came Jesus and stood
+    in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.'
+    --JOHN xx. 19.
+
+So did our Lord greet His sad followers. The first of these
+salutations was addressed to the women as they hurried in the
+morning from the empty tomb bewildered; the second to the disciples
+assembled in the upper room in the evening of the same day. Both are
+ordinary greetings. The first is that usual in Greek, and literally
+means 'Rejoice'; the second is that common in Hebrew. The divergence
+between the two may be owing to the Evangelist Matthew having
+rendered the words which our Lord actually did speak, in the tongue
+familiar to His time, into their equivalent Greek. But whatever
+account may be given of the divergence does not materially affect
+the significance which I find in the salutations. And I desire to
+turn to them for a few moments now, because I think that, if we
+ponder them, we may gain some precious lessons from these Easter
+greetings of the Lord Himself.
+
+I. First, then, notice their strange and majestic simplicity.
+
+He meets His followers after Calvary and the Tomb and the
+Resurrection, with the same words with which two casual
+acquaintances, after some slight absence, might salute one another
+by the way. Their very simplicity is their sublimity here. For think
+of what tremendous experiences He had passed through since they saw
+Him last, and of what a rush of rapture and disturbance of joy shook
+the minds of the disciples, and then estimate the calm and calming
+power of that matter-of-fact and simple greeting. It bears upon its
+very front the mark of truth. Would anybody have imagined the scene
+so? There have been one or two great poets who might conceivably
+have risen to the height of putting such words under such
+circumstances into the mouths of creatures of their own imagination.
+Analogous instances of the utmost simplicity of expression in
+moments of intense feeling may be quoted from Æschylus or
+Shakespeare, and are regarded as the high-water marks of genius. But
+does any one suppose that these evangelists were exceptionally
+gifted souls of that sort, or that they could have imagined anything
+like this--so strange in its calm, so unnatural at first sight, and
+yet vindicating itself as so profoundly natural and sublime--unless
+for the simple reason that they had heard it themselves, or been
+told it by credible witnesses? Neither the delicate pencil of the
+great dramatic genius nor the coarser brush of legend can have drawn
+such an incident as this, and it seems to me that the only
+reasonable explanation of it is that these greetings are what He
+really did say.
+
+For, as I have remarked, unnatural as it seems at first sight, if
+we think for a moment, the very simplicity and calm, and, I was
+going to say, the _matter-of-factness_, of such a greeting, as
+the first that escaped from lips that had passed through death and
+yet were red and vocal, is congruous with the deepest truths of
+His nature. He has come from that tremendous conflict, and He
+reappears, not flushed with triumph, nor bearing any trace of effort,
+but surrounded as by a nimbus with that strange tranquillity which
+evermore enwrapped Him. So small does the awful scene which He has
+passed through seem to this divine-human Man, and so utterly are
+the old ties and bonds unaffected by it, that when He meets His
+followers, all He has to say to them as His first greeting is,
+'Peace be unto you!'--the well-worn salutation that was bandied to
+and fro in every market-place and scene where men were wont to meet.
+Thus He indicates the divine tranquillity of His nature; thus He
+minimises the fact of death; thus He reduces it to its true
+insignificance as a parenthesis across which may pass unaffected all
+sweet familiarities and loving friendships; thus He reknits the
+broken ties, and, though the form of their intercourse is hereafter
+to be profoundly modified, the substance of it remains, whereof He
+giveth assurance unto them in these His first words from the dead. So,
+as to a man standing on some mountain plateau, the deep gorges which
+seam it become invisible, and the unbroken level runs right on. So,
+there are a marvellous proof of the majesty and tranquillity of the
+divine Man, a glorious manifestation of His superiority over death;
+a blessed assurance of the reknitting of all ancient ties, after it
+as before it, coming to us from pondering on the trivial words--trivial
+from other lips, but profoundly significant on His--wherewith He
+greeted His servants when He rose again from the dead.
+
+II. Then note, secondly, the universal destination of the greetings
+of the risen Lord.
+
+I have said that it is possibly a mere accident that we should have
+the two forms of salutation preserved for us here; and that it is
+quite conceivable that our Lord really spoke but one, which has been
+preserved unaltered from its Hebrew or Aramaic original in John, and
+rendered by its Greek equivalent by the Evangelist Matthew.
