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           Title: Expositions of Holy Scripture: St John Ch. I to XIV
      Creator(s): Maclaren, Alexander (1826-1910)
   CCEL Subjects: All; Bible
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                         EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

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

  ST. JOHN
  Vols. I and II
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                         EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

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

  ST. JOHN
  Vols. I and II
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CONTENTS

   THE WORD IN ETERNITY, IN THE WORLD, AND IN THE FLESH (John i. 1-14)

   THE LIGHT AND THE LAMPS (John i. 8; v. 35)

   THREE TABERNACLES' (John i. 14; Rev. vii. 15; xxi. 3)

   THE FULNESS OF CHRIST (John i. 16)

   GRACE AND TRUTH (John i. 17)

   THE WORLD'S SIN-BEARER (John i. 29)

   THE FIRST DISCIPLES: I. JOHN AND ANDREW (John i. 37-39)

   THE FIRST DISCIPLES: II. SIMON PETER (John i. 40-42)

   THE FIRST DISCIPLES: III. PHILIP (John i. 43)

   THE FIRST DISCIPLES: IV. NATHANAEL (John i. 45-49)

   THE FIRST DISCIPLES: V. BELIEVING AND SEEING (John i. 50, 51)

   JESUS THE JOY-BRINGER (John ii. 1-11)

   THE FIRST MIRACLE IN CANA--THE WATER MADE WINE (John ii. 11)

   CHRIST CLEANSING THE TEMPLE (John ii. 16)

   THE DESTROYERS AND THE RESTORER (John ii. 19)

   TEACHER OR SAVIOUR? (John iii. 2)

   WIND AND SPIRIT (John iii. 8)

   THE BRAZEN SERPENT (John iii. 14)

   CHRIST'S MUSTS (John iii. 14)

   THE LAKE AND THE RIVER (John iii. 16)

   THE WEARIED CHRIST (John iv. 6, 32)

   GIVE ME TO DRINK' (John iv. 7, 26)

   THE GIFT AND THE GIVER (John iv. 10)

   THE SPRINGING FOUNTAIN (John iv. 14)

   THE SECOND MIRACLE (John iv. 54)

   THE THIRD MIRACLE IN JOHN'S GOSPEL (John v, 8)

   THE LIFE-GIVER AND JUDGE (John v. 17-27)

   THE FOURTH MIRACLE IN JOHN'S GOSPEL (John vi. 11)

   FRAGMENTS' OR BROKEN PIECES' (John vi. 12)

   THE FIFTH MIRACLE IN JOHN'S GOSPEL (John vi. 19, 20)

   HOW TO WORK THE WORK OF GOD (John vi. 28, 29)

   THE MANNA (John vi. 48-50)

   ONE SAYING WITH TWO MEANINGS (John vii. 33, 34; xiii. 33)

   THE ROCK AND THE WATER (John vii. 37, 38)

   THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD (John viii. 12)

   THREE ASPECTS OF FAITH (John viii. 30, 31)

   NEVER IN BONDAGE' (John viii. 33)

   ONE METAPHOR AND TWO MEANINGS (John ix. 4; Romans xiii. l2)

   THE SIXTH MIRACLE IN JOHN'S GOSPEL--THE BLIND MADE TO SEE, AND THE
   SEEING MADE BLIND (John ix. 6, 7)

   THE GIFTS TO THE FLOCK (John x. 9)

   THE GOOD SHEPHERD (John x. 14, 15)

   OTHER SHEEP' (John x. 16 R.V.)

   THE DELAYS OF LOVE (John xi. 5, 6)

   CHRIST'S QUESTION TO EACH (John xi. 26, 27)

   THE OPEN GRAVE AT BETHANY (John xi. 30-45)

   THE SEVENTH MIRACLE IN JOHN'S GOSPEL--THE RAISING OF LAZARUS (John xi.
   43, 44)

   CAIAPHAS (John xi. 49, 50)

   LOVE'S PRODIGALITY CENSURED AND VINDICATED (John xii. 1-1l)

   A NEW KIND OF KING (John xii. 12-26)

   AFTER CHRIST: WITH CHRIST (John xii. 26)

   THE UNIVERSAL MAGNET (John xii. 32)

   THE SON OF MAN (John xii. 34)

   A PARTING WARNING (John xii. 35, 36 R V.)

   THE LOVE OF THE DEPARTING CHRIST (John xiii. 1)

   THE SERVANT-MASTER (John xiii. 3-5)

   THE DISMISSAL OF JUDAS (John xiii. 27)

   THE GLORY OF THE CROSS (John xiii. 31, 32)

   CANNOT AND CAN (John xiii. 33)

   SEEKING JESUS (John xiii. 33)

   AS I HAVE LOVED' (John xiii. 34, 35)

   QUO VADIS?' (John xiii. 37, 38)

   A RASH VOW (John xiii. 38)

   FAITH IN GOD AND CHRIST (John xiv. 1)

   MANY MANSIONS' (John xiv. 2)

   THE FORERUNNER (John xiv. 2, 3)

   THE WAY (John xiv. 4-7)

   THE TRUE VISION OF GOD (John xiv. 8-11)

   CHRIST'S WORKS AND OURS (John xiv. 12-14)

   LOVE AND OBEDIENCE (John xiv. 15)

   THE COMFORTER GIVEN (John xiv. 16, 17)

   THE ABSENT PRESENT CHRIST (John xiv. 18, 19)

   THE GIFTS OF THE PRESENT CHRIST (John xiv. 20, 21)

   WHO BRING CHRIST (John xiv. 22-24)

   THE TEACHER SPIRIT (John xiv. 25, 26)

   CHRIST'S PEACE (John xiv. 27)

   JOY AND FAITH, THE FRUITS OF CHRIST'S DEPARTURE (John xiv. 28, 29)

   CHRIST FORESEEING HIS PASSION (John xiv. 30, 31)
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THE WORD IN ETERNITY, IN THE WORLD, AND IN THE FLESH

   In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
   was God. 2. The same was in the beginning with God. 3. All things were
   made by Him; and without Him was not any thing made that was made. 4.
   In Him was life; and the life was the light of men. 5. And the light
   shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. 6. There was
   a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7. The same came for a
   witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might
   believe. 8. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that
   Light. 9. That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh
   into the world. 10. He was in the world, and the world was made by Him,
   and the world knew Him not. 11. He came unto His own, and His own
   received Him not. 12. But as many as received Him, to them gave He
   power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name:
   13. Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of
   the will of man, but of God. 14. 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.'--JOHN i. 1-14.

   The other Gospels begin with Bethlehem; John begins with the bosom of
   the Father.' Luke dates his narrative by Roman emperors and Jewish
   high-priests; John dates his in the beginning.' To attempt adequate
   exposition of these verses in our narrow limits is absurd; we can only
   note the salient points of this, the profoundest page in the New
   Testament.

   The threefold utterance in verse 1 carries us into the depths of
   eternity, before time or creatures were. Genesis and John both start
   from the beginning,' but, while Genesis works downwards from that point
   and tells what followed, John works upwards and tells what preceded--if
   we may use that term in speaking of what lies beyond time. Time and
   creatures came into being, and, when they began, the Word was.' Surely
   no form of speech could more emphatically declare absolute, uncreated
   being, outside the limits of time. Clearly, too, no interpretation of
   these words fathoms their depth, or makes worthy sense, which does not
   recognise that the Word is a person. The second clause of verse 1
   asserts the eternal communion of the Word with God. The preposition
   employed means accurately towards,' and expresses the thought that in
   the Word there was motion or tendency towards, and not merely
   association with, God. It points to reciprocal, conscious communion,
   and the active going out of love in the direction of God. The last
   clause asserts the community of essence, which is not inconsistent with
   distinction of persons, and makes the communion of active Love
   possible; for none could, in the depths of eternity, dwell with and
   perfectly love and be loved by God, except one who Himself was God.

   Verse 1 stands apart as revealing the pretemporal and essential nature
   of the Word. In it the deep ocean of the divine nature is partially
   disclosed, though no created eye can either plunge to discern its
   depths or travel beyond our horizon to its boundless, shoreless extent.
   The remainder of the passage deals with the majestic march of the
   self-revealing Word through creation, and illumination of humanity, up
   to the climax in the Incarnation.

   John repeats the substance of verse 1 in verse 2, apparently in order
   to identify the Agent of creation with the august person whom he has
   disclosed as filling eternity. By Him creation was effected, and,
   because He was what verse 1 has declared Him to be, therefore was it
   effected by Him. Observe the three steps marked in three consecutive
   verses. All things were made by Him'; literally became,' where the
   emergence into existence of created things is strongly contrasted with
   the divine was' of verse 1. Through Him' declares that the Word is the
   agent of creation; without Him' (literally, apart from Him') declares
   that created things continue in existence because He communicates it to
   them. Man is the highest of these all things,' and verse 4 sets forth
   the relation of the Word to Him, declaring that life,' in all the width
   and height of its possible meanings, inheres in Him, and is
   communicated by Him, with its distinguishing accompaniment, in human
   nature, of light, whether of reason or of conscience.

   So far, John has been speaking as from the upper or divine side, but in
   verse 5 he speaks from the under or human, and shows us how the
   self-revelation of the Word has, by some mysterious necessity, been
   conflict. The darkness' was not made by Him, but it is there, and the
   beams of the light have to contend with it. Something alien must have
   come in, some catastrophe have happened, that the light should have to
   stream into a region of darkness.

   John takes the Fall' for granted, and in verse 5 describes the whole
   condition of things, both within and beyond the region of special
   revelation. The shining of the light is continuous, but the darkness is
   obstinate. It is the tragedy and crime of the world that the darkness
   will not have the light. It is the long-suffering mercy of God that the
   light repelled is not extinguished, but shines meekly on.

   Verses 6-13 deal with the historical appearance of the Word. The
   Forerunner is introduced, as in the other Gospels; and, significantly
   enough, this Evangelist calls him only John,'--omitting the Baptist,'
   as was very natural to him, the other John, who would feel less need
   for distinguishing the two than others did. The subordinate office of a
   witness to the light is declared positively and negatively, and the
   dignity of such a function is implied. To witness to the light, and to
   be the means of leading men to believe, was honour for any man.

   The limited office of the Forerunner serves as contrast to the
   transcendent lustre of the true Light. The meaning of verse 9 may be
   doubtful, but verses 10 and 11 clearly refer to the historical
   manifestation of the Word, and probably verse 9 does so too. Possibly,
   however, it rather points to the inner revelation by the Word, which is
   the light of men.' In that case the phrase that cometh into the world'
   would refer to every man,' whereas it is more natural in this context
   to refer it to the light,' and to see in the verse a reference to the
   illumination of humanity consequent on the appearance of Jesus Christ.
   The use of world' and came' in verses 10 and 11 points in that
   direction. Verse 9 represents the Word as coming'; verse 10 regards Him
   as come--He was in the world.'

   Note the three clauses, so like, and yet so unlike the august three in
   verse 1. Note the sad issue of the coming--The world knew Him not.' In
   that world' there was one place where He might have looked for
   recognition, one set of people who might have been expected to hail
   Him; but not only the wide world was blind (knew not') , but the
   narrower circle of His own' fought against what they knew to be light
   (received not') .

   But the rejection was not universal, and John proceeds to develop the
   blessed consequences of receiving the light. For the first time he
   speaks the great word believe.' The act of faith is the condition or
   means of receiving.' It is the opening of the mental eye for the light
   to pour in. We possess Jesus in the measure of our faith. The object of
   faith is His name,' which means, not this or that collocation of
   letters by which He is designated, but His whole self-revelation. The
   result of such faith is the right to become children of God,' for
   through faith in the only-begotten Son we receive the communication of
   a divine life which makes us, too, sons. That new life, with its
   consequence of sonship, does not belong to human nature as received
   from parents, but is a gift of God mediated through faith in the Light
   who is the Word.

   Verse 14 is not mere repetition of the preceding, but advances beyond
   it in that it declares the wonder of the way by which that divine Word
   did enter into the world. John here, as it were, draws back the
   curtain, and shows us the transcendent miracle of divine love, for
   which he has been preparing in all the preceding. Note that he has not
   named the Word' since verse 1, but here he again uses the majestic
   expression to bring out strongly the contrast between the ante-temporal
   glory and the historical lowliness. These four words, The Word became
   flesh,' are the foundation of all our knowledge of God, of man, of the
   relations between them, the foundation of all our hopes, the guarantee
   of all our peace, the pledge of all blessedness. He tabernacled among
   us.' As the divine glory of old dwelt between the cherubim, so Jesus is
   among men the true Temple, wherein we see a truer glory than that
   radiant light which filled the closed chamber of the holy of holies.
   Rapturous remembrances rose before the Apostle as he wrote, We beheld
   His glory'; and he has told us what he has beheld and seen with his
   eyes, that we also may have fellowship with him in beholding. The glory
   that shone from the Incarnate Word was no menacing or dazzling light.
   He and it were full of grace and truth,' perfect Love bending to
   inferiors and sinners, with hands full of gifts and a heart full of
   tenderness and the revelation of reality, both as regards God and man.
   His grace bestows all that our lowness needs, His truth teaches all
   that our ignorance requires. All our gifts and all our knowledge come
   from the Incarnate Word, in whom believing we are the children of God.
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THE LIGHT AND THE LAMPS

   He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that
   Light.'--JOHN i. 8.

   'He was a burning and a shining light; and ye were willing for a season
   to rejoice in His light.'--JOHN v. 35.

   My two texts both refer to John the Baptist. One of them is the
   Evangelist's account of him, the other is our Lord's eulogium upon him.
   The latter of my texts, as the Revised Version shows, would be more
   properly rendered, He was a lamp' rather than He was a light,' and the
   contrast between the two words, the light' and the lamps,' is my theme.
   I gather all that I would desire to say into three points: that Light'
   and its witnesses; the underived Light and the kindled lamps; the
   undying Light and the lamps that go out.

   I. First of all, then, the contrast suggested to us is between that
   Light' and its witnesses.

   John, in that profound prologue which is the deepest part of Scripture,
   and lays firm and broad in the depths the foundation-stones of a
   reasonable faith, draws the contrast between that Light' and them whose
   business it was to bear witness to it. As for the former, I cannot here
   venture to dilate upon the great, and to me absolutely satisfying and
   fundamental, thoughts that lie in these eighteen first verses of this
   Gospel. The Word was with God,' and that Word was the Agent of
   Creation, the Fountain of Life, the Source of the Light which is
   inseparable from all human life. John goes back, with the simplicity of
   a child's speech, which yet is deeper than all philosophies, to a
   Beginning, far anterior to the Beginning' of which Genesis speaks, and
   declares that before creation that Light shone; and he looks out over
   the whole world, and declares, that before and beyond the limits of the
   historical manifestation of the Word in the flesh, its beams spread
   over the whole race of man. But they are all focussed, if I may so
   speak, and gathered to a point which burns as well as illuminates, in
   the historical manifestation of Jesus Christ in the flesh. That was the
   true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.'

   Next, he turns to the highest honour and the most imperative duty laid,
   not only upon mighty men and officials, but upon all on whose happy
   eyeballs this Light has shone, and into whose darkened hearts the joy
   and peace and purity of it have flowed, and he says, He was sent'--and
   they are sent--to bear witness of that Light.' It is the noblest
   function that a man can discharge. It is a function that is discharged
   by the very existence through the ages of a community which, generation
   after generation, subsists, and generation after generation manifests
   in varying degrees of brightness, and with various modifications of
   tint, the same light. There is the family character in all true
   Christians, with whatever diversities of idiosyncrasies, and national
   life or ecclesiastical distinctions. Whether it be Francis of Assisi or
   John Wesley, whether it be Thomas a Kempis or George Fox, the light is
   one that shines through these many-coloured panes of glass, and the
   living Church is the witness of a living Lord, not only before it, and
   behind it, and above it, but living in it. They are light' because they
   are irradiated by Him. They are light' because they are in the Lord.'
   But not only by the fact of the existence of such a community is the
   witness-bearing effected, but it comes as a personal obligation, with
   immense weight of pressure and immense possibilities of joy in the
   discharge of it, to every Christian man and woman.

   What, then, is the witness that we all are bound to bear, and shall
   bear if we are true to our obligations and to our Lord? Mainly, dear
   brethren, the witness of experience. That a Christian man shall be able
   to stand up and say, I know this because I live it, and I testify to
   Jesus Christ because I for myself have found Him to be the life of my
   life, the Light of all my seeing, the joy of my heart, my home, and my
   anchorage'--that is the witness that is impregnable. And there is no
   better sign of the trend of Christian thought to-day than the fact that
   the testimony of experience is more and more coming to be recognised by
   thoughtful men and writers as being the sovereign attestation of the
   reality of the Light. I see'; that is the proof that light has touched
   my eyeballs. And when a man can contrast, as some of us can, our
   present vision with our erstwhile darkness, then the evidence, like
   that of the sturdy blind man in the Gospels, who had nothing to say in
   reply to the subtleties and Rabbinical traps and puzzles but only I was
   blind; now I see'--his experience is likely to have the effect that it
   had in another miracle of healing: Beholding the man which was healed
   standing amongst them, they could say nothing against it.' I should
   think they could not.

   But there is one thing that will always characterise the true witnesses
   to that Light, and that is self-suppression. Remember the beautiful,
   immovable humility of the Baptist about whom these texts were spoken:
   What sayest thou of thyself?' I am a Voice,' that is all. Art thou that
   Prophet?' No!' Art thou the Christ?' No! I am nothing but a Voice.' And
   remember how, when John's disciples tried to light the infernal fires
   of jealousy in his quiet heart by saying, He whom thou didst baptise,
   and to whom thou didst give witness'--He whom thou didst start on His
   career--is baptising,' poaching upon thy preserves, and all men come
   unto Him,' the only answer that he gave was, The friend of the
   Bridegroom'--who stands by in a quiet, dark corner--rejoices greatly
   because of the Bridegroom's voice.' Keep yourself out of sight,
   Christian teachers and preachers; put Christ in the front, and hide
   behind Him.