+
+But be that as it may, I cannot help feeling that in this fact, that
+the one salutation is the common greeting among Greek-speaking peoples,
+and the other the common greeting amongst Easterns, we may permissibly
+find the thought of the universal aspect of the gifts and greetings of
+the risen Christ. He comes to all men, and each man hears Him, 'in his
+own tongue wherein he was born,' breathing forth to him greetings
+which are promises, and promises which are gifts. Just as the mocking
+inscription on the Cross proclaimed, in 'Hebrew and Greek and Latin,'
+the three tongues known to its readers, the one kingdom of the
+crucified King--so in the greetings from the grave, the one declares
+that, to all the desires of eager, ardent, sensuous, joy-loving
+Westerns, and all the aspirations of repose-loving Easterns, who had
+had bitter experience of the pangs and pains of a state of warfare,
+Jesus Christ is ready to respond and to bring answering gifts.
+Whatsoever any community or individual has conceived as its highest
+ideal of blessedness and of good, that the risen Christ hath in His
+hands to bestow. He takes men's ideals of blessedness, and deepens
+and purifies and refines them.
+
+The Greek notion of joy as being the good to be most wished for
+those dear to us, is but a shallow one. They had to learn, and their
+philosophy and their poetry and their art came to corruption because
+they would not learn, that the corn of wheat must be cast into the
+ground and die before it bring forth fruit. They knew little of the
+blessing and meaning of sorrow, and therefore the false glitter
+passed away, and the pursuit of the ideal became gross and foul and
+sensuous. And, on the other hand, the Jew, with his longing for
+peace, had an equally shallow and unworthy conception of what it
+meant, and what was needed to produce it. If he had only external
+concord with men, and a competency of outward good within his reach
+without too much trouble, he thought that because he 'had much goods
+laid up for many years' he might 'take his ease; and eat, and drink,
+and be merry.' But Jesus Christ comes to satisfy both aspirations by
+contradicting both, and to reveal to Greek and Jew how much deeper
+and diviner was his desire than he dreamed it to be; and, therefore,
+how impossible it was to find the joy that would last, in the
+dancing fireflies of external satisfactions or the delights of art
+and beauty; and how impossible it was to find the repose that
+ennobled and was wedded to action, in anything short of union with
+God.
+
+The Lord Christ comes out of the grave in which He lay for every
+man, and brings to each man's door, in a dialect intelligible to the
+man himself, the satisfaction of the single soul's aspirations and
+ideals, as well as of the national desires. His gifts and greetings
+are of universal destination, meant for us all and adapted for us
+each.
+
+III. Then, thirdly, notice the unfailing efficacy of the Lord's
+greetings.
+
+Look at these people to whom He spoke. Remember what they were
+between the Friday and the Sunday morning; utterly cowed and beaten,
+the women, in accordance with the feminine nature, apparently more
+deeply touched by the personal loss of the Friend and Comforter; and
+the men apparently, whilst sharing that sorrow, also touched by
+despair at the going to water of all the hopes that they had been
+building upon His official character and position. 'We trusted that
+it had been He which should have redeemed Israel,' they said, 'as
+they walked and were sad.' They were on the point of parting. The
+Keystone withdrawn, the stones were ready to fall apart. Then came
+_something_--let us leave a blank for a moment--then  came
+_something_; and those who had been cowards, dissolved in
+sorrow and relaxed by despair, in eight-and-forty hours became
+heroes. From that time, when, by all reasonable logic and common
+sense applied to men's motives, the Crucifixion should have crushed
+their dreams and dissolved their society, a precisely opposite
+effect ensues, and not only did the Church continue, but the men
+changed their characters, and became, somehow or other, full of
+these very two things which Christ wished for them--namely, joy and
+peace.
+
+Now I want to know--what bridges that gulf? How do you get the Peter
+of the Acts of the Apostles out of the Peter of the Gospels? Is
+there any way of explaining that revolution of character, whilst yet
+its broad outlines remain identical, which befell him and all of
+them, except the old-fashioned one that the _something_ which
+came in between was the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the
+consequent gift of joy and peace in Him, a joy that no troubles or
+persecutions could shake, a peace that no conflicts could for a
+moment disturb? It seems to me that every theory of Christianity
+which boggles at accepting the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as a
+plain fact, is shattered to pieces on the sharp-pointed rock of this
+one demand--'Very well! If it is not a fact, account for the
+existence of the Church, and for the change in the characters of its
+members.' You may wriggle as you like, but you will never get a
+reasonable theory of these two undeniable facts until you believe
+that He rose from the dead. In His right hand He carried peace, and
+in His left joy. He gave these to them, and therefore 'out of
+weakness they were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to
+flight the armies of the aliens,' and when the time came, 'were
+tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better
+resurrection.' There is omnipotent efficacy in Christ's greetings.
+
+The one instance opens up the general law, that His wishes are
+gifts, that all His words are acts, that He speaks and it is done,
+and that when He desires for us joy, it is a deed of conveyance and
+gift, and invests us with the joy that He desires if we observe the
+conditions.
+
+Christ's wishes are omnipotent, ours are powerless. We wish for our
+friends many good things, and the event turns wishes to mockery, and
+the garlands which we prepared for their birthdays have sometimes to
+be hung on their tombs. The limitations of human friendship and of
+our deepest and sincerest wishes, like a dark background, enhance
+the boundless efficacy of the greetings of the Master, which are not
+only wishes but bestowments of the thing wished, and therein given,
+by Him.
+
+IV. So, lastly, notice our share in this twofold greeting.
+
+When it was first heard, I suppose that the disciples and the women
+apprehended the salutation only in its most outward form, and that
+all other thoughts were lost in the mere rapture of the sudden
+change from the desolate sense of loss to the glad consciousness of
+renewed possession. When the women clung to His feet on that Easter
+morning, they had no thought of anything but--'we clasp Thee again,
+O Soul of our souls.' But then, as time went on, the meaning and
+blessedness and far-reaching issues of the Resurrection became more
+plain to them. And I think we can see traces of the process, in the
+development of Christian teaching as presented in the Acts of the
+Apostles and in the Epistles. Peter in his early sermons dwells on
+the Resurrection all but exclusively from one point of view--viz.,
+as being the great proof of Christ's Messiahship. Then there came by
+degrees, as is represented in the same Peter's letter, and
+abundantly in the Apostle Paul's, the recognition of the light which
+the Resurrection of Jesus Christ threw upon immortality; as a
+prophecy and a pattern thereof. Then, when the historical fact had
+become fully accepted and universally diffused, and its bearings
+upon men's future had been as fully apprehended as is possible here,
+there came, finally, the thought that the Resurrection of Jesus
+Christ was the symbol of the new life, which from that risen Lord
+passed into all those who loved and trusted Him.
+
+Now, in all these three aspects--as proof of Messiahship, as the
+pattern and prophecy of immortality, and as the symbol of the better
+life which is accessible for us, here and now--the Resurrection of
+Jesus Christ stands for us even more truly than for the rapturous
+women who caught His feet, or for the thankful men who looked upon
+Him in the upper chamber, as the source of peace and of joy.
+
+For, dear brethren, therein is set forth for us the Christ whose
+work is thereby declared to be finished and acceptable to God, and
+all sorrow of sin, all guilt, all disturbance of heart and mind by
+reason of evil passions and burning memories of former iniquity, and
+all disturbance of our concord with God, are at once and for ever
+swept away. If Jesus Christ was 'declared to be the Son of God with
+power by His Resurrection from the dead,' and if in that
+Resurrection, as is most surely the case, the broad seal of the
+divine acceptance is set to the charter of our forgiveness and
+sonship by the blood of the Cross, then joy and peace come to us
+from Him and from it.
+
+Again, the resurrection of Jesus Christ sets Him forth before us as
+the pattern and the prophecy of immortal life. This Samson has taken
+the gates of the prison-house on His broad shoulders and carried
+them away, and now no man is kept imprisoned evermore in that
+darkness. The earthquake has opened the doors and loosened every
+man's bonds. Jesus Christ hath risen from the dead, and therein not
+only demonstrated the certainty that life subsists through death,
+and that a bodily life is possible thereafter, but hath set before
+all those who give the keeping of their souls into His hands the
+glorious belief that 'the body of their humiliation shall be'
+'changed into the likeness of the body of His glory, according to
+the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto
+Himself.' Therefore the sorrows of death, for ourselves and for our
+dear ones, the agitation which it causes, and all its darkness into
+which we shrink from passing, are swept away when He comes forth
+from the grave, serene, radiant, and victorious, to die no more, but
+to dispense amongst us His peace and His joy.