   II. Now let me ask you to look at the other contrast that is suggested
   by our other text. The underived light and the kindled lamps.

   It is possible to read the words of that second text thus--He was a
   lamp kindled and (therefore) shining.' But whether that be the meaning,
   or whether the usual rendering is correct, the emblem itself carries
   the same thought, for a lamp must be lit by contact with a light, and
   must be fed with oil, if its flame is to be sustained. And so the very
   metaphor-whatever the force of the ambiguous word--in its eloquent
   contrast between the Light and the lamp, suggests this thought, that
   the one is underived, self-fed, and therefore undying, and that the
   other owes all its flame to the touch of that uncreated Light, and
   burns brightly only on condition of its keeping up the contact with
   Him, and being fed continually from His stores of radiance.

   I need not say more than a word with regard to the former member of
   that contrast suggested here. That unlit Light derives its brilliancy,
   according to the Scriptural teaching, from nothing but its divine union
   with the Father. So that long before there were eyes to see, there was
   the eradiation and outshining of the Father's glory. I do not enter
   into these depths, but this I would say, that what is called the
   originality' of Jesus is only explained when we reverently see in that
   unique life the shining through a pure humanity, as through a sheet of
   alabaster, of that underived, divine Light. Jesus is an insoluble
   problem to men who will not see in Him the Eternal Light which in the
   beginning was with God.' You find in Him no trace of gradual
   acquisition of knowledge, or of arguing or feeling His way to His
   beliefs. You find in Him no trace of consciousness of a great horizon
   of darkness encompassing the region where He sees light. You find in
   Him no trace of a recognition of other sources from which He has drawn
   any portion of His light. You find in Him the distinct declaration that
   His relation to truth is not the relation of men who learn, and grow,
   and acquire, and know in part; for, says He, I am the Truth.' He stands
   apart from us all, and above us all, in that He owes His radiance to
   none, and can dispense it to every man. The question which the puzzled
   Jews asked about Him, How knoweth this Man letters, having never
   learned?' may be widened out to all the characteristics of His human
   life. To me the only answer is: Thou art the King of glory, O Christ!
   Thou art the Everlasting Son of the Father.'

   Dependent on Him are the little lights which He has lit, and in the
   midst of which He walks. Union with Jesus Christ--that Light'--is the
   condition of all human light. That is true over all regions, as I
   believe. The inspiration of the Almighty giveth understanding.' The
   candle of the Lord shines in every man, and that true Light lighteth
   every man that cometh into the world.' Thinker, student, scientist,
   poet, author, practical man--all of them are lit from the uncreated
   Source, and all of them, if they understand their own nature, would
   say, In Thy light do we see Light.'

   But especially is this great thought true and exemplified within the
   limits of the Christian life. For the Christian to be touched with
   Christ's Promethean finger is to flame into light. And the condition of
   continuing to shine is to continue the contact which first illuminated.
   A break in the contact, of a finger's breadth, is as effectual as one
   of a mile. Let Christian men and women, if they would shine, remember,
   Ye are light in the Lord'; and if we stray, and get without the circle
   of the Light, we pass into darkness, and ourselves cease to shine.

   Brethren, it is threadbare truth, that the condition of Christian
   vitality and radiance is close and unbroken contact with Jesus Christ,
   the Source of all light. Threadbare; but if we lived as if we believed
   it, the Church would be revolutionised and the world illuminated; and
   many a smoking wick would flash up into a blazing torch. Let Christian
   people remember that the words of my text define no special privilege
   or duty of any official or man of special endowments, but that to all
   of us has been said, Ye are My witnesses,' and to all of us is offered
   the possibility of being burning and shining lights' if we keep
   ourselves close to that Light.

   III. Lastly, the second of my texts suggests--the contrast between the
   Undying Light and the lamps that go out.

   For a season ye were willing to rejoice in His light.' There is nothing
   in the present condition of the civilised and educated world more
   remarkable and more difficult for some people to explain than the
   contrast between the relation which Jesus Christ bears to the present
   age, and the relation which all other great names in the
   past--philosophers, poets, guides of men--bear to it. There is nothing
   in the world the least like the vividness, the freshness, the
   closeness, of the personal relation which thousands and thousands of
   people, with common sense in their heads, bear to that Man who died
   nineteen hundred years ago. All others pass, sooner or later, into the
   darkness. Thickening mists of oblivion, fold by fold, gather round the
   brightest names. But here is Jesus Christ, whom all classes of thinkers
   and social reformers have to reckon with to-day, who is a living power
   amongst the trivialities of the passing moment, and in whose words and
   in the teaching of whose life serious men feel that there lie
   undeveloped yet, and certainly not yet put into practice, principles
   which are destined to revolutionise society and change the world. And
   how does that come?

   I am not going to enter upon that question; I only ask you to think of
   the contrast between His position, in this generation, to communities
   and individuals, and the position of all other great names which lie in
   the past. Why, it does not take more than a lifetime such as mine, for
   instance, to remember how the great lights that shone seventy years ago
   in English thinking and in English literature, have for the most part
   gone out, and what we young men thought to be bright particular stars,
   this new generation pooh-poohs as mere exhalations from the marsh or
   twinkling and uncertain tapers, and you will find their books in the
   twopenny-box at the bookseller's door. A cynical diplomatist, in one of
   our modern dramas, sums it up, after seeing the death of a
   revolutionary, I have known eight leaders of revolts.' And some of us
   could say, We have known about as many guides of men who have been
   forgotten and passed away.' His Name shall endure for ever. His name
   shall continue as long as the sun, and men shall be blessed in Him; all
   generations shall call Him blessed.' Even Shelley had the prophecy
   forced from him--


     The moon of Mahomet

     Arose and it shall set,

     While blazoned as on heaven's eternal noon,

     The Cross leads generations on.'

   We may sum up the contrast between the undying Light and the lamps that
   go out in the old words: They truly were many, because they were not
   suffered to continue by reason of death, but this Man, because He
   continueth ever . . . is able to save unto the uttermost them that come
   unto God through Him.'

   So, brethren, when lamps are quenched, let us look to the Light. When
   our own lives are darkened because our household light is taken from
   its candlestick, let us lift up our hearts and hopes to Him that
   abideth for ever. Do not let us fall into the folly, and commit the
   sin, of putting our heart's affections, our spirit's trust, upon any
   that can pass and that must change. We need a Person whom we can clasp,
   and who never will glide from our hold. We need a Light uncreated,
   self-fed, eternal. Whilst ye have the Light, believe in the Light, that
   ye may be the children of light.'
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THREE TABERNACLES'

   The Word . . . dwelt among us.'--JOHN i. 14.

   . . . He that sitteth on the Throne shall dwell among them.'--REV. vii.
   15.

   . . . Behold, the Tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with
   them.'--REV. xxi. 3.

   The word rendered dwelt' in these three passages, is a peculiar one. It
   is only found in the New Testament--in this Gospel and in the Book of
   Revelation. That fact constitutes one of the many subtle threads of
   connection between these two books, which at first sight seem so
   extremely unlike each other; and it is a morsel of evidence in favour
   of the common authorship of the Gospel and of the Apocalypse, which has
   often, and very vehemently in these latter days of criticism, been
   denied.

   The force of the word, however, is the matter to which I desire
   especially to draw attention. It literally means to dwell in a tent,'
   or, if we may use such a word, to tabernacle,' and there is no doubt a
   reference to the Tabernacle in which the divine Presence abode in the
   wilderness and in the land of Israel before the erection. In all three
   passages, then, we may see allusion to that early symbolical dwelling
   of God with man. The Word tabernacled among us'; so is the truth for
   earth and time. He that sitteth upon the throne shall spread His
   tabernacle upon' the multitude which no man can number, who have made
   their robes white in the blood of the Lamb; that is the truth for the
   spirits of just men made perfect, the waiting Church, which expects the
   redemption of the body. God shall tabernacle with them'; that is the
   truth for the highest condition of humanity, when the Tabernacle of God
   shall be with redeemed men in the new earth. Let us build three
   tabernacles,' one for the Incarnate Christ, one for the interspace
   between earth and heaven, and one for the culmination of all things.
   And it is to these three aspects of the one thought, set forth in rude
   symbol by the movable tent in the wilderness, that I ask you to turn
   now.

   I. First, then, we have to think of that Tabernacle for earth. The Word
   was made flesh, and dwelt, as in a tent, amongst us.'

   The human nature, the visible, material body of Jesus Christ, in which
   there enshrined itself the everlasting Word, which from the beginning
   was the Agent of all divine revelation, that is the true Temple of God.
   When we begin to speak about the special presence of Omnipresence in
   any one place, we soon lose ourselves, and get into deep waters of
   glory, where there is no standing. And I do not care to deal here with
   theological definitions or thorny questions, but simply to set forth,
   as the language of my text sets before us, that one transcendent,
   wonderful, all-blessed thought that this poor human nature is capable
   of, and has really once in the history of the world received into
   itself, the real, actual presence of the whole fulness of the Divinity.
   What must be the kindred and likeness between Godhood and manhood when
   into the frail vehicle of our humanity that wondrous treasure can be
   poured; when the fire of God can burn in the bush of our human nature,
   and that nature not be consumed? So it has been. In Him dwelleth all
   the fulness of the Godhead bodily.'

   And when we come with our questions, How? In what manner? How can the
   lesser contain the greater? we have to be content with the recognition
   that the manner is beyond our fathoming, and to accept the fact,
   pressed upon our faith, that our hearts may grasp it and be at peace.
   God hath dwelt in humanity. The everlasting Word, who is the
   forthcoming of all the fulness of Deity into the realm of finite
   creatures, was made flesh and dwelt among us.

   But the Tabernacle was not only the dwelling-place of God, it was also
   and, therefore, the place of Revelation of God. So in our text there
   follows, we beheld His glory.' As in the tent in the wilderness there
   hovered between the outstretched wings of the silent cherubim, above
   the Mercy-seat, the brightness of the symbolical cloud which was
   expressly named the glory of God,' and was the visible manifestation of
   His real presence; so John would have us think that in that lowly
   humanity, with its curtains and its coverings of flesh, there lay
   shrined in the inmost place the brightness of the light of the manifest
   glory of God. We beheld His glory.' The rapturous adoration of the
   remembrance overcomes him, and he breaks his sentence, reckless of
   grammatical connection, as the fulness of the blessed memory floods
   into his soul. That glory was as of the Only Begotten of the Father.'
   The manifestation of God in Christ is unique, as becomes Him who
   partakes of the nature of that God of whom He is the Representative and
   the Revealer.

   And how did that glory make itself known to us? By miracle? Yes! As we
   read in the story of the first that Christ wrought, He manifested forth
   His glory and His disciples believed upon Him.' By miracle? Yes! As we
   read His own promise at the grave of Lazarus: Said I not unto thee,
   that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?'
   But, blessed be His name, miracle is not the highest manifestation of
   Christ's glory and of God's. The uniqueness of the revelation of
   Christ's glory in God does not depend upon the deeds which He wrought.
   For, as the context goes on to tell, the Word which tabernacled among
   us was full of grace and truth,' and therein is the glory most
   gloriously revealed.

   The lambent light of stooping love that shone forth warning and
   attracting in His gentle life, and the clear white beam of unmingled
   truth that streamed from the radiant purity of Christ's life, revealed
   God to hearts that pine for love and spirits that hunger for truth, as
   no others of God's self-revealing works have done. And that revelation
   of the glory of God in the fulness of grace and truth is the highest
   possible revelation. For the divinest thing in God is love, and the
   true glory of God' is neither some symbolical flashing light nor the
   pomp of mere power and majesty; nor even those inconceivable and
   incommunicable attributes which we christen with names like Omnipotence
   and Omnipresence and Infinitude, and the like. These are all at the
   fringes of the brightness. The true central heart and lustrous light of
   the glory of God lie In His love, and of that glory Christ is the
   unique Representative and Revealer, because He is the only Begotten
   Son, and full of grace and truth.'

   Thus the Word tabernacled amongst us. And though the Tabernacle to
   outward seeming was covered by curtains and skins that hid all the
   glowing splendour within; yet in that lowly life that was lived in the
   body of His humiliation, and knew our limitations and our weaknesses,
   the glory of the Lord was revealed; and all flesh hath seen it
   together' and acknowledged the divine Presence there.

   Still further the Tabernacle was the place of sacrifice. So in the
   tabernacle of His flesh Jesus offered up the one sacrifice for sins for
   ever. In the offering up of His human life in continuous obedience, and
   in the offering up of His body and blood in the bitter Passion of the
   Cross, He brought men nigh unto God.

   Therefore, because of all these things, because the Tabernacle is the
   dwelling-place of God, the place of revelation, and the place of
   sacrifice, therefore, finally is it the meeting-place betwixt God and
   man. In the Old Testament it is always called by the name which our
   Revised Version has accurately substituted for tabernacle of the
   congregation,' namely tent of meeting.' The correctness of that
   rendering and the meaning of the name are established by several
   passages in the Old Testament, as for instance, There I will meet with
   you, to speak there unto thee, and there I will meet with the children
   of Israel.' So in Christ, who by His Incarnation lays His hand upon
   both, God touches man and man touches God. We who are afar off are made
   nigh, and in that true tabernacle which the Lord pitched and not man'
   we meet God and are glad.


     And so the word was flesh, and wrought

     With human hands the creed of creeds,

     In loveliness of perfect deeds.'

   The temple for earth is the temple of His body.'

   II. We have the Tabernacle for the Heavens.

   In the context of our second passage we have a vision of the great
   multitude redeemed out of all nations and kindreds, standing before the
   Throne and before the Lamb, arrayed in white robes, and palms in their
   hands.' The palms in their hands give important help towards
   understanding the vision. As has been often remarked, there are no
   heathen emblems in the Book of the Apocalypse. All its metaphors move
   within the circle of Jewish experiences and facts. So that we are not
   to think of the Roman palm of victory, but of the Jewish palm which was
   borne at the Feast of Tabernacles. What was the Feast of Tabernacles? A
   festival established on purpose to recall to the minds and to the
   gratitude of the Jews settled in their own land the days of their
   wandering in the wilderness. Part of the ritual of it was that during
   its celebration they builded for themselves booths or tabernacles of
   leaves and boughs of trees, under which they dwelt, thus reminding
   themselves of their nomad condition.

   Now what beauty and power it gives to the word of my text, if we take
   in this allusion to the Jewish festival! The great multitude bearing
   the palms are keeping the feast, memorial of past wilderness
   wanderings; and He that sitteth on the throne shall spread His
   tabernacle above them,' as the word might be here rendered. That is to
   say, He Himself shall build and be the tent in which they dwell; He
   Himself shall dwell with them in it. He Himself, in closer union than
   can be conceived of here, shall keep them company during that feast.

   What a thought of that condition--the condition as I believe
   represented in this vision--of the spirits of the just made perfect,
   who wait for the adoption, to wit, the resurrection of the body,' is
   given us if we take this point of view to interpret the whole lovely
   symbolism. It is all a time of glad, grateful remembrance of the
   wilderness march. It is all a time in which festal joys shall be
   theirs, and the memory of the trials and the weariness and the sorrow
   and the solitude that are past shall deepen to a more exquisite
   poignancy of delight, the rest and the fellowship and the felicity of
   that calm Presence, and God Himself shall spread His tent above them,
   lodge with them, and they with Him.

   And so, dear brethren, rest in that assurance, that though we know so
   little of that state, we know this: Absent from the body, present with
   the Lord,' and that the happy company who bear the palms shall dwell in
   God, and God in them.

   III. And now, lastly, look at that final vision which we have in these
   texts, which we may call the Tabernacle for the renewed earth.

   I do not pretend to interpret the scenery and the setting of these
   Apocalyptic visions with dogmatic confidence, but it seems to me as if
   the emblems of this final vision coincide with dim hints in many other
   portions of Scripture; to the effect that some cosmical change having
   passed upon this material world in which we dwell, it, in some
   regenerated form, shall be the final abode of a regenerated and
   redeemed humanity. That, I think, is the natural interpretation of a
   great deal of Scriptural teaching.

   For that highest condition there is set forth this as the all-sufficing
   light upon it. Behold, the Tabernacle of God is with men, and He will
   tabernacle with them.' The climax and the goal of all the divine
   working, and the long processes of God's love for, and discipline of,
   the world, are to be this, that He and men shall abide together in
   unity and concord. That is God's wish from the beginning. We read in
   one of the profound utterances of the Book of Proverbs how from of old
   the delights' of the Incarnate Wisdom which foreshadowed the Incarnate
   Word were with the sons of men.' And, at the close of all things, when
   the vision of this final chapter shall be fulfilled, God will say,
   settling Himself in the midst of a redeemed humanity, Lo! here will I
   dwell, for I have desired it. This is My rest for ever.' He will
   tabernacle with men, and men with Him.

   We know not, and never shall know until experience strips the bandages
   from our eyes, what new methods of participation of the divine nature,
   and new possibilities of intimacy and intercourse with Him may be ours
   when the veils of flesh and sense and time have all dropped away. New
   windows may be opened in our spirits, from which we shall perceive new
   aspects of the divine character. New doors may be opened in our souls,
   from out of which we may pass to touch parts of His nature, all
   impalpable and inconceivable to us now. And when all the veils of a
   discordant moral nature are taken away, and we are pure, then we shall
   see, then we shall draw nigh to God. The thing that chiefly separates
   man from God is man's sin. When that is removed, the centrifugal force
   which kept our tiny orb apart from the great central sun being
   withdrawn, we shall, as it were, fall into the brightness and be one,
   not losing our sense of individuality, which would be to lose all the
   blessedness, but united with Him in a union far more intimate than
   earth can parallel. The Tabernacle of God shall be with men, and He
   will tabernacle with them.'