+
+And, again, the risen Christ is the source of a new life drawn from
+Him and received into the heart by faith in His sacrifice and
+Resurrection and glory. And if I have, deep-seated in my soul,
+though it may be in imperfect maturity, that life which is hid with
+Christ in God, an inward fountain of gladness, far better than the
+effervescent, and therefore soon flat, waters of Greek or earthly
+joy, is mine; and in my inmost being dwells a depth of calm peace
+which no outward disturbance can touch, any more than the winds that
+rave along the surface of the ocean affect its unmoved and unsounded
+abysses. Jesus Christ comes to thee, my brother, weary, distracted,
+care-laden, sin-laden, sorrowful and fearful. And He says to each of
+us from the throne what He said in the upper room before the Cross,
+and on leaving the grave after it, 'My joy will remain in you, and
+your joy shall be full. My peace I leave to you, My peace I give
+unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you.'
+
+
+
+
+ON THE MOUNTAIN
+
+
+    'Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into
+    a mountain where Jesus had appointed them. 17. And when
+    they saw Him, they worshipped Him: but some doubted.'
+    --MATT. xxviii. 16, 17.
+
+    'After that, He was seen of above five hundred brethren
+    at once.'--1 COR. xv. 4
+
+To infer an historian's ignorance from his silence is a short and
+easy, but a rash, method. Matthew has nothing to say of our Lord's
+appearances in Jerusalem, except in regard to that of the women in
+the early morning of Easter Day. But it does not follow that he was
+ignorant of these appearances. Imperfect knowledge may be the
+explanation; but the scope and design of his Gospel is much more
+likely to be so. It is emphatically the Gospel of the King of
+Israel, and it moves, with the exception of the story of the
+Passion, wholly within the limits of the Galilean ministry. What
+more probable than that the same motive which induced Jesus to
+select the mountain which He had appointed as the scene of this
+meeting should have induced the Evangelist to pass by all the other
+manifestations in order to fix upon this one? It was fitting that in
+Galilee, where He had walked in lowly gentleness, 'kindly with His
+kind,' He should assume His sovereign authority. It was fitting that
+in 'Galilee of the Gentiles,' that outlying and despised province,
+half heathen in the eyes of the narrow-minded Pharisaic Jerusalem,
+He should proclaim the widening of His kingdom from Israel to all
+nations.
+
+If we had Matthew's words only, we should suppose that none but the
+eleven were present on this occasion. But it is obviously the same
+incident to which Paul refers when he speaks of the appearance to
+'five hundred brethren at once.' These were the Galilean disciples
+who had been faithful in the days of His lowliness, and were thus
+now assembled to hear His proclamation of exaltation. Apparently the
+meeting had been arranged beforehand. They came without Him to 'the
+mountain where Jesus had appointed.' Probably it was the same spot
+on which the so-called Sermon on the Mount, the first proclamation
+of the King, had been delivered, and it was naturally chosen to be
+the scene of a yet more exalted proclamation. A thousand tender
+memories and associations clustered round the spot. So we have to
+think of the five hundred gathered in eager expectancy; and we
+notice how unlike the manner of His coming is to that of the former
+manifestations. _Then_, suddenly, He became visibly present
+where a moment before He had been unseen. But _now_ He gradually
+approaches, for the doubting and the worshipping took place 'when
+they saw Him,' and before 'He came to them.' I suppose we may
+conceive of Him as coming down the hill and drawing near to them,
+and then, when He stands above them, and yet close to them--else the
+five hundred could not have seen Him 'at once'--doubts vanish; and
+they listen with silent awe and love. The words are majestic; all is
+regal. There is no veiled personality now, as there had been to Mary,
+and to the two on the road to Emmaus. There is no greeting now, as
+there had been in the upper chamber; no affording of a demonstration
+of the reality of His appearance, as there had been to Thomas and to
+the others. He stands amongst them as the King, and the music of His
+words, deep as the roll of thunder, and sweet as harpers harping with
+their harps, makes all comment or paraphrase sound thin and poor. But
+yet so many great and precious lessons are hived in the words that we
+must reverently ponder them. The material is so abundant that I can
+but touch it in the slightest possible fashion. This great utterance
+of our Lord's falls into three parts: a great claim, a great commission,
+a great promise.
+
+I. There is a Great Claim.
+
+'All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth.' No words can
+more absolutely express unconditional, unlimited authority and
+sovereignty. Mark the variety of the gift--'all power'; every kind
+of force, every kind of dominion is in His hands. Mark the sphere of
+sovereignty--'in heaven and in earth.' Now, brethren, if we know
+anything about Jesus Christ, we know that He made this claim. There
+is no reason, except the unwillingness of some people to admit that
+claim, for casting any sort of doubt upon these words, or making any
+distinction in authority between them and the rest of the words of
+graciousness which the whole world has taken to its heart. But if He
+said this, what becomes of His right to the veneration of mankind,
+as the Perfect Example of the self-sacrificing, self-oblivious
+religious life? It is a mystery that I cannot solve, how any man can
+keep his reverence for Jesus, and refuse to believe that beneath
+these tremendous words there lies a solemn and solid reality.
+
+Notice, too, that there is implied a definite point of time at which
+this all-embracing authority was given. You will find in the Revised
+Version a small alteration in the reading, which makes a great
+difference in the sense. It reads, 'All power _has been_ given';
+and that points, as I say, to a definite period. _When_ was it
+given? Let another portion of Scripture answer the question--'Declared
+to be the Son of God with power, by the resurrection from the dead.'
+_Then_ to the Man Jesus was given authority over heaven and earth.
+All the early Christian documents concur in this view of the connection
+between the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and His investiture
+with this sovereign power. Hearken to Paul, 'Became obedient unto
+death, even the death of the Cross; wherefore God also hath highly
+exalted Him, and given Him a name that is above every name.' Hearken
+to Peter, 'Who raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory.' Hearken
+to the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 'We see Jesus crowned
+with glory and honour for the suffering of death.' Hearken to John,
+'To Him that is the Faithful Witness, and the First-born from the
+dead, and the Prince of the kings of the earth.' Look with his
+eyes to the vision of the 'Lamb as it had been slain,' enthroned
+in the midst of the throne, and say whether this unanimous consent
+of the earliest Christian teachers is explicable on any reasonable
+grounds, unless there had been underlying it just the words of our
+text, and the Master Himself had taught them that all power was
+given to Him in heaven and in earth. As it seems to me impossible
+to account for the existence of the Church if we deny the
+Resurrection, so it seems to me impossible to account for the faith
+of the earliest stratum of the Christian Church without the
+acceptance of some such declaration as this, as having come from the
+Lord Himself. And so the hands that were pierced with the nails wield
+the sceptre of the Universe, and on the brows that were wounded and
+bleeding with the crown of thorns are wreathed the many crowns of
+universal Kinghood.
+
+But we have further to notice that in this investiture, with 'all
+power in heaven and on earth,' we have not merely the attestation of
+the perfection of His obedience, the completeness of His work, and
+the power of His sacrifice, but that we have also the elevation of
+Manhood to enthronement with Divinity. For the _new_ thing that
+came to Jesus after His resurrection was that His humanity was taken
+into, and became participant of, 'the glory which I had with Thee,
+before the world was.' Then our nature, when perfect and sinless, is
+so cognate and kindred with the Divine that humanity is capable of
+being invested with, and bearing, that 'exceeding and eternal weight
+of glory.' In that elevation of the Man Christ Jesus, we may read a
+prophecy, that shall not be unfulfilled, of the destiny of all those
+who conform to Him through faith, love, and obedience, finally to
+sit down with Him on His throne, even as He is set down with the
+Father on His throne.