   Do not let us forget that this highest and ultimate hope that is held
   forth here, of the union and communion, perfect and perpetual, of
   humanity with God, does not sweep aside Jesus Christ. For through all
   eternity the Everlasting Word, the Christ who bears our nature in its
   glorified form, or, rather, whose nature in its glorified form we shall
   bear, is the Medium of Revelation, and the Medium of communication
   between man and God.

   I saw no Temple therein,' says this final vision of the Apocalypse, but
   God Almighty and the Lamb,' and these are the Temples thereof.
   Therefore through eternity God shall tabernacle with men, as He does
   tabernacle with us now through Him, in whom dwelleth as in its
   perennial habitation, all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.'

   So we have the three tabernacles, for earth, for heaven, for the
   renewed earth; and these three, if I may say so, are like the triple
   division of that ancient Tabernacle in the wilderness: the Outer Court;
   the Holy Place; the Holiest of all. Let us enter into that outer court,
   and abide and commune with that God who comes near to us, revealing,
   forgiving, in the person of His Son, and then we shall pass from court
   to court, and go from strength to strength, until every one of us in
   Zion appear before God'; and enter into the Holiest of all, where
   within the veil' we shall receive splendours of revelation undreamed of
   here, and enjoy depths of communion to which the selectest moments of
   fellowship with God on earth are shallow and poor.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE FULNESS OF CHRIST

   And of His fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.'--JOHN i.
   16.

   What a remarkable claim that is which the Apostle here makes for his
   Master! On the one side he sets His solitary figure as the universal
   Giver; on the other side are gathered the whole race of men, recipients
   from Him. As in the wilderness the children of Israel clustered round
   the rock from which poured out streams, copious enough for all the
   thirsty camp, John, echoing his Master's words, If any man thirst, let
   him come unto Me and drink,' here declares Of His fulness have all we
   received.'

   I. Notice, then, the one ever full Source.

   The words of my text refer back to those of the fourteenth verse: The
   Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.' And
   of His fulness have all we received.' The fulness' here seems to mean
   that of which the Incarnate Word was full, the grace and truth' which
   dwelt without measure in Him; the unlimited and absolute completeness
   and abundance of divine powers and glories which tabernacled' in Him.
   And so the language of my text, both verbally and really, is
   substantially equivalent to that of the Apostle Paul. In Him dwelleth
   all the fulness of the Godhead bodily; and ye are complete in Him.' The
   whole infinite Majesty, and inexhaustible resources of the divine
   nature, were incorporated and insphered in that Incarnate Word from
   whom all men may draw.

   There are involved in that thought two ideas. One is the unmistakable
   assertion of the whole fulness of the divine nature as being in the
   Incarnate Word, and the other is that the whole fulness of the divine
   nature dwells in the Incarnate Word in order that men may get at it.

   The words of my text go back, as I said, to the previous verse; but
   notice what an advance upon that previous verse they present to us.
   There we read, We beheld His glory.' To behold is much, but to possess
   is more. It is much to say that Christ comes to manifest God, but that
   is a poor, starved account of the purpose of His coming, if that is all
   you have to say. He comes to manifest Him. Yes! but He comes to
   communicate Him, not merely to dazzle us with a vision, not merely to
   show us Him as from afar, not merely to make Him known to understanding
   or to heart; but to bestow--in no mere metaphor, but in simple, literal
   fact--the absolute possession of the divine nature. We beheld His
   glory' is a reminiscence that thrills the Evangelist, though half a
   century has passed since the vision gleamed upon his eyes; but of His
   fulness have all we received' is infinitely and unspeakably more. And
   the manifestation was granted that the possession might be sure, for
   this is the very centre and heart of Christianity, that in Him who is
   Christianity God is not merely made known, but given; not merely
   beheld, but possessed.

   In order that that divine fulness might belong to us there was needed
   that the Word should be made flesh; and there was further needed that
   incarnation should be crowned by sacrifice, and that life should be
   perfected in death. The alabaster box had to be broken before the house
   could be filled with the odour of the ointment. If I may so say, the
   sack, the coarse-spun sack of Christ's humanity, had to be cut asunder
   in order that the wealth that was stored in it might be poured into our
   hands. God came near us in the life, but God became ours in the death,
   of His dear Son. Incarnation was needed for that great privilege--we
   beheld His glory'; but the Crucifixion was needed in order to make
   possible the more wondrous prerogative: Of His fulness have all we
   received.' God gives Himself to men in the Christ whose life revealed
   and whose death imparted Him to the world.

   And so He is the sole Source. All men, in a very real sense, draw from
   His fulness. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.' The
   life of the body and the life of the spirit willing, knowing, loving,
   all which makes life into light, all comes to us through that
   everlasting Word of God. And when that Word has become flesh and dwelt
   among us,' His gifts are not only the gifts of light and life, which
   all men draw from Him, but the gifts of grace and truth which all those
   who love Him receive at His hands. His gifts, like the water from some
   fountain, may flow underground into many of the pastures of the
   wilderness; and many a man is blessed by them who knows not from whence
   they come. It is He from whom all the truth, all the grace which
   illuminates and blesses humanity, flow into all lands in all ages.

   II. Consider, then, again, the many receivers from the one Source. Of
   His fulness have all we received.'

   Observe, we are not told definitely what it is that we receive. If we
   refer back to words in a previous verse, they may put us on the right
   track for answering the question, What is it that we get? He came unto
   His own,' says verse 11, and His own received Him not; but as many as
   received Him, to them gave He power,' etc. That answers the question,
   What do we receive? Christ is more than all His gifts. All His gifts
   are treasured up in Him and inseparable from Him. We get Jesus Christ
   Himself.

   The blessings that we receive may be stated in many different ways. You
   may say we get pardon, purity, hope, joy, the prospect of Heaven, power
   for service; all these and a hundred more designations by which we
   might describe the one gift. All these are but the consequences of our
   having got the Christ within our hearts. He does not give pardon and
   the rest, as a king might give pardon and honours, a thousand miles
   off, bestowing it by a mere word, upon some criminal, but He gives all
   that He gives because He gives Himself. The real possession that we
   receive is neither more nor less than a loving Saviour, to enter our
   spirits and abide there, and be the spirit of our spirits, and the life
   of our lives.

   Then, notice the universality of this possession. John has said, in the
   previous words, We beheld His glory.' He refers there, of course, to
   the comparatively small circle of the eye-witnesses of our Master's
   life; who, at the time when he wrote, must have been very, very few in
   number. They had had the prerogative of seeing with their eyes and
   handling with their hands the Word of life that was manifested unto
   us'; and with that prerogative the duty of bearing witness of Him to
   the rest of men. But in the receiving,' John associates with himself,
   and with the other eyewitnesses, all those who had listened to their
   word, and had received the truth in the love of it. We beheld' refers
   to the narrower circle; we all received' to the wider sweep of the
   whole Church. There is no exclusive class, no special prerogative.
   Every Christian man, the weakest, the lowliest, the most uncultured,
   rude, ignorant, foolish, the most besotted in the past, who has
   wandered furthest away from the Master; whose spirit has been most
   destitute of all sparks of goodness and of God--receives from out of
   His fulness. If any man have not the Spirit of Christ he is none of
   His.' And every one of us, if we will, may have dwelling in our hearts,
   in the greatness of His strength, in the sweetness of His love, in the
   clearness of His illuminating wisdom, the Incarnate Word, the
   Comforter, the All-in-all whom we all receive.'

   And, as I said, that word all' might have even a wider extension
   without going beyond the limits of the truth. For on the one side there
   stands Christ, the universal Giver; and grouped before Him, in all
   attitudes of weakness and of want, is gathered the whole race of
   mankind. And from Him there pours out a stream copious enough to supply
   all the necessities of every human soul that lives to-day, of every
   human soul that has lived in the past, of every one that shall live in
   the future. There is no limit to the universality except only the limit
   of the human will: Whosoever will, let him take the water of life
   freely.'

   Think of that solitary figure of the Christ reared up, as it were,
   before the whole race of man, as able to replenish all their emptiness
   with His fulness, and to satisfy all their thirst with His sufficiency.
   Dear brother! you have a great gaping void in your heart--an aching
   emptiness there, which you know better than I can tell you. Look to Him
   who can fill it and it shall be filled. He can supply all your wants as
   He can supply all the wants of every soul of man. And after generations
   have drawn from Him, the water will not have sunk one hairsbreadth in
   the great fountain, but there will be enough for all coming eternities
   as there has been enough for all past times. He is like His own
   miracle--the thousands are gathered on the grass, they do all eat and
   are filled.' As their necessities required the bread was multiplied,
   and at the last there was more left than there had seemed to be at the
   beginning. So of His fulness have all we received'; and after a
   universe has drawn from it, for an Eternity, the fulness is not turned
   into scantiness or emptiness.

   III. And so, lastly, notice the continuous flow from the inexhaustible
   Source. Of His fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.'

   The word for' is a little singular. Of course it means instead of, in
   exchange for; and the Evangelist's idea seems to be that as one supply
   of grace is given and used, it is, as it were, given back to the
   Bestower, who substitutes for it a fresh and unused vessel, filled with
   new grace. He might have said, grace upon grace; one supply being piled
   upon the other. But his notion is, rather, one supply given in
   substitution for the other, new lamps for old ones.'

   Just as a careful gardener will stand over a plant that needs water,
   and will pour the water on the surface until the earth has drunk it up,
   and then add a little more; so He gives step by step, grace for grace,
   an uninterrupted bestowal, yet regulated according to the absorbing
   power of the heart that receives it. Underlying that great thought are
   two things: the continuous communication of grace, and the progressive
   communication of grace. We have here the continuous communication of
   grace. God is always pouring Himself out upon us in Christ. There is a
   perpetual out flow from Him to us: if there is not a perpetual inflow
   into us from Him it is our fault, and not His. He is always giving, and
   His intention is that our lives shall be a continual reception. Are
   they? How many Christian men there are whose Christian lives at the
   best are like some of those Australian or Siberian rivers; in the dry
   season, a pond here, a stretch of sand, waterless and barren there,
   then another place with a drop of muddy water in some hollow, and then
   another stretch of sand, and so on. Why should not the ponds be linked
   together by a flashing stream? God is always pouring Himself out; why
   do we not always take Him in?

   There is but one answer, and the answer is, that we do not fulfil the
   condition, which condition is simple faith. As many as received Him, to
   them gave He power to become the sons of God; even to them that
   believed on His name.' Faith is the condition of receiving, and
   wherever there is a continuous trust there will be an unbroken grace;
   and wherever there are interrupted gifts it is because there has been
   an intermitted trust in Him. Do not let your lives be like some dimly
   lighted road, with a lamp here, and a stretch of darkness, and then
   another twinkling light; let the light run all along the side of your
   path, because at every moment your heart is turning to Christ with
   trust. Make your faith continuous, and God will make His grace
   incessant, and out of His fulness you will draw continual supplies of
   needed strength.

   But not only have we here the notion of continuous, but also, as it
   seems to me, of progressive gifts. Each measure of Christ received, if
   we use it aright, makes us capable of possessing more of Christ. And
   the measure of our capacity is the measure of His gift, and the more we
   can hold the more we shall get. The walls of our hearts are elastic,
   the vessel expands by being filled out; it throbs itself wider by
   desire and faith. The wider we open our mouths the larger will be the
   gift that God puts into them. Each measure and stage of grace utilised
   and honestly employed will make us capable and desirous, and,
   therefore, possessors, of more and more of the grace that He gives. So
   the ideal of the Christian life, and God's intention concerning us, is
   not only that we should have an uninterrupted, but a growing
   possession, of Christ and of His grace.

   Is that the case with you, my friend? Can you hold more of God than you
   could twenty years ago? Is there any more capacity in your soul for
   more of Christ than there was long, long ago? If there is you have more
   of Him; if you have not more of Him it is because you cannot contain
   more; and you cannot contain more because you have not desired more,
   and because you have been so wretchedly unfaithful in your use of what
   you had. The ideal is, they go from strength to strength,' and the end
   of that is, every one of them appeareth before God.'

   So, dear brother, as the dash of the waves will hollow out some little
   indentation on the coast, and make it larger and larger until there is
   a great bay, with its headlands miles apart, and its deep bosom
   stretching far into the interior, and all the expanse full of flashing
   waters and leaping waves, so the giving Christ works a place for
   Himself in a man's heart, and makes the spirit which receives and
   faithfully uses the gifts which He brings, capable of more of Himself,
   and fills the widened space with larger gifts and new grace.

   Only remember the condition of having Him is trusting to His name and
   longing for His presence. If any man open the door I will come in.' We
   have Him if we trust Him. That trust is no mere passive reception, such
   as is the case with some empty jar which lies open-mouthed on the shore
   and lets the sea wash into it and out of it, as may happen. But the
   receive' of our text might be as truly rendered take.' Faith is an
   active taking, not a passive receiving. We must lay hold on eternal
   life.' Faith is the hand that grasps the offered gift, the mouth that
   feeds upon the bread of God, the voice that says to Christ, Come in,
   Thou blessed of the Lord; why standest Thou without?' Such a faith
   alone brings us into vital connection with Jesus. Without it, you will
   be none the richer for all His fulness, and may perish of famine in the
   midst of plenty, like a man dying of hunger outside the door of a
   granary. They who believe take the Saviour who is given, and they who
   take receive, and they who receive obtain day by day growing grace from
   the fulness of Christ, and so come ever nearer to the realisation of
   the ultimate purpose of the Father, that they should be filled with all
   the fulness of God.'
     __________________________________________________________________

GRACE AND TRUTH

   The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus
   Christ.'--JOHN i. 17.

   There are scarcely any traces, in the writings of the Apostle John, of
   that great controversy as to the relation of the Law and the Gospel
   which occupied and embittered so much of the work of the Apostle Paul.
   We have floated into an entirely different region in John's writings.
   The old controversies are dead--settled, I suppose, mainly by Paul's
   own words, and also to a large extent by the logic of events. This
   verse is almost the only one in which John touches upon that extinct
   controversy, and here the Law is introduced simply as a foil to set off
   the brightness of the Gospel. All artists know the value of contrast in
   giving prominence. A dark background flashes up brighter colours into
   brilliancy. White is never so white as when it is relieved against
   black. And so here the special preciousness and distinctive
   peculiarities of what we receive in Christ are made more vivid and more
   distinct by contrast with what in old days was given by Moses.'

   Every word in this verse is significant. Law' is set against grace and
   truth.' It was given'; they came.' Moses is contrasted with Christ. So
   we have a threefold antithesis as between Law and Gospel: in reference
   to their respective contents; in reference to the manner of their
   communication; and in reference to the person of their Founders. And I
   think, if we look at these three points, we shall get some clear
   apprehension of the glories of that Gospel which the Apostle would
   thereby commend to our affection and to our faith.

   I. First of all, then, we have here the special glory of the contents
   of the Gospel heightened by the contrast with Law.

   Law has no tenderness, no pity, no feeling. Tables of stone and a pen
   of iron are its fitting vehicles. Flashing lightnings and rolling
   thunders symbolise the fierce light which it casts upon men's duty and
   the terrors of its retribution. Inflexible, and with no compassion for
   human weakness, it tells us what we ought to be, but it does not help
   us to be it. It binds heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne,' upon
   men's consciences, but puts not forth the tip of a finger' to enable
   men to bear them. And this is true about law in all forms, whether it
   be the Mosaic Law, or whether it be the law of our own country, or
   whether it be the laws written upon men's consciences. These all
   partake of the one characteristic, that they help nothing to the
   fulfilment of their own behests, and that they are barbed with
   threatenings of retribution. Like some avenging goddess, law comes down
   amongst men, terrible in her purity, awful in her beauty, with a hard
   light in her clear grey eyes--in the one hand the tables of stone,
   bearing the commandments which we have broken, and in the other a sharp
   two-edged sword.

   And this is the opposite of all that comes to us in the Gospel. The
   contrast divides into two portions. The Law' is set against grace and
   truth.' Let us look at these two in order.

   What we have in Christ is not law, but grace. Law, as I said, has no
   heart; the meaning of the Gospel is the unveiling of the heart of God.
   Law commands and demands; it says: This shalt thou do, or else--'; and
   it has nothing more that it can say. What is the use of standing beside
   a lame man, and pointing to a shining summit, and saying to him, Get up
   there, and you will breathe a purer atmosphere'? He is lying lame at
   the foot of it. There is no help for any soul in law. Men are not
   perishing because they do not know what they ought to do. Men are not
   bad because they doubt as to what their duty is. The worst man in the
   world knows a great deal more of what he ought to do than the best man
   in the world practises. So it is not for want of precepts that so many
   of us are going to destruction, but it is for want of power to fulfil
   the precepts.

   Grace is love giving. Law demands, grace bestows. Law comes saying Do
   this,' and our consciences respond to the imperativeness of the
   obligation. But grace comes and says, I will help thee to do it.' Law
   is God requiring; grace is God bestowing. Give what Thou commandest,
   and then command what Thou wilt.'

   Oh, brethren! we have all of us written upon the fleshly tablets of our
   hearts solemn commandments which we know are binding upon us; and which
   we sometimes would fain keep, but cannot. Is this not a message of hope
   and blessedness that comes to us? Grace has drawn near in Jesus Christ,
   and a giving God, who bestows upon us a life that will unfold itself in
   accordance with the highest law, holds out the fulness of His gift in
   that Incarnate Word. Law has no heart; the Gospel is the unveiling of
   the heart of God. Law commands; grace is God bestowing Himself.