+
+Ah! brethren, Christianity has dark and low views of human nature,
+and men say they are too low and too dark. It is 'Nature's sternest
+painter,' and, therefore, 'its best.' But if on its palette the
+blacks are blacker than anywhere else, its range of colour is
+greater, and its white is more lustrous. No system thinks so
+condemnatorily of human nature as it is; none thinks so glowingly of
+human nature as it may become. There are bass notes far down beyond
+the limits of the scale to which ears dulled by the world and sin
+and sorrow are sensitive; and there are clear, high tones, thrilling
+and shrilling far above the range of perception of such ears. The
+man that is in the lowest depths may rise with Jesus to the highest,
+but it must be by the same road by which the Master went. 'If we
+suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him,' and only 'if.' There
+is no other path to the Throne but the Cross. _Via crucis, via
+lucis_--the way of the Cross is the way of light. It is to those
+who have accepted their Gethsemanes and their Calvarys that He
+appoints a kingdom, as His Father has appointed unto Him.
+
+So much, then, for the first point here in these words; turn now to
+the second.
+
+II. The Great Commission.
+
+One might have expected that the immediate inference to be drawn from
+'All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth' would have been
+some word of encouragement and strengthening to those who were so soon
+to be left, and who were beginning to be conscious of their feebleness.
+But there is nothing more striking in the whole of the incidents of
+those forty days than the prominence which is given in them to the
+work of the Church when the Master had left it, and to the imperative
+obligations devolving upon it. And so here, not encouragement, but
+obligation is the inference that is drawn from that tremendous claim.
+'Because I have all power, therefore you are charged with the duty
+of winning the world for its King.' The all-ruling Christ calls for
+the universal proclamation of His sovereignty by His disciples. These
+five hundred little understood the sweep of the commandment, and, as
+history shows, terribly failed to apprehend the emancipating power
+of it. But He says to us, as to them, 'I am not content with the
+authority given to Me by God, unless I have the authority that each
+man for himself can give Me, by willing surrender of his heart and
+will to Me.' Jesus Christ craves no empty rule, no mere elevation
+by virtue of Divine supremacy, over men. He regards that elevation
+as incomplete without the voluntary surrender of men to become His
+subjects and champions. Without its own consent He does not count
+that His universal power is established in a human heart. Though
+that dominion be all-embracing like the ocean, and stretching into
+all corners of the universe, and dominating over all ages, yet in
+that ocean there may stand up black and dry rocks, barren as they
+are dry, and blasted as they are black, because, with the awful
+power of a human will, men have said, 'We will not have this Man
+to reign over us.' It is willing subjects whom Christ seeks, in
+order to make the Divine grant of authority a reality.
+
+In that work He needs His servants. The gift of God notwithstanding,
+the power of His Cross notwithstanding, the perfection and
+completeness of His great reconciling and redeeming work
+notwithstanding, all these are vain unless we, His servants, will
+take them in our hands as our weapons, and go forth on the warfare
+to which He has summoned us. This is the command laid upon us all,
+'Make disciples of all nations.' Only so will the reality correspond
+to the initial and all-embracing grant.
+
+It would take us too far to deal at all adequately, or in anything
+but the most superficial fashion, with the remaining parts of this
+great commission. 'Make disciples of all nations'--that is the first
+thing. Then comes the second step: 'Baptizing them into the name of
+the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.' Who are to be
+baptized? Now, notice, if I may venture upon being slightly
+technical for a moment, that the word 'nations' in the preceding
+clause is a neuter one, and that the word for 'them' in this clause
+is a masculine, which seems to me fairly to imply that the command
+'baptizing them' does not refer to 'all nations,' but to the
+disciples latent among them, and to be drawn from them. Surely,
+surely the great claim of absolute and unbounded power has for its
+consequence something better than the lame and impotent conclusion
+of appointing an indiscriminate rite, as the means of making
+disciples! Surely that is not in accordance with the spirituality of
+the Christian faith!