   And still further, law condemns. Grace is love that bends down to an
   evildoer, and deals not on the footing of strict retribution with the
   infirmities and the sins of us poor weaklings. And so, seeing that no
   man that lives but hears in his heart an accusing voice, and that every
   one of us knows what it is to gaze upon lofty duties that we have
   shrunk from, upon plain obligations from the yoke of which we have
   selfishly and cowardly withdrawn our necks; seeing that every man,
   woman, and child listening to me now has, lurking in some corner of
   their hearts, a memory that only needs to be quickened to be a torture,
   and deeds that only need to have the veil drawn away from them to
   terrify and shame them--oh! surely it ought to be a word of gladness
   for every one of us that, in front of any law that condemns us, stands
   forth the gentle, gracious form of the Christ that brings pardon, and
   the grace of God that bringeth salvation unto all men.' Thank God! law
   needed to be given,' but it was only the foundation on which was to be
   reared a better thing. The law was given By Moses'--a schoolmaster,' as
   conscience is to-day, to bring us to Christ' by whom comes the grace
   that loves, that stoops, that gives, and that pardons.

   Still further, there is another antithesis here. The Gospel which comes
   by Christ is not law, but truth. The object of law is to regulate
   conduct, and only subordinately to inform the mind or to enlighten the
   understanding. The Mosaic Law had for its foundation, of course, a
   revelation of God. But that revelation of God was less prominent,
   proportionately, than the prescription for man's conduct. The Gospel is
   the opposite of this. It has for its object the regulation of conduct;
   but that object is less prominent, proportionately, than the other, the
   manifestation and the revelation of God. The Old Testament says Thou
   shalt'; the New Testament says God is.' The Old was Law; the New is
   Truth.

   And so we may draw the inference, on which I do not need to dwell, how
   miserably inadequate and shallow a conception of Christianity that is
   which sets it forth as being mainly a means of regulating conduct, and
   how false and foolish that loose talk is that we hear many a
   time.--Never mind about theological subtleties; conduct is the main
   thing.' Not so. The Gospel is not law; the Gospel is truth. It is a
   revelation of God to the understanding and to the heart, in order that
   thereby the will may be subdued, and that then the conduct may be
   shaped and moulded. But let us begin where it begins, and let us
   remember that the morality of the New Testament has never long been
   held up high and pure, where the theology of the New Testament has been
   neglected and despised. The law came by Moses; truth came by Jesus
   Christ.'

   But, still further, let me remind you that, in the revelation of a God
   who is gracious, giving to our emptiness and forgiving our sins--that
   is to say, in the revelation of grace--we have a far deeper, nobler,
   more blessed conception of the divine nature than in law. It is great
   to think of a righteous God, it is great and ennobling to think of One
   whose pure eyes cannot look upon sin, and who wills that men should
   live pure and noble and Godlike lives. But it is far more and more
   blessed, transcending all the old teaching, when we sit at the feet of
   the Christ who gives, and who pardons, and look up into His deep eyes,
   with the tears of compassion shining in them, and say: Lo! This is our
   God! We have waited for Him and He will save us.' That is a better
   truth, a deeper truth than prophets and righteous men of old possessed;
   and to us there has come, borne on the wings of the mighty angel of His
   grace, the precious revelation of the Father-God whose heart is love.
   The law was given by Moses,' but brighter than the gleam of the
   presence between the Cherubim is the lambent light of gentle tenderness
   that shines from the face of Jesus Christ. Grace, and therefore truth,
   a deeper truth, came by Him.

   And, still further, let me remind you of how this contrast is borne out
   by the fact that all that previous system was an adumbration, a shadow
   and a premonition of the perfect revelation that was to come. Temple,
   priest, sacrifice, law, the whole body of the Mosaic constitution of
   things was, as it were, a shadow thrown along the road in advance by
   the swiftly coming King. The shadow fell before Him, but when He came
   the shadow disappeared. The former was a system of types, symbols,
   pictures. Here is the reality that antiquates and fulfils and
   transcends them all. The law was given by Moses; grace and truth came
   by Jesus Christ.'

   II. Now, secondly, look at the other contrast that is here, between
   giving and coming.

   I do not know that I have quite succeeded in making clear to my own
   mind the precise force of this antithesis. Certainly there is a
   profound meaning if one can fathom it; perhaps one might put it best in
   something like the following fashion.

   The word rendered came' might be more correctly translated became,' or
   came into being.' The law was given; grace and truth came to be.

   Now, what do we mean when we talk about a law being given? We simply
   mean, I suppose, that it is promulgated, either in oral or in written
   words. It is, after all, no more than so many words. It is given when
   it is spoken or published. It is a verbal communication at the best.
   But grace and truth came to be.' They are realities; they are not
   words. They are not communicated by sentences, they are actual
   existences; and they spring into being as far as man's historical
   possession and experience of them are concerned--they spring into being
   in Jesus Christ, and through Him they belong to us all. Not that there
   was no grace, no manifest lore of God, in the world, nor any true
   knowledge of Him before the Incarnation, but the earlier portions of
   this chapter remind us that all of grace, however restrained and
   partial, that all of truth, however imperfect and shadowy it may have
   been, which were in the world before Christ came, were owing to the
   operation of that Eternal Word Who became flesh and dwelt among us,'
   and that these, in comparison with the affluence and the fulness and
   the nearness of grace and truth after Christ's coming, were so small
   and remote that it is not an exaggeration to say that, as far as man's
   possession and experience of them are concerned, the giving love of God
   and the clear and true knowledge of His deep heart of tenderness and
   grace, sprang into being with the historical manifestation of Jesus
   Christ the Lord.

   He comes to reveal by no words. His gift is not like the gift that
   Moses brought down from the mountain, merely a writing upon tables; His
   gift is not the letter of an outward commandment, nor the letter of an
   outward revelation. It is the thing itself which He reveals by being
   it. He does not speak about grace, He brings it; He does not show us
   God by His words, He shows us God by His acts. He does not preach about
   Him, but He lives Him, He manifests Him. His gentleness, His
   compassion, His miracles, His wisdom, His patience, His tears, His
   promises; all these are the very Deity in action before our eyes; and
   instead of a mere verbal revelation, which is so imperfect and so
   worthless, grace and truth, the living realities, are flashed upon a
   darkened world in the face of Jesus Christ. How cold, how hard, how
   superficial, in comparison with that fleshly table of the heart of
   Christ on which grace and truth were written, are the stony tables of
   law, which bore after all, for all their majesty, only words which are
   breath and nothing besides.

   III. And so, lastly, look at the contrast that is drawn here between
   the persons of the Founders.

   I do not suppose that we are to take into consideration the difference
   between the limitations of the one and the completeness of the other. I
   do not suppose that the Apostle was thinking about the difference
   between the reluctant service of the Lawgiver and the glad obedience of
   the Son; or between the passion and the pride that sometimes marred
   Moses' work, and the continual calmness and patient meekness that
   perfected the sacrifice of Jesus. Nor do I suppose that there flashed
   before his memory the difference between that strange tomb where God
   buried the prophet, unknown of men, in the stern solitude of the
   desert, true symbol of the solemn mystery and awful solitude with which
   the law which we have broken invests death, to our trembling
   consciences, and the grave in the garden with the spring flowers
   bursting round it, and visited by white-robed angels, who spoke comfort
   to weeping friends, true picture of what His death makes the grave for
   all His followers.

   But I suppose he was mainly thinking of the contrast between the
   relation of Moses to his law, and of Christ to His Gospel. Moses was
   but a medium. His personality had nothing to do with his message. You
   may take away Moses, and the law stands all the same. But Christ is so
   interwoven with Christ's message that you cannot rend the two apart;
   you cannot have the figure of Christ melt away, and the gift that
   Christ brought remain. If you extinguish the sun you cannot keep the
   sunlight; if you put away Christ in the fulness of His manhood and of
   His divinity, in the power of His Incarnation and the omnipotence of
   His cross--if you put away Christ from Christianity, it collapses into
   dust and nothingness.

   So, dear brethren, do not let any of us try that perilous experiment.
   You cannot melt away Jesus and keep grace and truth. You cannot tamper
   with His character, with His nature, with the mystery of His passion,
   with the atoning power of His cross, and preserve the blessings that He
   has brought to the world. If you want the grace which is the unveiling
   of the heart of God, the gift of a giving God and the pardon of a
   forgiving Judge; or if you want the truth, the reality of the knowledge
   of Him, you can only get them by accepting Christ. I am the Truth, and
   the Way, and the Life.' There is a law given which gives life,' and
   righteousness is by that law.' There is a Person who is the Truth, and
   our knowledge of the truth is through that Person, and through Him
   alone. By humble faith receive Him into your hearts, and He will come
   bringing to you the fulness of grace and truth.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE WORLD'S SIN-BEARER

   The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the
   Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.'--JOHN i. 29.

   Our Lord, on returning from His temptation in the wilderness, came
   straight to John the Baptist. He was welcomed with these wonderful and
   rapturous words, familiarity with which has deadened our sense of their
   greatness. How audacious they would sound to some of their first
   hearers! Think of these two, one of them a young Galilean carpenter, to
   whom His companion witnesses and declares that He is of worldwide and
   infinite significance. It was the first public designation of Jesus
   Christ, and it throws into exclusive prominence one aspect of His work.

   John the Baptist summing up the whole of former revelation which
   concentrated in Him, pointed a designating finger to Jesus and said,
   That is He!' My text is the sum of all Christian teaching ever since.
   My task, and that of all preachers, if we understand it aright, is but
   to repeat the same message, and to concentrate attention on the same
   fact--The Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.' It is
   the one thing needful for you, dear friend, to believe. It is the truth
   that we all need most of all. There is no reason for our being gathered
   together now, except that I may beseech you to behold for yourselves
   the Lamb of God which takes away the world's sin.

   I. Now let me ask you to note, first, that Jesus Christ is the world's
   sin-bearer.

   The significance of the first clause of my text, the Lamb of God,' is
   deplorably weakened if it is taken to mean only, or mainly, that Jesus
   Christ, in the sweetness of His human nature, is gentle and meek and
   patient and innocent and pure. It does mean all that, thank God! But it
   was no mere description of Christ's disposition which John the Baptist
   conceived himself to be uttering, as is clear by the words that follow
   in the next clause. His reason for selecting (under divine guidance, as
   I believe) that image of the Lamb of God,' went a great deal deeper
   than anything in the temper of the Person of whom he was speaking. Many
   streams of ancient prophecy and ritual converge upon this emblem, and
   if we want to understand what is meant by the designation the Lamb of
   God,' we must not content ourselves with the sentimentalisms which some
   superficial teachers have supposed to exhaust the significance of the
   expression; but we must submit to be led back by John, who was the
   summing up of all the ancient Revelation, to the sources in that
   Revelation from which he drew this metaphor.

   First and chiefest of these, as I take it, are the words which no Jew
   ever doubted referred to the Messiah, until after He had come, and the
   Rabbis would not believe in Him, and so were bound to hunt up another
   interpretation--I mean the great words in the prophecy which, I
   suppose, is familiar to most of us, where there are found two
   representations, one, He was led as a Lamb to the slaughter, and as a
   sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He opened not His mouth'; and the
   other, still more germane to the purpose of my text, the Lord hath laid
   on Him the iniquity of us all. . . . By His knowledge shall He justify
   many, for He shall bear their iniquities.' John the Baptist, looking
   back through the ages to that ancient prophetic utterance, points to
   the young Man standing by his side, and says, There it is fulfilled.'

   But the prophetic symbol of the Lamb, and the thought that He bore the
   iniquity of the many, had their roots in the past, and pointed back to
   the sacrificial lamb, the lamb of the daily sacrifice, and especially
   to the lamb slain at the Passover, which was an emblem and sacrament of
   deliverance from bondage. Thus the conceptions of vicarious suffering,
   and of a death which is a deliverance, and of blood which, sprinkled on
   the doorposts, guards the house from the destroying angel, are all
   gathered into these words.

   Nor do these exhaust the sources of this figure, as it comes from the
   venerable and sacred past. For when we read the Lamb of God,' who is
   there that does not recognise, unless his eyes are blinded by obstinate
   prejudice, a glance backward to that sweet and pathetic story when the
   father went up with his son to the top of Mount Moriah, and to the
   boy's question, Where is the lamb?' answered, My son, God Himself will
   provide the lamb!' John says, Behold the Lamb that God has provided,
   the Sacrifice, on whom is laid a world's sins, and who bears them
   away.'

   Note, too, the universality of the power of Christ's sacrificial work.
   John does not say the sins,' as the Litany, following an imperfect
   translation, makes him say. But he says, the sin of the world,' as if
   the whole mass of human transgression was bound together, in one black
   and awful bundle, and laid upon the unshrinking shoulders of this
   better Atlas who can bear it all, and bear it all away. Your sin, and
   mine, and every man's, they were all laid upon Jesus Christ.

   Now remember, dear brethren, that in this wondrous representation there
   lie, plain and distinct, two things which to me, and I pray they may be
   to you, are the very foundation of the Gospel to which we have to
   trust. One is that on Christ Jesus, in His life and in His death, were
   laid the guilt and the consequences of a world's sin. I do not profess
   to be ready with an explanation of how that is possible. That it is a
   fact I believe, on the authority of Christ Himself and of Scripture;
   that it is inconsistent with the laws of human nature may be asserted,
   but never can be proved. Theories manifold have been invented in order
   to make it plain. I do not know that any of them have gone to the
   bottom of the bottomless. But Christ in His perfect manhood, wedded, as
   I believe it is, to true divinity, is capable of entering into--not
   merely by sympathy, though that has much to do with it--such closeness
   of relation with human kind, and with every man, as that on Him can be
   laid the iniquity of us all.

   Oh, brethren! what was the meaning of I have a baptism to be baptized
   with,' unless the cold waters of the flood into which He unshrinkingly
   stepped, and allowed to flow over Him, were made by the gathered
   accumulation of the sins of the whole world? What was the meaning of
   the agony in Gethsemane? What was the meaning of that most awful word
   ever spoken by human lips, in which the consciousness of union with,
   and of separation from, God, were so marvellously blended, My God! my
   God! why hast Thou forsaken Me?' unless the Guiltless was then loaded
   with the sins of the world, which rose between Him and God?

   Dear friends, it seems to me that unless this transcendent element be
   fairly recognised as existing in the passion and death of Jesus Christ,
   His demeanour when He came to die was far less heroic and noble and
   worthy of imitation than have been the deaths of hundreds of people who
   drew all their strength to die from Him. I do not venture to bring a
   theory, but I press upon you the fact, He bears the sins of the world,
   and in that awful load are yours and mine.

   There is the other truth here, as clearly, and perhaps more directly,
   meant by the selection of the expression in my text, that the
   Sin-bearer not only carries, but carries away, the burden that is laid
   upon Him. Perhaps there may be a reference--in addition to the other
   sources of the figure which I have indicated as existing in ritual, and
   prophecy, and history--there may be a reference in the words to yet
   another of the eloquent symbols of that ancient system which enshrined
   truths that were not peculiar to any people, but were the property of
   humanity. You remember, no doubt, the singular ceremonial connected
   with the scapegoat, and many of you will recall the wonderful
   embodiment of it given by the Christian genius of a modern painter. The
   sins of the nation were symbolically laid upon its head, and it was
   carried out to the edge of the wilderness and driven forth to wander
   alone, bearing away upon itself into the darkness and solitude--far
   from man and far from God--the whole burden of the nation's sins. Jesus
   Christ takes away the sin which He bears, and there is, as I believe,
   only one way by which individuals, or society, or the world at large,
   can thoroughly get rid of the guilt and penal consequences and of the
   dominion of sin, and that is, by beholding the Lamb of God that takes
   upon Himself, that He may carry away out of sight, the sin of the
   world. So much, then, for the first thought that I wish to suggest to
   you.

   II. Now let me ask you to look with me at a second thought, that such a
   world's Sin-bearer is the world's deepest need.

   The sacrifices of every land witness to the fact that humanity all over
   the world, and through all the ages, and under all varieties of
   culture, has been dimly conscious that its deepest need was that the
   fact of sin should be dealt with. I know that there are plenty of
   modern ingenious ways of explaining the universal prevalence of an
   altar and a sacrifice, and the slaying of innocent creatures, on other
   grounds, some of which I think it is not uncharitable to suppose are in
   favour mainly because they weaken this branch of the evidence for the
   conformity of Christian truth with human necessities. But
   notwithstanding these, I venture to affirm, with all proper submission
   to wiser men, that you cannot legitimately explain the universal
   prevalence of sacrifice, unless you take into account as one--I should
   say the main--element in it, this universally diffused sense that
   things are wrong between man and the higher Power, and need to be set
   right even by such a method.

   But I do not need to appeal only to this world-wide fact as being a
   declaration of what man's deepest need is. I would appeal to every
   man's own consciousness--hard though it be to get at it; buried as it
   is, with some of us, under mountains of indifference and neglect; and
   callous as it is with many of us by reason of indulgence in habits of
   evil. I believe that in every one of us, if we will be honest, and give
   heed to the inward voice, there does echo a response and an amen to the
   Scripture declaration, God hath shut up all under sin.' I ask you about
   yourselves, is it not so? Do you not know that, however you may gloss
   over the thing, or forget it amidst a whirl of engagements and
   occupations, or try to divert your thoughts into more or less noble or
   ignoble channels of pleasures and pursuits, there does lie, in each of
   our hearts, the sense, dormant often, but sometimes like a snake in its
   hybernation, waking up enough to move, and sometimes enough to
   sting--there does lie, in each of us, the consciousness that we are
   wrong with God, and need something to put us right?

   And, brethren, let modern philanthropists of all sorts take this
   lesson: The thing that the world wants is to have sin dealt with--dealt
   with in the way of conscious forgiveness; dealt with in the way of
   drying up its source, and delivering men from the power of it. Unless
   you do that, I do not say you do nothing, but you pour a bottle full of
   cold water into Vesuvius, and try to put the fire out with that. You
   may educate, you may cultivate, you may refine; you may set political
   and economical arrangements right in accordance with the newest notions
   of the century, and what then? Why! the old thing will just begin over
   again, and the old miseries will appear again, because the old
   grandmother of them all is there, the sin that has led to them.

   Now do not misunderstand me, as if I were warring against good and
   noble men who are trying to remedy the world's evils by less thorough
   methods than Christ's Gospel. They will do a great deal. But you may
   have high education, beautiful refinement of culture and manners; you
   may divide out political power in accordance with the most democratic
   notions; you may give everybody a living wage,' however extravagant his
   notions of a living wage may be. You may carry out all these panaceas
   and the world will groan still, because you have not dealt with the
   tap-root of all the mischief. You cannot cure an internal cancer with a
   plaster upon the little finger, and you will never stanch the world's
   wounds until you go to the Physician that has balm and bandage, even
   Jesus Christ, that takes away the sins of the world. I profoundly
   distrust all these remedies for the world's misery as in themselves
   inadequate, even whilst I would help them all, and regard them all as
   then blessed and powerful, when they are consequences and secondary
   results of the Gospel, the first task of which is to deal by
   forgiveness and by cleansing with individual transgression.

   And if I might venture to go a step further, I would like to say that
   this aspect of our Lord's work on which John the Baptist concentrated
   all our attention is the only one which gives Him power to sway men,
   and which makes the Gospel--the record of His work--the kingly power in
   the world that it is meant to be. Depend upon it, that in the measure
   in which Christian teachers fail to give supreme importance to that
   aspect of Christ's work they fail altogether. There are many other
   aspects which, as I have just said, follow in my conception from this
   first one; but if, as is obviously the tendency in many quarters
   to-day, Christianity be thought of as being mainly a means of social
   improvement, or if its principles of action be applied to life without
   that basis of them all, in the Cross which takes away the world's
   iniquity, then it needs no prophet to foretell that such a Christianity
   will only have superficial effects, and that, in losing sight of this
   central thought, it will have cast away all its power.

   I beseech you, dear brethren, remember that Jesus Christ is something
   more than a social reformer, though He is the first of them, and the
   only one whose work will last. Jesus Christ is something more than a
   lovely pattern of human conduct, though He is that. Jesus Christ is
   something more than a great religious genius who set forth the
   Fatherhood of God as it had never been set forth before. The Gospel of
   Jesus Christ is the record not only of what He said but of what He did,
   not only that He lived but that He died; and all His other powers, and
   all His other benefits and blessings to society, come as results of His
   dealing with the individual soul when He takes away its guilt and
   reconciles it to God.

   III. And so, lastly, let me ask you to notice that this Sin-bearer of
   the world is our Sin-bearer if we behold' Him.

   John was simply summoning ignorant eyes to look, and telling of what
   they would see. But his call is susceptible, without violence, of a far
   deeper meaning. This is really the one truth that I want to press upon
   you, dear friends--Behold the Lamb of God!'

   What is that beholding? Surely it is nothing else than our recognising
   in Him the great and blessed work which I have been trying to describe,
   and then resting ourselves upon that great Lord and sufficient
   Sacrifice. And such an exercise of simple trust is well named
   beholding, because they who believe do see, with a deeper and a truer
   vision than sense can give. You and I can see Christ more really than
   these men who stood round Him, and to whom His flesh was a veil'--as
   the Epistle to the Hebrews calls it--hiding His true divinity and work.
   They who thus behold by faith lack nothing either of the directness or
   of the certitude that belong to vision. Seeing is believing,' says the
   cynical proverb. The Christian version inverts its terms, Believing is
   seeing.' Whom having not seen ye love, in whom though now ye see Him
   not, yet believing ye rejoice.'

   And your simple act of beholding,' by the recognition of His work and
   the resting of yourself upon it, makes the world's Sin-bearer your
   Sin-bearer. You appropriate the general blessing, like a man taking in
   a little piece of a boundless prairie for his very own. Your possession
   does not make my possession of Him less, for every eye gets its own
   beam, and however many eyes wait upon Him, they all receive the light
   on to their happy eyeballs. You can make Christ your own, and have all
   that He has done for the world as your possession, and can experience
   in your own hearts the sense of your own forgiveness and deliverance
   from the power and guilt of your own sin, on the simple condition of
   looking unto Jesus. The serpent is lifted on the pole, the dying camp
   cannot go to it, but the filming eyes of the man in his last gasp may
   turn to the gleaming image hanging on high; and as he looks the health
   begins to tingle back into his veins, and he is healed.

   And so, dear brethren, behold Him; for unless you do, though He has
   borne the world's sin, your sin will not be there, but will remain on
   your back to crush you down. O Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins
   of the world, have mercy upon me!'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE FIRST DISCIPLES: I. JOHN AND ANDREW

   And the two disciples heard Him speak, and they followed Jesus. 38.
   Then Jesus turned, and saw them following, and saith unto them, What
   seek ye? They said unto Him, Rabbi, (which is to say, being
   interpreted, Master,) where dwellest Thou? 39. He saith unto them, Come
   and see. They came and saw where He dwelt, and abode with Him that day:
   for it was about the tenth hour.'--JOHN i. 37-39.

   In these verses we see the head waters of a great river, for we have
   before us nothing less than the beginnings of the Christian Church. So
   simply were the first disciples made. The great society of believers
   was born like its Master, unostentatiously and in a corner.

   Jesus has come back from His conflict in the wilderness after His
   baptism, and has presented Himself before John the Baptist for his
   final attestation. It was a great historical moment when the last of
   the Prophets stood face to face with the Fulfilment of all prophecy. In
   his words, Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the
   world!' Jewish prophecy sang its swan-song, uttered its last rejoicing,
   Eureka! I have found Him!' and died as it spoke.

   We do not sufficiently estimate the magnificent self-suppression and
   unselfishness of the Baptist, in that he, with his own lips, here
   repeats his testimony in order to point his disciples away from
   himself, and to attach them to Jesus. If he could have been touched by
   envy he would not so gladly have recognised it as his lot to decrease
   while Jesus increased. Bare magnanimity that in a teacher! The two who
   hear John's words are Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, and an anonymous
   man. The latter is probably the Evangelist. For it is remarkable that
   we never find the names of James and John in this Gospel (though from
   the other Gospels we know how closely they were associated with our
   Lord), and that we only find them referred to as the sons of Zebedee,'
   once near the close of the book. That fact points, I think, in the
   direction of John's authorship of this Gospel.

   These two, then, follow behind Jesus, fancying themselves unobserved,
   not desiring to speak to Him, and probably with some notion of tracking
   Him to His home, in order that they may seek an interview at a later
   period. But He who notices the first beginnings of return to Him, and
   always comes to meet men, and is better to them than their wishes, will
   not let them steal behind Him uncheered, nor leave them to struggle
   with diffidence and delay. So He turns to them, and the events ensue
   which I have read in the verses that follow as my text.

   We have, I think, three things especially to notice here. First, the
   Master's question to the whole world, What seek ye?' Second, the
   Master's invitation to the whole world, Come and see!' Lastly, the
   personal communion which brings men's hearts to Him, They came and saw
   where He dwelt, and abode with Him that day.'

   I. So, then, first look at this question of Christ to the whole world,
   What seek ye?'

   As it stands, on its surface, and in its primary application, it is the
   most natural of questions. Our Lord hears footsteps behind Him, and, as
   any one would do, turns about, with the question which any one would
   ask, What is it that you want?' That question would derive all its
   meaning from the look with which it was accompanied, and the tone in
   which it was spoken. It might mean either annoyance and rude repulsion
   of a request, even before it was presented, or it might mean a glad
   wish to draw out the petition, and more than half a pledge to bestow
   it. All depends on the smile with which it was asked and the intonation
   of voice which carried it to their ears. And if we had been there we
   should have felt, as these two evidently felt, that though in form a
   question, it was in reality a promise, and that it drew out their shy
   wishes, made them conscious to themselves of what they desired, and
   gave them confidence that their desire would be granted. Clearly it had
   sunk very deep into the Evangelist's mind; and now, at the end of his
   life, when his course is nearly run, the never-to-be-forgotten voice
   sounds still in his memory, and he sees again, in sunny clearness, all
   the scene that had transpired on that day by the fords of the Jordan.
   The first words and the last words of those whom we have learned to
   love are cut deep on our hearts.

   It was not an accident that the first words which the Master spoke in
   His Messianic office were this profoundly significant question, What
   seek ye?' He asks it of us all, He asks it of us to-day. Well for them
   who can answer, Rabbi! where dwellest Thou?' It is Thou whom we seek!'
   So, venturing to take the words in that somewhat wider application, let
   me just suggest to you two or three directions in which they seem to
   point.

   First, the question suggests to us this: the need of having a clear
   consciousness of what is our object in life. The most of men have never
   answered that question. They live from hand to mouth, driven by
   circumstances, guided by accidents, impelled by unreflecting passions
   and desires, knowing what they want for the moment, but never having
   tried to shape the course of their lives into a consistent whole, so as
   to stand up before God in Christ when He puts the question to them,
   What seek ye?' and to answer the question.

   These incoherent, instinctive, unreflective lives that so many of you
   are living are a shame to your manhood, to say nothing more. God has
   made us for something else than that we should thus be the sport of
   circumstances. It is a disgrace to any of us that our lives should be
   like some little fishing-boat, with an unskilful or feeble hand at the
   tiller, yawing from one point of the compass to another, and not
   keeping a straight and direct course. I pray you, dear brethren, to
   front this question: After all, and at bottom, what is it I am living
   for? Can I formulate the aims and purposes of my life in any
   intelligible statement of which I should not be ashamed?' Some of you
   are not ashamed to do what you would be very much ashamed to say, and
   you practically answer the question, What are you seeking?' by pursuits
   that you durst not call by their own ugly names.

   There may be many of us who are living for our lusts, for our passions,
   for our ambitions, for avarice, who are living in all uncleanness and
   godlessness. I do not know. There are plenty of shabby, low aims in all
   of us which do not bear being dragged out into the light of day. I
   beseech you to try and get hold of the ugly things and bring them up to
   the surface, however much they may seek to hide in the congenial
   obscurity and twist their slimy coils round something in the dark. If
   you dare not put your life's object into words, bethink yourselves
   whether it ought to be your life's object at all.

   Ah, brethren! if we would ask ourselves this question, and answer it
   with any thoroughness, we should not make so many mistakes as to the
   places where we look for the things for which we are seeking. If we
   knew what we were really seeking, we should know where to go to look
   for it. Let me tell you what you are seeking, whether you know it or
   not. You are seeking for rest for your heart, a home for your spirits;
   you are seeking for perfect truth for your understandings, perfect
   beauty for your affections, perfect goodness for your conscience. You
   are seeking for all these three, gathered into one white beam of light,
   and you are seeking for it all in a Person. Many of you do not know
   this, and so you go hunting in all manner of impossible places for that
   which you can only find in one. To the question, What seek ye?' the
   deepest of all answers, the only real answer, is, My soul thirsteth for
   God, for the living God.' If you know that, you know where to look for
   what you need! Do men gather grapes of thorns?' If these are really the
   things that you are seeking after, in all your mistaken search--oh! how
   mistaken is the search! Do men look for pearls in cockle-shells, or for
   gold in coal-pits; and why should you look for rest of heart, mind,
   conscience, spirit, anywhere and in anything short of God? What seek
   ye?'--the only answer is, We seek Thee!'

   And then, still further, let me remind you how these words are not only
   a question, but are really a veiled and implied promise. The question,
   What do you want of Me?' may either strike an intending suppliant like
   a blow, and drive him away with his prayer sticking in his throat
   unspoken, or it may sound like a merciful invitation, What is thy
   petition, and what is thy request, and it shall be granted unto thee?'
   We know which of the two it was here. Christ asks all such questions as
   this (and there are many of them in the New Testament), not for His
   information, but for our strengthening. He asks people, not because He
   does not know before they answer, but that, on the one hand, their own
   minds may be clear as to their wishes, and so they may wish the more
   earnestly because of the clearness; and that, on the other hand, their
   desires being expressed, they may be the more able to receive the gift
   which He is willing to bestow. So He here turns to these men, whose
   purpose He knew well enough, and says to them, What seek ye?' Herein He
   is doing the very same thing on a lower level, and in an outer sphere,
   as is done when He appoints that we shall pray for the blessings which
   He is yearning to bestow, but which He makes conditional on our
   supplications, only because by these supplications our hearts are
   opened to a capacity for receiving them.

   We have, then, in the words before us, thus understood, our Lord's
   gracious promise to give what is desired on the simple condition that
   the suppliant is conscious of his own wants, and turns to Him for the
   supply of them. What seek ye?' It is a blank cheque that He puts into
   their hands to fill up. It is the key of His treasure-house which He
   offers to us all, with the assured confidence that if we open it we
   shall find all that we need.

   Who is He that thus stands up before a whole world of seeking, restless
   spirits, and fronts them with the question which is a pledge, conscious
   of His capacity to give to each of them what each of them requires? Who
   is this that professes to be able to give all these men and women and
   children bread here in the wilderness? There is only one answer--the
   Christ of God.

   And He has done what He promises. No man or woman ever went to Him, and
   answered this question, and presented their petition for any real good,
   and was refused. No man can ask from Christ what Christ cannot bestow.
   No man can ask from Christ what Christ will not bestow. In the loftiest
   region, the region of inward and spiritual gifts, which are the best
   gifts, we can get everything that we want, and our only limit is, not
   His boundless omnipotence and willingness, but our own poor, narrow,
   and shrivelled desires. Ask, and ye shall receive; seek, and ye shall
   find.'

   Christ stands before us, if I may so say, like some of those fountains
   erected at some great national festival, out of which pour for all the
   multitude every variety of draught which they desire, and each man that
   goes with his empty cup gets it filled, and gets it filled with that
   which he wishes. What seek ye?' Wisdom? You students, you thinkers, you
   young men that are fighting with intellectual difficulties and
   perplexities, What seek ye?' Truth? He gives us that. You others, What
   seek ye?' Love, peace, victory, self-control, hope, anodyne for sorrow?
   Whatever you desire, you will find in Jesus Christ. The first words
   with which He broke the silence when He spake to men as the Messias,
   were at once a searching question, probing their aims and purposes, and
   a gracious promise pledging Him to a task not beyond His power, however
   far beyond that of all others, even the task of giving to each man his
   heart's desire. What seek ye?' Seek, and ye shall find.'

   II. Then, still further, notice how, in a similar fashion, we may
   regard here the second words which our Lord speaks as being His
   merciful invitation to the world. Come and see.'

   The disciples' answer was simple and timid. They did not venture to
   say, May we talk to you?' Will you take us to be your disciples?' All
   they can muster courage to ask now is, Where dwellest Thou?' At another
   time, perhaps, we will go to this Rabbi and speak with Him. His answer
   is, Come, come now; come, and by intercourse with Me learn to know Me.'
   His temporary home was probably nothing more than some selected place
   on the river's bank, for He had not where to lay His head'; but such as
   it was, He welcomes them to it. Come and see!'

   Take a plain, simple truth out of that. Christ is always glad when
   people resort to Him. When He was here in the world, no hour was
   inconvenient or inopportune; no moment was too much occupied; no
   physical wants of hunger, or thirst, or slumber were ever permitted to
   come between Him and seeking hearts. He was never impatient. He was
   never wearied of speaking, though He was often wearied in speaking. He
   never denied Himself to any one or said, I have something else to do
   than to attend to you.' And just as in literal fact, whilst He was here
   upon earth, nothing was ever permitted to hinder His drawing near to
   any man who wanted to draw near to Him, so nothing now hinders it; and
   He is glad when any of us resort to Him and ask Him to let us speak to
   Him and be with Him. His weariness or occupation never shut men out
   from Him then. His glory does not shut them out now.

   Then there is another thought here. This invitation of the Master is
   also a very distinct call to a firsthand knowledge of Jesus Christ.
   Andrew and John had heard from the Baptist about Him, and now what He
   bids them to do is to come and hear Himself. That is what He calls you,
   dear brethren, to do. Do not listen to us, let the Master Himself speak
   to you. Many who reject Christianity reject it through not having
   listened to Jesus Himself teaching them, but only to theologians and
   other human representations of the truth. Go and ask Christ to speak to
   you with His own lips of truth, and take Him as the Expositor of His
   own system. Do not be contented with traditional talk and second-hand
   information. Go to Christ, and hear what He Himself has to say to you.

   Then, still further, in this Come and see' there is a distinct call to
   the personal act of faith. Both of these words, come' and see,' are
   used in the New Testament as standing emblems of faith. Coming to
   Christ is trusting Him; trusting Him is seeing Him, looking unto Him.
   Come unto Me, and I will give you rest,' Look unto Me, and be ye saved,
   all ye ends of the earth.' There are two metaphors, both of them
   pointing to one thing, and that one thing is the invitation from the
   dear lips of the loving Lord to every man, woman, and child in this
   congregation. Come and see!' Put your trust in Me, draw near to Me by
   desire and penitence, draw near to Me in the fixed thought of your
   mind, in the devotion of your will, in the trust of your whole being.
   Come to Me, and see Me by faith; and then--and then--your hearts will
   have found what they seek, and your weary quest will be over, and, like
   the dove, you will fold your wings and nestle at the foot of the Cross,
   and rest for evermore. Come! "Come and see!"'