+
+'Baptizing them into the Name'--the name is one, that of the Father,
+and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Does that mean the name of God,
+and of a man, and of an influence, all jumbled up together in
+blasphemous and irrational union? Surely, if Father, Son, and Holy
+Spirit have one name, the name of Divinity, then it is but a step to
+say that three Persons are one God! But there is a great deal more
+here than a baptismal formula, for to be baptized into the Name is
+but the symbol of being plunged into communion with this one
+threefold God of our salvation. The ideal state of the Christian
+disciple is that he shall be as a vase dropped into the Atlantic,
+encompassed about with God, and filled with Him. We all 'live, and
+move, and have our being' in Him, but some of us have so wrapped
+ourselves, if I may venture to use such a figure, in waterproof
+covering, that, though we are floating in an ocean of Divinity, not
+a drop finds its way in. Cast the covering aside, and you will be
+saturated with God, and only in the measure in which you live and
+move and have your being in the Name are you disciples.
+
+There is another step still. Making disciples and bringing into
+communion with the Godhead is not all that is to flow from, and
+correspond to, and realise in the individual, the absolute authority
+of Jesus Christ--'Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I
+have commanded you.' We hear a great deal in these days about the
+worthlessness of mere dogmatic Christianity. Jesus Christ
+anticipated all that talk, and guarded it from exaggeration. For
+what He tells us here that we are to train ourselves and others in,
+is not creed but conduct; not things to be believed or _credenda_
+but things to be done or _agenda_--'teaching them to observe all
+things whatsoever I have commanded you.' A creed that is not wrought
+out in actions is empty; conduct that is not informed, penetrated,
+regulated by creed, is unworthy of a man, not to say of a Christian.
+What we are to know we are to know in order that we may do, and so
+inherit the benediction, which is never bestowed upon them that
+know, but upon them that, knowing these things, are blessed _in_,
+as well as _for_, the doing of them.
+
+That training is to be continuous, educating to new views of duty;
+new applications of old truths, new sensitiveness of conscience,
+unveiling to us, ever as we climb, new heights to which we aspire.
+The Christian Church has not yet learnt--thank God it is learning,
+though by slow degrees--all the moral and practical implications and
+applications of 'the truth as it is in Jesus.' And so these are the
+three things by which the Church recognises and corresponds to the
+universal dominion of Christ, the making disciples universally; the
+bringing them into the communion of the Father, the Son, and the
+Holy Spirit; and the training of them to conduct ever approximating
+more and more to the Divine ideal of humanity in the glorified
+Christ.
+
+And now I must gather just into a sentence or two what is to be said
+about the last point. There is--
+
+III. The Great Promise.
+
+'I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world,' or, as it
+might be read, 'with you all the days, even to the accomplishment of
+the age.' Note that emphatic 'I am,' which does not only denote
+certainty, but is the speech of Him who is lifted above the lower
+regions where Time rolls and the succession of events occurs. That
+'I am' covers all the varieties of _was, is, will be_. Notice
+the long vista of variously tinted days which opens here. Howsoever
+many they be, howsoever different their complexion, days of summer
+and days of winter, days of sunshine and days of storm, days of
+buoyant youth and days of stagnant, stereotyped old age, days of
+apparent failure and days of apparent prosperity, He is with us in
+them all. They change, He is 'the same yesterday, and to-day, and
+for ever.' Notice the illimitable extent of the promise--'even unto
+the end.' We are always tempted to think that long ago the earth was
+more full of God than it is to-day, and that away forward in the
+future it will again be fuller, but that this moment is comparatively
+empty. The heavens touch the earth on the horizon in front and behind,
+and they are highest and remotest above us just where we stand. But
+no past day had more of Christ in it than to-day has, and that He
+has gone away is the condition of His coming. 'He therefore departed
+for a season, that we might receive Him for ever.'
+
+But mark that the promise comes after a command, and is contingent,
+for all its blessedness and power, upon our obedience to the
+prescribed duty. That duty is primarily to make disciples of all
+nations, and the discharge of it is so closely connected with the
+realisation of the promise that a non-missionary Church never has
+much of Christ's presence. But obedience to all the King's commands
+is required if we stand before Him, and are to enjoy His smile. If
+you wish to keep Christ very near you, and to feel Him with you, the
+way to do so is no mere cultivation of religious emotion, or
+saturating your mind with religious books and thoughts, though these
+have their place; but on the dusty road of life doing His will and
+keeping His commandments. 'If a man love Me he will keep My words,
+and My Father will love Him. We will come to Him, and make our abode
+with Him.'
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Expositions of Holy Scripture
+by Alexander Maclaren
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE ***
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