   III. So, lastly, we have in these words a parable of the blessed
   experience which binds men's hearts to Jesus for ever. They came and
   saw where He dwelt, and abode with Him that day, for it was about the
   tenth hour.'

   Dwelt' and abode' are the same words in the original. It is one of
   John's favourite words, and in its deepest meaning expresses the close,
   still communion which the soul may have with Jesus Christ, which
   communion, on that never-to-be-forgotten day, when he and Andrew sat
   with Him in the quiet, confidential fellowship that disclosed Christ's
   glory full of grace and truth' to their hearts, made them His for ever.

   If the reckoning of time here is made according to the Hebrew fashion,
   the tenth hour' will be ten o'clock in the morning. So, one long day of
   talk! If it be according to the Roman legal fashion, the hour will be
   four o'clock in the afternoon, which would only give time for a brief
   conversation before the night fell. But, in any case, sacred reserve is
   observed as to what passed in that interview. A lesson for a great deal
   of blatant talk, in this present day, about conversion and the details
   thereof!


     Not easily forgiven

     Are those, who setting wide the doors, that bar

     The secret bridal chambers of the heart.

     Let in the day.'

   John had nothing to say to the world about what the Master said to him
   and his brother in that long day of communion.

   One plain conclusion from this last part of our narrative is that the
   impression of Christ's own personality is the strongest force to make
   disciples. The character of Jesus Christ is, after all, the central and
   standing evidence and the mightiest credential of Christianity. It
   bears upon its face the proof of its own truthfulness. If such a
   character was not lived, how did it ever come to be described, and
   described by such people? And if it was lived, how did it come to be
   so? The historical veracity of the character of Jesus Christ is
   guaranteed by its very uniqueness. And the divine origin of Jesus
   Christ is forced upon us as the only adequate explanation of His
   historical character. Truly this man was the Son of God.'

   I believe that to lift Him up is the work of all Christian preachers
   and teachers; as far as they can to hide themselves behind Jesus
   Christ, or at the most to let themselves appear, just as the old
   painters used to let their own likenesses appear in their great
   altar-pieces--a little kneeling figure there, away in a dark corner of
   the background. Present Christ, and He will vindicate His own
   character; He will vindicate His own nature; He will vindicate His own
   gospel. They came and saw where He dwelt, and abode with Him,' and the
   end of it was that they abode with Him for evermore. And so it will
   always be.

   Once more, personal experience of the grace and sweetness of this
   Saviour binds men to Him as nothing else will:


     He must be loved ere that to you

     He will seem worthy of your love.'

   The deepest and sweetest and most precious part of His character and of
   His gifts can only be known on condition of possessing Him and them,
   and they can be possessed only on condition of holding fellowship with
   Him. I do not say to any man: Try trust in order to be sure that Jesus
   Christ is worthy to be trusted,' for by its very nature faith cannot be
   an experiment or provisional. I do not say that my experience is
   evidence to you, but at the same time I do say that it is worth any
   man's while to reflect upon this, that none who ever trusted in Him
   have been put to shame. No man has looked to Jesus and has said: Ah! I
   have found Him out! His help is vain, His promises empty.' Many men
   have fallen away from Him, I know, but not because they have proved Him
   untruthful, but because they have become unfaithful.

   And so, dear brethren, I come to you with the old message, Oh! taste,'
   and thus you will see that the Lord is good.' There must be the faith
   first, and then there will be the experience, which will make anything
   seem to you more credible than that He whom you have loved and trusted,
   and who has answered your love and your trust, should be anything else
   than the Son of God, the Saviour of mankind. Come to Him and you will
   see. The impregnable argument will be put into your mouth--Whether this
   man be a sinner or no, I know not. One thing I know, that whereas I was
   blind, now I see.' Look to Him, listen to Him, and when He asks you,
   What seek ye?' answer, Rabbi, where dwellest Thou? It is Thou whom I
   seek.' He will welcome you to close blessed intercourse with Him, which
   will knit you to Him with cords that cannot be broken, and with His
   loving voice making music in memory and heart, you will be able
   triumphantly to confess--Now we believe, not because of any man's
   saying, for we have heard Him ourselves, and know that this is indeed
   the Christ, the Saviour of the world.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE FIRST DISCIPLES: II. SIMON PETER

   One of the two which heard John speak, and followed him, was Andrew,
   Simon Peter's brother. 41. He first findeth his own brother Simon, and
   saith unto him, We have found the Messias, which is, being interpreted,
   the Christ. 42. And he brought him to Jesus. And when Jesus beheld him,
   He said, Thou art Simon the son of Jona: thou shalt be called Cephas,
   which is, by interpretation, a stone.'--JOHN i. 40-42.

   There are many ways by which souls are brought to their Saviour.
   Sometimes, like the merchantman seeking goodly pearls, men seek Him
   earnestly and find Him. Sometimes, by the intervention of another, the
   knowledge of Him is kindled in dark hearts. Sometimes He Himself takes
   the initiative, and finds those that seek Him not. We have
   illustrations of all these various ways in these simple records of the
   gathering in of the first disciples. Andrew and his friend, with whom
   we were occupied in our last sermon, looked for Christ and found Him.
   Peter, with whom we have to do now, was brought to Christ by his
   brother; and the third of the group, consisting of Philip, was sought
   by Christ while he was not thinking of Him, and found an unsought
   treasure; and then Philip again, like Andrew, finds a friend, and
   brings him to Christ.

   Each of the incidents has its own lesson, and each of them adds
   something to the elucidation of John's two great subjects: the
   revelation of Jesus as the Son of God, and the development of that
   faith in Him which gives us life. It may be profitable to consider each
   group in succession, and mark the various aspects of these two subjects
   presented by each.

   In this incident, then, we have two things mainly to consider: first,
   the witness of the disciple; second, the self-revelation of the Master.

   I. The witness of the disciple.

   We have seen that the unknown companion of Andrew was probably the
   Evangelist himself, who, in accordance with his uniform habit,
   suppresses his own name, and that that omission points to John's
   authorship of this Gospel. Another morsel of evidence as to the date
   and purpose of the Gospel lies in the mention here of Andrew as Simon
   Peter's brother.' We have not yet heard anything about Simon Peter. The
   Evangelist has never mentioned his name, and yet he takes it for
   granted that his hearers knew all about Peter, and knew him better than
   they did Andrew. That presupposes a considerable familiarity with the
   incidents of the Gospel story, and is in harmony with the theory that
   this fourth Gospel is the latest of the four, and was written for the
   purpose of supplementing, not of repeating, their narrative. Hence a
   number of the phenomena of the Gospel, which have troubled critics, are
   simply and sufficiently explained.

   But that by the way. Passing that, notice first the illustration that
   we get here of how instinctive and natural the impulse is, when a man
   has found Jesus Christ, to tell some one else about Him. Nobody said to
   Andrew, Go and look for your brother,' and yet, as soon as he had
   fairly realised the fact that this Man standing before him was the
   Messiah, though the evening seems to have come, he hurries away to find
   his brother, and share with him the glad conviction.

   Now, that is always the case. If a man has any real depth of
   conviction, he cannot rest till he tries to share it with somebody
   else. Why, even a dog that has had its leg mended, will bring other
   limping dogs to the man that was kind to it. Whoever really believes
   anything becomes a propagandist.

   Look round about us to-day! and hearken to the Babel, the wholesale
   Babel of noises, where every sort of opinion is trying to make itself
   heard. It sounds like a country fair where every huckster is shouting
   his loudest. That shows that the men believe the things that they
   profess. Thank God that there is so much earnestness in the world! And
   now are Christians to be dumb whilst all this vociferous crowd is
   calling its wares, and quacks are standing on their platforms shouting
   out their specifics, which are mostly delusions? Have you not a
   medicine that will cure everything, a real heal-all, a veritable
   pain-killer? If you believe that you have, certainly you will never
   rest till you share your boon with your brethren.

   If the natural effect of all earnest conviction, viz. a yearning and an
   absolute necessity to speak it out, is no part of your Christian
   experience, very grave inferences ought to be drawn from that. This
   man, before he was four-and-twenty hours a disciple, had made another.
   Some of you have been disciples for as many years, and have never even
   tried to make one. Whence comes that silence which is, alas, so common
   among us?

   It is very plain that, making all allowance for changed manners, for
   social difficulties, for timidity, for the embarrassment that besets
   people when they talk to other people about religion, which is such an
   awkward subject to introduce into mixed company,' and the like,--making
   all allowance for these, there is a deplorable number of Christian
   people who ought to be, in their own circles, evangelists and
   missionaries, who are, if I may venture to quote very rude words which
   the Bible uses, Dumb dogs lying down, and loving to slumber.' He first
   findeth his own brother, Simon!'

   Now, take another lesson out of this witness of the disciple, as to the
   channel in which such effort naturally runs. He first findeth his own
   brother'; does not that imply a second finding by the other of the two?
   The language of the text suggests that the Evangelist's tendency to the
   suppression of himself, of which I have spoken, hides away, if I may so
   say, in this singular expression, the fact that he too went to look for
   a brother, but that Andrew found his brother before John found his. If
   so, each of the original pair of disciples went to look for one who was
   knit to him by close ties of kindred and affection, and found him and
   brought him to Christ; and before the day was over the Christian Church
   was doubled, because each member of it, by God's grace, had added
   another. Home, then, and those who are nearest to us, present the
   natural channels for Christian work. Many a very earnest and busy
   preacher, or Sunday-school teacher, or missionary, has brothers and
   sisters, husband or wife, children or parents at home to whom he has
   never said a word about Christ. There is an old proverb, The
   shoemaker's wife is always the worst shod.' The families of many very
   busy Christian teachers suffer wofully for want of remembering he first
   findeth his own brother.' It is a poor affair if all your philanthropy
   and Christian energy go off noisily in Sunday-schools and
   mission-stations, and if your own vineyard is neglected, and the people
   at your own fireside never hear anything from you about the Master whom
   you say you love. Some of you want that hint; will you take it?

   But then, the principle is one that might be fairly expanded beyond the
   home circle. The natural relationships into which we are brought by
   neighbourhood and by ordinary associations prescribe the direction of
   our efforts. What, for instance, are we set down in this swarming
   population of Lancashire for? For business and personal ends? Yes,
   partly. But is that all? Surely, if we believe that there is a divinity
   that shapes our ends' and determines the bounds of our habitation, we
   must believe that other purposes affecting other people are also meant
   by God to be accomplished through us, and that where a man who knows
   and loves Christ Jesus is brought into neighbourly contact with
   thousands who do not, he is thereby constituted his brethren's keeper,
   and is as plainly called to tell them of Christ as if a voice from
   Heaven had bid him do it. What is to be said of the depth and vital
   energy of the Christianity that neither hears the call nor feels the
   impulse to share its blessing with the famishing Lazarus at its gate?
   What will be the fate of such a church? Why, if you live in luxury in
   your own well drained and ventilated house, and take no heed to the
   typhoid fever or cholera in the slums at its back, the chances are that
   seeds of the disease will find their way to you, and kill your wife, or
   child, or yourself. And if you Christian people, living in the midst of
   godless people, do not try to heal them, they will infect you. If you
   do not seek to impress your conviction that Christ is the Messiah upon
   an unbelieving generation, the unbelieving generation will impress upon
   you its doubts whether He is; and your lips will falter, and a pallor
   will come over the complexion of your love, and your faith will become
   congealed and turn into ice.

   Notice again the simple word which is the most powerful means of
   influencing most men.

   Andrew did not begin to argue with his brother. Some of us can do that
   and some of us cannot. Some of us are influenced by argument and some
   of us are not. You may pound a man's mistaken creed to atoms with
   sledge-hammers of reasoning, and he is not much the nearer being a
   Christian than he was before; just as you may pound ice to pieces and
   it is pounded ice after all. The mightiest argument that we can use,
   and the argument that we can all use, if we have got any religion in us
   at all, is that of Andrew, We have found the Messias.'

   I recently read a story in some newspaper or other about a minister who
   preached a very elaborate course of lectures in refutation of some form
   of infidelity, for the special benefit of a man that attended his place
   of worship. Soon after, the man came and declared himself a Christian.
   The minister said to him, Which of my discourses was it that removed
   your doubts?' The reply was, Oh! it was not any of your sermons that
   influenced me. The thing that set me thinking was that a poor woman
   came out of the chapel beside me, and stumbled on the steps, and I
   stretched out my hand to help her, and she said "Thank you!" Then she
   looked at me and said, "Do you love Jesus Christ, my blessed Saviour?"
   And I did not, and I went home and thought about it; and now I can say
   I love Jesus.' The poor woman's word, and her frank confession of her
   experience, were all the transforming power.

   If you have found Christ, you can say that you have. Never mind about
   the how! Any how! Only say it! A boy that is sent on an errand by his
   father has only one duty to perform, and that is to repeat what he was
   told. Whether we have any eloquence or not, whether we have any logic
   or not, whether we can speak persuasively and gracefully or not, if we
   have laid hold of Christ at all we can say that we have; and it is at
   our peril that we do not. We can say it to somebody. There is surely
   some one who will listen to you more readily than to any one else.
   Surely you have not lived all your life and bound nobody to you by
   kindness and love, so that they will gladly attend to what you say.
   Well, then, use the power that is given to you.

   Remember the beginnings of the Christian Church--two men, each of whom
   found his brother. Two and two make four; and if every one of us would
   go, according to the old law of warfare, and each of us slay our man,
   or rather each of us give life by God's grace to some one, or try to do
   it, our congregations and our churches would grow as fast as, according
   to the old problem, the money grew that was paid down for the nails in
   the horse's shoes. Two snowflakes on the top of a mountain gather an
   avalanche by the time they reach the valley. He first findeth his
   brother, Simon.'

   II. And now I turn to the second part of this text, the self-revelation
   of the Master.

   The bond which knit these men to Christ at first was by no means the
   perfect Christian faith which they afterwards attained. They recognised
   Him as the Messiah, they were personally attached to Him, they were
   ready to accept His teaching and to obey His commandments. That was
   about as far as they had gone. But they were scholars. They had entered
   the school. The rest would come. It would be absurd to expect that
   Christ would begin by preaching to them faith in His divinity and
   atoning work. He binds them to Himself. That is lesson enough for a
   beginner for one day.

   It was the impression which Christ Himself made on Simon which
   completed the work begun by his brother. What, then, was the
   impression? He comes all full of wonder and awe, and he is met by a
   look and a sentence. The look, which is described by an unusual word,
   was a penetrating gaze which regarded Peter with fixed attention. It
   must have been remarkable, to have lived in John's memory for all these
   years. Evidently, as I think, a more than natural insight is implied.
   So, also, the saying with which our Lord received Peter seems to me to
   be meant to show more than natural knowledge: Thou art Simon, the son
   of Jonas.' Christ may, no doubt, have learned the Apostle's name and
   lineage from his brother, or in some other ordinary way. But if you
   observe the similar incident which follows in the conversation with
   Nicodemus, and the emphatic declaration of the next chapter that Jesus
   knew both all men,' and what was in man'--both human nature as a whole,
   and each individual--it is more natural to see here superhuman
   knowledge.

   So then, the first point in our Lord's self-revelation here is that He
   shows Himself possessed of supernatural and thorough knowledge. One
   remembers the many instances where our Lord read men's hearts, and the
   prayer addressed to Him probably, by Peter, Thou, Lord, which knowest
   the hearts of all men,' and the vision which John saw of eyes like a
   flame of fire,' and the sevenfold I know thy works.'

   It may be a very awful thought, Thou, God, seest me.' It is a very
   unwelcome thought to a great many men, and it will be so to us unless
   we can give it the modification which it receives from the belief in
   the divinity of Jesus Christ, and feel sure that the eyes which are
   blazing with divine omniscience are dewy with divine and human love.

   Do you believe it? Do you feel that Christ is looking at you, and
   searching you altogether? Do you rejoice in it? Do you carry it about
   with you as a consolation and a strength in moments of weakness and in
   times of temptation? Is it as blessed to you to feel Thou Christ
   beholdest me now,' as it is for a child to feel that, when it is
   playing in the garden, its mother is sitting up at the window watching
   it, and that no harm can come? There have been men driven mad in
   prisons because they knew that somewhere in the wall there was a little
   pinhole, through which a gaoler's eye was always, or might be always,
   glaring down at them. And the thought of an absolute Omniscience up
   there, searching me to the depths of my nature, may become one from
   which I recoil shudderingly, and will not be altogether a blessed one
   unless it comes to me in this shape:--My Christ knows me altogether and
   loves me better than He knows. And so I will spread myself out before
   Him, and though I feel that there is much in me which I dare not tell
   to men, I will rejoice that there is nothing which I need to tell to
   Him. He knows me through and through. He knew me when He died for me.
   He knew me when He forgave me. He knew me when He undertook to cleanse
   me. Like this very Peter I will say, "Lord, Thou knowest all things,"
   and, like him, I will cling the closer to His feet, because I know, and
   He knows, my weakness and my sin.'

   Another revelation of our Lord's relation to His disciples is given in
   the fact that He changes Simon's name. Jehovah, in the Old Testament,
   changes the names of Abraham and of Jacob. Babylonian kings in the Old
   Testament change the names of their vassal princes. Masters impose
   names on their slaves; and I suppose that even the marriage custom of
   the wife's assuming the name of the husband rests originally upon the
   same idea of absolute authority. That idea is conveyed in the fact that
   our Lord changes Peter's name, and so takes absolute possession of him,
   and asserts His mastery over him. We belong to Him altogether, because
   He has given Himself altogether for us. His absolute authority is the
   correlative of His utter self-surrender. He who can come to me and say,
   I have spared not my life for thee,' and He only, has the right to come
   to me and say, yield yourself wholly to Me.' So, Christian friends,
   your Master wants all your service; do you give yourselves up to Him
   out and out, not by half and half.

   Lastly, that change of name implies Christ's power and promise to
   bestow a new character and new functions and honours. Peter was by no
   means a Peter' then. The name no doubt mainly implies official
   function, but that official function was prepared for by personal
   character; and in so far as the name refers to character, it means
   firmness. At that epoch Peter was rash, impulsive, headstrong,
   self-confident, vain, and therefore, necessarily changeable. Like the
   granite, all fluid and hot, and fluid because it was hot, he needed to
   cool in order to solidify into rock. And not until his self-confidence
   had been knocked out of him, and he had learned humility by falling;
   not until he had been beaten from all his presumption, and tamed down,
   and sobered and steadied by years of difficulty and responsibilities,
   did he become the rock that Christ meant him to be. All that lay
   concealed in the future, but in the change of his name, while he stood
   on the very threshold of his Christian career, there was preached to
   him, and there is preached to us, this great truth, that if you will go
   to Jesus Christ He will make a new man of you. No man's character is so
   obstinately rooted in evil but that Christ can change its set and
   direction. No man's natural dispositions are so faulty and low but that
   Christ can develop counterbalancing virtues, and out of the evil and
   weakness make strength. He will not make a Peter into a John, or a John
   into a Paul, but He will deliver Peter from the defects of his
   qualities,' and lead them up into a higher and a nobler region. There
   are no outcasts in the view of the transforming Christ. He dismisses no
   people out of His hospital as incurable, because anybody, everybody,
   the blackest, the most rooted in evil, those who have longest indulged
   in any given form of transgression, may all come to Him; with the
   certainty that if they will cleave to Him, He will read all their
   character and all its weaknesses, and then with a glad smile of welcome
   and assured confidence on His face, will ensure to them a new nature
   and new dignities. Thou art Simon--thou shalt be Peter.'

   The process will be long. It will be painful. There will be a great
   deal pared off. The sculptor makes the marble image by chipping away
   the superfluous marble. Ah! and when you have to chip away superfluous
   flesh and blood it is bitter work, and the chisel is often deeply dyed
   in gore, and the mallet seems to be very cruel. Simon did not know all
   that had to be done to make a Peter of him. We have to thank God's
   providence that we do not know all the sorrows and trials of the
   process of making us what He wills us to be. But we may be sure of
   this, that if only we keep near our Master, and let Him have His way
   with us, and work His will upon us, and if only we will not wince from
   the blows of the Great Artist's chisel, then out of the roughest block
   He will carve the fairest statue; and He will fulfil for us at last His
   great promise: I will give unto him a white stone, and in the stone a
   new name written, which no man knoweth save he that receiveth it.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE FIRST DISCIPLES: III. PHILIP

   The day following Jesus would go forth into Galilee, and findeth
   Philip, and saith unto him, Follow Me.'--JOHN i. 43.

   The day following'--we have a diary in this chapter and the next,
   extending from the day when John the Baptist gives his official
   testimony to Jesus, up till our Lord's first journey to Jerusalem. The
   order of events is this. The deputation from the Sanhedrim to John
   occupied the first day. On the second Jesus comes back to John after
   His temptation, and receives his solemn attestation. On the third day,
   John repeats his testimony, and three disciples, probably four, make
   the nucleus of the Church. These are the two pairs of brothers, James
   and John, Andrew and Peter, who stand first in every catalogue of the
   Apostles, and were evidently nearest to Christ.

   The day following' of our text is the fourth day. On it our Lord
   determines to return to Galilee. His objects in His visit to John were
   accomplished--to receive his public attestation, and to gather the
   first little knot of His followers. Thus launched upon His course, He
   desired to return to His native district.

   These events had occurred where John was baptising, in a place called
   in the English version Bethabara, which means The house of crossing,'
   or as we might say, Ferry-house. The traditional site for John's
   baptism is near Jericho, but the next chapter (verse i.) shows that it
   was only a day's journey from Cana of Galilee, and must therefore have
   been much further north than Jericho. A ford, still bearing the name
   Abarah, a few miles south of the lake of Gennesaret, has lately been
   discovered. Our Lord, then, and His disciples had a day's walking to
   take them back to Galilee. But apparently before they set out on that
   morning, Philip and Nathanael were added to the little band. So these
   two days saw six disciples gathered round Jesus.

   Andrew and John sought Christ and found Him. To them He revealed
   Himself as very willing to be approached, and glad to welcome any to
   His side. Peter, who comes next, was brought to Christ by his brother,
   and to him Christ revealed Himself as reading his heart, and promising
   and giving him higher functions and a more noble character.

   Now we come to the third case, Jesus findeth Philip,' who was not
   seeking Jesus, and who was brought by no one. To him Christ reveals
   Himself as drawing near to many a heart that has not thought of Him,
   and laying a masterful hand of gracious authority on the springs of
   life and character in that autocratic word Follow Me.' So we have a
   gradually heightening revelation of the Master's graciousness to all
   souls, to them that seek and to them that seek Him not. It is only to
   the working out of these simple thoughts that I ask your attention now.

   I. First, then, let us deal with the revelation that is given us here
   of the seeking Christ.

   Every one who reads this chapter with even the slightest attention must
   observe how seeking' and finding' are repeated over and over again.
   Christ turns to Andrew and John with the question, What seek ye?'
   Andrew, as the narrative says, findeth his own brother, Simon, and
   saith unto him, "We have found the Messias!"' Then again, Jesus finds
   Philip; and again, Philip, as soon as he has been won to Jesus, goes
   off to find Nathanael; and his glad word to him is, once more, We have
   found the Messias.' It is a reciprocal play of finding and seeking all
   through these verses.

   There are two kinds of finding. There is a casual stumbling upon a
   thing that you were not looking for, and there is a finding as the
   result of seeking. It is the latter which is here. Christ did not
   casually stumble upon Philip, upon that morning, before they departed
   from the fords of the Jordan on their short journey to Cana of Galilee.
   He went to look for this other Galilean, one who was connected with
   Andrew and Peter, a native of the same little village. He went and
   found him; and whilst Philip was all unexpectant and undesirous, the
   Master came to him and laid His hand upon him, and drew him to Himself.

   Now that is what Christ often does. There are men like the merchantman
   who went all over the world seeking goodly pearls, who with some eager
   longing to possess light, or truth, or goodness, or rest, search up and
   down and find it nowhere, because they are looking for it in a hundred
   different places. They are expecting to find a little here and a little
   there, and to piece all together to make of the fragments one
   all-sufficing restfulness. Then when they are most eager in their
   search, or when, perhaps, it has all died down into despair and apathy,
   the veil seems to be withdrawn, and they see Him whom they have been
   seeking all the time and knew not that He was there beside them. All,
   and more than all, that they sought for in the many pearls is stored
   for them in the one Pearl of great price. The ancient covenant stands
   firm to-day as for ever. Seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be
   opened unto you.'

   But then there are others, like Paul on the road to Damascus or like
   Matthew the publican, sitting at the receipt of custom, on whom there
   is laid a sudden hand, to whom there comes a sudden conviction, on
   whose eyes, not looking to the East, there dawns the light of Christ's
   presence. Such cases occur all through the ages, for He is not to be
   confined, bless His name! within the narrow limits of answering seeking
   souls, or of showing Himself to people that are brought to Him by human
   instrumentality; but far beyond these bounds He goes, and many a time
   discloses His beauty and His sweetness to hearts that wist not of Him,
   and who can only say, Lo! God was in this place, and I knew it not.'
   Thou wast found of them that sought Thee not.'

   As it was in His miracles upon earth, so it has been in the sweet and
   gracious works of His grace ever since. Sometimes He healed in response
   to the yearning desire that looked out of sick eyes, or that spoke from
   parched lips, and no man that ever came to Him and said Heal me!' was
   sent away beggared of His blessing. Sometimes He healed in response to
   the beseeching of those who, with loving hearts, carried their dear
   ones and laid them at His feet. But sometimes, to magnify the
   spontaneity and the completeness of His own love, and to show us that
   He is bound and limited by no human co-operation, and that He is His
   own motive, He reached out the blessing to a hand that was not extended
   to grasp it; and by His question, Wilt thou be made whole?' kindled
   desires that else had lain dormant for ever.

   And so in this story before us; He will welcome and over-answer Andrew
   and John when they come seeking; He will turn round to them with a
   smile on His face, that converts the question, What seek ye?' into an
   invitation, Come and see.' And when Andrew brings his brother to Him,
   He will go more than halfway to meet him. But when these are won, there
   still remains another way by which He will have disciples brought into
   His Kingdom, and that is by Himself going out and laying His hand on
   the man and drawing him to His heart by the revelation of His love. But
   further, and in a deeper sense, He really seeks us all, and, unasked,
   bestows His love upon us.

   Whether we seek Him or no, there is no heart upon earth which Christ
   does not desire; and no man or woman within the sound of His gospel
   whom He is not in a very real sense seeking that He may draw them to
   Himself. His own word is a wonderful one: The Father seeketh such to
   worship Him'; as if God went all up and down the world looking for
   hearts to love Him and to turn to Him with reverent thankfulness. And
   as the Father, so the Son--who is for us the revelation of the Father:
   The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.' No one
   on earth wanted Him, or dreamed of His coming. When He bowed the
   heavens and gathered Himself into the narrow space of the manger in
   Bethlehem, and took upon Him the limitations and the burdens and the
   weaknesses of manhood, it was not in response to any petition, it was
   in reply to no seeking; but He came spontaneously, unmoved, obeying but
   the impulse of His own heart, and because He would have mercy. He who
   is the Beginning, and will be First in all things, was first in this,
   that before they called He answered, and came upon earth unbesought and
   unexpected, because His own infinite love brought Him hither. Christ's
   mercy to a world does not come like water in a well that has to be
   pumped up, by our petitions, by our search, but like water in some
   fountain, rising sparkling into the sunlight by its own inward impulse.
   He is His own motive; and came to a forgetful and careless world, like
   a shepherd who goes after his flock in the wilderness, not because they
   bleat for him, while they crop the herbage which tempts them ever
   further from the fold and remember him and it no more, but because he
   cannot have them lost. Men are not conscious of needing Christ till He
   comes. The supply creates the demand. He is like the dew which tarrieth
   not for man, nor waiteth for the sons of men.'

   But not only does Christ seek us all, inasmuch as the whole conception
   and execution of His great work are independent of man's desires, but
   He seeks us each in a thousand ways. He longs to have each of us for
   His disciples. He seeks each of us for His disciples, by the motion of
   His Spirit on our spirits, by stirring conviction in our consciences,
   by pricking us often with a sense of our own evil, by all our
   restlessness and dissatisfaction, by the disappointments and the
   losses, as by the brightnesses and the goodness of earthly providences,
   and often through such agencies as my lips and the lips of other men.
   The Master Himself, who seeks all mankind, has sought and is seeking
   you at this moment. Oh! yield to His search. The shepherd goes out on
   the mountain side, for all the storm and the snow, and wades knee-deep
   through the drifts until he finds the sheep. And your Shepherd, who is
   also your Brother, has come looking for you, and at this moment is
   putting out His hand and laying hold of some of you through my poor
   words, and saying to you, as He said to Philip, Follow Me!'

   II. And now let us next consider that word of authority which, spoken
   to the one man in our text, is really spoken to us all.

   Jesus findeth Philip, and saith unto him, "Follow Me!"' No doubt a
   great deal more passed, but no doubt what more passed was less
   significant and less important for the development of faith in this man
   than what is recorded. The word of authority, the invitation which was
   a demand, the demand which was an invitation, and the personal
   impression which He produced upon Philip's heart, were the things that
   bound him to Jesus Christ for ever. Follow Me,' spoken at the beginning
   of the journey of Christ and His disciples back to Galilee, might have
   meant merely, on the surface, Come back with us.' But the words have,
   of course, a much deeper meaning. They mean--be My disciple. Think what
   is implied in them, and ask yourself whether the demand that Christ
   makes in these words is an unreasonable one, and then ask yourselves
   whether you have yielded to it or not.

   We lose the force of the image by much repetition. Sheep follow a
   shepherd. Travellers follow a guide. Here is a man upon some dangerous
   cornice of the Alps, with a ledge of limestone as broad as the palm of
   your hand, and perhaps a couple of feet of snow above that, for him to
   walk upon, a precipice on either side; and his guide says, as he ropes
   himself to him, Now, tread where I tread!' Travellers follow their
   guides. Soldiers follow their commanders. There is the hell of the
   battlefield; here a line of wavering, timid, raw recruits. Their
   commander rushes to the front and throws himself upon the advancing
   enemy with the one word, Follow' and the coward becomes a hero.
   Soldiers follow their captains. Your Shepherd comes to you and calls,
   Follow Me.' Your Captain and Commander comes to you and calls, Follow
   Me.' In all the dreary wilderness, in all the difficult contingencies
   and conjunctions, in all the conflicts of life, this Man strides in
   front of us and proposes Himself to us as Guide, Example, Consoler,
   Friend, Companion, everything; and gathers up all duty, all
   blessedness, in the majestic and simple words, Follow Me.'

   It is a call at the least to accept Him as a Teacher, but the whole
   gist of the context here is to show us that from the beginning Christ's
   disciples did not look upon Him as a Rabbi's disciples did, as being
   simply a teacher, but recognised Him as the Messias, the Son of God,
   the King of Israel. So that they were called upon by this command to
   accept His teaching in a very special way, not merely as Hillel or
   Gamaliel asked their disciples to accept theirs. Do you do that? Do you
   take Him as your illumination about all matters of theoretical truth,
   and of practical wisdom? Is His declaration of God your theology? Is
   His declaration of His own Person your creed? Do you think about His
   Cross as He did when He elected to be remembered in all the world by
   the broken body and the shed blood, which were the symbols of His
   reconciling death? Is His teaching, that the Son of Man comes to give
   His life a ransom for many,' the ground of your hope? Do you follow Him
   in your belief, and following Him in your belief, do you accept Him as,
   by His death and passion, the Saviour of your soul? That is the first
   step--to follow Him, to trust Him wholly for what He is, the Incarnate
   Son of God, the Sacrifice for the sins of the whole world, and
   therefore for your sins and mine. This is a call to faith.

   It is also a call to obedience. Follow Me' certainly means Do as I bid
   you,' but softens all the harshness of that command. Sedulously plant
   your tremulous feet in His firm footsteps. Where you see His track
   going across the bog be not afraid to walk after Him, though it may
   seem to lead you into the deepest and the blackest of it. Follow Him'
   and you will be right. Follow Him' and you will be blessed. Do as
   Christ did, or as according to the best of your judgment it seems to
   you that Christ would have done if He had been in your circumstances;
   and you will not go far wrong. The Imitation of Christ,' which Thomas a
   Kempis wrote his book about, is the sum of all practical Christianity.
   Follow Me!' makes discipleship to be something more than intellectual
   acceptance of His teaching, something more than even reliance for my
   salvation upon His work. It makes discipleship--springing out of these
   two--the acceptance of His teaching and the consequent reliance, by
   faith, upon His word--to be a practical reproduction of His character
   and conduct in mine.

   It is a call to communion. If a man follows Christ he will walk close
   behind Him, and near enough to Him to hear Him speak, and to be guided
   by His eye.' He will be separated from other people, and from other
   paths. In these four things, then--Faith, Obedience, Imitation,
   Communion--lies the essence of discipleship. No man is a Christian who
   has not in some measure all four. Have you got them?

   What right has Jesus Christ to ask me to follow Him? Why should I? Who
   is He that He should set Himself up as being the perfect Example and
   the Guide for all the world? What has He done to bind me to Him, that I
   should take Him for my Master, and yield myself to Him in a subjection
   that I refuse to the mightiest names in literature, and thought, and
   practical benevolence? Who is this that assumes thus to dominate over
   us all? Ah! brethren, there is only one answer. This is none other than
   the Son of God who has given Himself a ransom for me, and therefore has
   the right, and only therefore has the right, to say to me, "Follow
   Me."'

   III. And now one last word. Think for a moment about this silently and
   swiftly obedient disciple.

   Philip says nothing. Of course the narrative is mere sketchy outline.
   He is silent, but he yields. Ah, brethren, how quickly a soul may be
   won or lost! That moment, when Philip's decision was trembling in the
   balance, was but a moment. It might have gone the other way, for Christ
   has no pressed men in His army; they are all volunteers. It might have
   gone the other way. A moment may settle for you whether you will be His
   disciple or not. People tell us that the belief in instantaneous
   conversions is unphilosophical. It seems to me that the objections to
   them are unphilosophical. All decisions are matters of an instant.
   Hesitation may be long, weighing and balancing may be a protracted
   process, but the decision is always a moment's work, a knife-edge. And
   there is no reason whatever why any one listening to me may not now, if
   he or she will, do as this man Philip did on the spot, and when Christ
   says Follow Me,' turn to Him and answer, I will follow Thee
   whithersoever Thou goest.'

   There is an old church tradition which says that the disciple who at a
   subsequent period answered Christ, Lord! suffer me first to go and bury
   my father,' was this same Apostle. I do not think that at all likely,
   but the tradition suggests to us one last thought about the reasons why
   people are kept back from yielding this obedience to Christ's
   invitation. Many of you are kept back, as that procrastinating follower
   was, because there are some other duties which you feel, or make to be,
   more important. I will think about Christianity and turning religious
   when this, that, or the other thing has been got over. I have my
   position in life to make. I have a great many things to do that must be
   done at once, and really, I have not time to think about it.'

   Then there are some of you that are kept from following Christ because
   you have never yet found out that you need a guide at all. Then there
   are some of you that are kept back because you like very much better to
   go your own way, and to follow your own inclination, and dislike the
   idea of following the will of another. There are a host of other
   reasons that I do not need to deal with now; but oh! brethren, none of
   them is worth pleading. They are excuses, they are not reasons. They
   all with one consent began to make excuse'--excuses, not reasons; and
   manufactured excuses, in order to cover a decision which has been taken
   before, and on other grounds altogether, which it is not convenient to
   bring up to the surface. I am not going to deal with these in detail,
   but I beseech you, do not let what I venture to call Christ's seeking
   of you once more, even by my poor words now, be in vain.

   Follow Him. Trust, obey, imitate, hold fellowship with Him. You will
   always have a Companion, you will always have a Protector. He that
   followeth Me,' saith He, shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the
   light of life.' And if you will listen to the Shepherd's voice and
   follow Him, that sweet old promise will be true, in its divinest and
   sweetest sense, about your life, in time; and about your life in the
   moment of death, the isthmus between two worlds, and about your life in
   eternity--They shall not hunger nor thirst, neither shall the sun nor
   heat smite them; for He that hath mercy on them shall lead them, even
   by the springs of water shall He guide them.' Follow thou Me.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE FIRST DISCIPLES: IV. NATHANAEL

   Philip findeth Nathanael, and saith unto him, We have found Him, of
   whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write, Jesus of Nazareth,
   the son of Joseph. 46. And Nathanael said unto him, Can there any good
   thing come out of Nazareth? Philip saith unto him, Come and see. 47.
   Jesus saw Nathanael coming to Him, and saith of him, Behold an
   Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile! 48. Nathanael saith unto Him,
   Whence knowest Thou me? Jesus answered and said unto him, Before that
   Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee. 49.
   Nathanael answered and saith unto Him, Rabbi, Thou art the Son of God;
   Thou art the King of Israel.'--JOHN i. 45-49.

   The words are often the least part of a conversation. The Evangelist
   can tell us what Nathanael said to Jesus, and what Jesus said to
   Nathanael, but no Evangelist can reproduce the look, the tone, the
   magnetic influence which streamed out from Christ, and, we may believe,
   more than anything He said, riveted these men to Him.

   It looks as if Nathanael and his companions were very easily convinced,
   as if their adhesion to such tremendous claims as those of Jesus Christ
   was much too facile a thing to be a very deep one. But what can be put
   down in black and white goes a very short way to solve the secret of
   the power which drew them to Himself.

   The incident which is before us now runs substantially on the same
   lines as the previous bringing of Peter to Jesus Christ. In both cases
   the man is brought by a friend, in both cases the friend's weapon is
   simply the expression of his own personal experience, We have found the
   Messias,' although Philip has a little more to say about Christ's
   correspondence with the prophetic word. In both cases the work is
   finished by our Lord Himself manifesting His own supernatural knowledge
   to the inquiring spirit, though in the case of Nathanael that process
   is a little more lengthened out than in the case of Peter, because
   there was a little ice of hesitation and of doubt to be melted away.
   And Nathanael, starting from a lower point than Peter, having questions
   and hesitations which the other had not, rises to a higher point of
   faith and certitude, and from his lips first of all comes the full
   articulate confession, beyond which the Apostles never went as long as
   our Lord was upon earth: Rabbi, Thou art the Son of God; Thou art the
   King of Israel.' So that both in regard to the revelation that is given
   of the character of our Lord, and in regard to the teaching that is
   given of the development and process of faith in a soul, this last
   narrative fitly crowns the whole series. In looking at it with you now,
   I think I shall best bring out its force by asking you to take it as
   falling into these three portions: first, the preparation--a soul
   brought to Christ by a brother; then the conversation--a soul fastened
   to Christ by Himself; and then the rapturous confession--Rabbi, Thou
   art the Son of God; Thou art the King of Israel.'

   I. Look, then, first of all, at the preparation--a soul brought to
   Christ by a brother.

   Philip findeth Nathanael.' Nathanael, in all probability, as
   commentators will tell you, is the Apostle Bartholomew; and in the
   catalogues of the Apostles in the Gospels, Philip and he are always
   associated together. So that the two men, friends before, had their
   friendship riveted and made more close by this sacredest of all bonds,
   that the one had been to the other the means of bringing him to Jesus
   Christ. There is nothing that ties men to each other like that. If you
   want to know the full sweetness of association with friends, and of
   human love, get some heart knit to yours by this sacred and eternal
   bond that it owes to you its first knowledge of the Saviour. So all
   human ties will be sweetened, ennobled, elevated, and made perpetual.

   We have found Him, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did
   write: Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Joseph.' Philip knows nothing
   about Christ's supernatural birth, nor about its having been in
   Bethlehem; to him He is the son of a Nazarene peasant. But,
   notwithstanding that, He is the great, significant, mysterious Person
   for whom the whole sacred literature of Israel had been one long
   yearning for centuries; and he has come to believe that this Man
   standing beside him is the Person on whom all previous divine
   communications for a millennium past focussed and centred.

   I need not dwell upon these words, because to do so would be to repeat
   substantially what I said in a former sermon on these first disciples,
   about the value of personal conviction as a means of producing
   conviction in the minds of others, and about the necessity and the
   possibility of all who have found Christ for themselves saying so to
   others, and thereby becoming His missionaries and evangelists.

   I do not need to repeat what I said on that occasion; therefore I pass
   on to the very natural hesitation and question of Nathanael: Can there
   any good thing come out of Nazareth?' A prejudice, no doubt, but a very
   harmless one; a very thin ice which melted as soon as Christ's smile
   beamed upon him. And a most natural prejudice. Nathanael came from Cana
   of Galilee, a little hill village, three or four miles from Nazareth.
   We all know the bitter feuds and jealousies of neighbouring villages,
   and how nothing is so pleasant to the inhabitants of one as a gibe
   about the inhabitants of another. And in Nathanael's words there simply
   speaks the rustic jealousy of Cana against Nazareth.

   It is easy to blame him, but do you think that you or I, if we had been
   in his place, would have been likely to have said anything very
   different? Suppose you were told that a peasant out of Ross-shire was a
   man on whom the whole history of this nation hung. Do you think you
   would be likely to believe it without first saying, That is a strange
   place for such a person to be born in'? Galilee was the despised part
   of Palestine, and Nazareth obviously was a proverbially despised
   village of Galilee; and this Jesus was a carpenter's son that nobody
   had ever heard of. It seemed to be a strange head on which the divine
   dove should flutter down, passing by all the Pharisees and the Scribes,
   all the great people and wise people. Nathanael's prejudice was but the
   giving voice to a fault that is as wide as humanity, and which we have
   every day of our lives to fight with; not only in regard to religious
   matters but in regard to all others--namely, the habit of estimating
   people, and their work, and their wisdom, and their power to teach us,
   by the class to which they are supposed to belong, or even by the place
   from which they come.

   Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?' Can a German teach an
   Englishman anything that he does not know?' Is a Protestant to owe
   anything of spiritual illumination to a Roman Catholic?' Are we
   Dissenters to receive any wisdom or example from Churchmen?' Will a
   Conservative be able to give any lessons in politics to a Liberal?' Is
   there any other bit of England that can teach Lancashire?' Take care
   that whilst you are holding up your hands in horror against the
   prejudices of our Lord's contemporaries, who stumbled at His origin,
   you are not doing the same thing in regard to all manner of subjects
   twenty times a day.

   That is one very plain lesson, and not at all too secular for a sermon.
   Take another. This three-parts innocent prejudice of Nathanael brings
   into clear relief for us what a very real obstacle to the recognition
   of our Lord's Messianic authority His apparent lowly origin was. We
   have got over it, and it is no difficulty to us; but it was so then.
   When Jesus Christ came into this world Judaea was ruled by the most
   heartless of aristocracies, an aristocracy of cultured pedants.
   Wherever you get such a class you get people who think that there can
   be nobody worth looking at, or worth attending to, outside the little
   limits of their own supercilious superiority. Why did Jesus Christ come
   from the men of the earth,' as the Rabbis called all who had not
   learned to cover every plain precept with spiders' webs of casuistry?
   Why, for one thing, in accordance with the general law that the great
   reformers and innovators always come from outside these classes, that
   the Spirit of the Lord shall come on a herdsman like Amos, and
   fishermen and peasants spread the Gospel through the world; and that in
   politics, in literature, in science, as well as in religion, it is
   always true that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty,
   not many noble are called.' To the cultivated classes you have to look
   for a great deal that is precious and good, but for fresh impulse, in
   unbroken fields, you have to look outside them. And so the highest of
   all lives is conformed to the general law.

   More than that, Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Joseph,' came thus
   because He was the poor man's Christ, because He was the ignorant man's
   Christ, because His word was not for any class, but as broad as the
   world. He came poor, obscure, unlettered, that all who, like Him, were
   poor and untouched by the finger of earthly culture, might in Him find
   their Brother, their Helper, and their Friend.

   Philip saith unto him, Come and see.' He is not going to argue the
   question. He gives the only possible answer to it--You ask Me, can any
   good thing come out of Nazareth?' Come and see whether it is a good
   thing or no; and if it is, and if it came out of Nazareth, well then,
   the question has answered itself.' The quality of a thing cannot be
   settled by the origin of the thing.

   As it so happened, this Man did not come out of Nazareth at all, though
   neither Philip nor Nathanael knew it; but if He had, it would have been
   all the same. The right answer was Come and see.'

   Now although, of course, there is no kind of correspondence between the
   mere prejudice of this man Nathanael and the rooted intellectual doubts
   of other generations, yet Come and see' carries in it the essence of
   all Christian apologetics. By far the wisest thing that any man who has
   to plead the cause of Christianity can do is to put Christ well
   forward, and let people look at Him, and trust Him to produce His own
   impression. We may argue round, and round, and round about Him for
   evermore, and we shall never convince as surely as by simply holding
   Him forth. I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me.' Yet we are
   so busy proving Christianity that we sometimes have no time to preach
   it; so busy demonstrating that Jesus Christ is this, that, and the
   other thing, or contradicting the notion that He is not this, that, and
   the other thing, that we forget simply to present Him for men to look
   at. Depend upon it, whilst argument has its function, and there are men
   that must be approached thereby; on the whole, and for the general, the
   best way of propagating Christianity is to proclaim it, and the second
   best way is to prove it. Our arguments do fare very often very much as
   did that elaborate discourse that a bishop once preached to prove the
   existence of a God, at the end of which a simple old woman who had not
   followed his reasoning very intelligently, exclaimed, Well, for all he
   says, I can't help thinking there is a God after all.' The errors that
   are quoted to be confuted often remain more clear in the hearers' minds
   than the attempted confutations. Hold forth Christ--cry aloud to men,
   Come and see!' and some eyes will turn and some hearts cleave to Him.

   And on the other side, dear brethren, you have not done fairly by
   Christianity until you have complied with this invitation, and
   submitted your mind and heart honestly to the influence and the
   impression that Christ Himself would make upon it.

   II. We come now to the second stage--the conversation between Christ
   and Nathanael, where we see a soul fastened to Christ by Himself.

   In general terms, as I remarked, the method by which our Lord manifests
   His Messiahship to this single soul is a revelation of His supernatural
   knowledge of him. But a word or two may be said about the details. Mark
   the emphasis with which the Evangelist shows us that our Lord speaks
   this discriminating characterisation of Nathanael before Nathanael had
   come to Him: He saw him coming.' So it was not with a swift,
   penetrating glance of intuition that He read his character in his face.
   It was not that He generalised rapidly from one action which He had
   seen him do. It was not from any previous personal knowledge of him,
   for, obviously, from the words of Philip to Nathanael, the latter had
   never seen Jesus Christ. As Nathanael was drawing near Him, before he
   had done anything to show himself, our Lord speaks the words which show
   that He had read his very heart: Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is
   no guile.'

   That is to say, here is a man who truly represents that which was the
   ideal of the whole nation. The reference is, no doubt, to the old story
   of the occasion on which Jacob's name was changed to Israel. And we
   shall see a further reference to the same story in the subsequent
   verses. Jacob had wrestled with God in that mysterious scene by the
   brook Jabbok, and had overcome, and had received instead of the name
   Jacob, a supplanter,' the name of Israel, for as a Prince hast thou
   power with God and hast prevailed.' And, says Christ: This man also is
   a son of Israel, one of God's warriors, who has prevailed with Him by
   prayer.' In whom is no guile'--Jacob in his early life had been marked
   and marred by selfish craft. Subtlety and guile had been the very
   keynote of his character. To drive that out of him, years of discipline
   and pain and sorrow had been needed. And not until it had been driven
   out of him could his name be altered, and he become Israel. This man
   has had the guile driven out of him. By what process? The words are a
   verbal quotation from Psalm xxxii.: Blessed is he whose transgression
   is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man unto whom the
   Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile.'
   Clear, candid openness of spirit, and the freedom of soul from all that
   corruption which the Psalmist calls guile,' is the property of him only
   who has received it, by confession, by pardon, and by cleansing, from
   God. Thus Nathanael, in his wrestling, had won the great gift. His
   transgression had been forgiven; his iniquity had been covered; to him
   God had not imputed his sin; and in his spirit, therefore, there was no
   guile. Ah, brother! if that black drop is to be cleansed out of your
   heart, it must be by the same means--confession to God and pardon from
   God. And then you too will be a prince with Him. and your spirit will
   be frank and free, and open and candid.

   Nathanael, with astonishment, says, Lord, whence knowest Thou me?' Not
   that he appropriates the description to himself, or recognises the
   truthfulness of it, but he is surprised that Christ should have means
   of forming any judgment with reference to him, and so he asks Him, half
   expecting an answer which will show the natural origin of our Lord's
   knowledge: Whence knowest Thou me?' Then comes the answer, which, to
   supernatural insight into Nathanael's character, adds supernatural
   knowledge of Nathanael's secret actions: Before that Philip called
   thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee. And it is because
   I saw thee under the fig-tree that I knew thee to be "an Israelite
   indeed, in whom there is no guile."' So then, under the fig-tree,
   Nathanael must have been wrestling in prayer; under the fig-tree must
   have been confessing his sins; under the fig-tree must have been
   longing and looking for the Deliverer who was to turn away ungodliness
   from Jacob.' So solitary had been that vigil, and so little would any
   human eye that had looked upon it have known what had been passing in
   his mind, that Christ's knowledge of it and of its significance at once
   lights up in Nathanael's heart the fire of the glad conviction, Thou
   art the Son of God.' If we had seen Nathanael, we should only have seen
   a man sitting, sunk in thought, under a fig-tree; but Jesus had seen
   the spiritual struggle which had no outward marks, and to have known
   which He must have exercised the divine prerogative of reading the
   heart.

   I ask you to consider whether Nathanael's conclusion was not right, and
   whether that woman of Samaria was not right when she hurried back to
   the city, leaving her water-pot, and said, Come and see a man that told
   me all that ever I did.' That all' was a little stretch of facts, but
   still it was true in spirit. And her inference was absolutely true: Is
   not this the Christ, the Son of God?' This is the first miracle that
   Jesus Christ wrought. His supernatural knowledge, which cannot be
   struck out from the New Testament representations of His character, is
   as much a mark of divinity as any of the other of His earthly
   manifestations. It is not the highest; it does not appeal to our
   sympathies as some of the others do, but it is irrefragable. Here is a
   man to whom all men with whom He came in contact were like those clocks
   with a crystal face which shows us all the works. How does He come to
   have this perfect and absolute knowledge?

   That omniscience, as manifested here, shows us how glad Christ is when
   He sees anything good, anything that He can praise in any of us. Behold
   an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile.' Not a word about
   Nathanael's prejudice, not a word about any of his faults (though no
   doubt he had plenty of them), but the cordial praise that he was an
   honest, a sincere man, following after God and after truth. There is
   nothing which so gladdens Christ as to see in us any faint traces of
   longing for, and love towards, and likeness to, His own self. His
   omniscience is never so pleased as when beneath heaps and mountains of
   vanity and sin it discerns in a man's heart some poor germ of goodness
   and longing for His grace.

   And then again, notice how we have here our Lord's omniscience set
   forth as cognisant of all our inward crises and struggles, When thou
   wast under the fig tree, I saw thee.' I suppose all of us could look
   back to some place or other, under some hawthorn hedge, or some boulder
   by the seashore, or some mountain-top, or perhaps in some back-parlour,
   or in some crowded street, where some never-to-be-forgotten epoch in
   our soul's history passed, unseen by all eyes, and which would have
   shown no trace to any onlooker, except perhaps a tightly compressed
   lip. Let us rejoice to feel that Christ sees all these moments which no
   other eye can see. In our hours of crisis, and in our monotonous,
   uneventful moments, in the rush of the furious waters, when the stream
   of our lives is caught among rocks, and in the long, languid reaches of
   its smoothest flow, when we are fighting with our fears or yearning for
   His light, or even when sitting dumb and stolid, like snow men,
   apathetic and frozen in our indifference, He sees us, and pities, and
   will help the need which He beholds.


     Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,

     And thy Saviour is not by;

     Think not thou canst weep a tear,

     And thy Saviour is not near.'

   When thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee.'

   III. One word more about this rapturous confession, which crowns the
   whole: Rabbi, Thou art the Son of God; Thou art the King of Israel.'

   Where had Nathanael learned these great names? He was a disciple of
   John the Baptist, and he had no doubt heard John's testimony as
   recorded in this same chapter, when he told us how the voice from
   Heaven had bid him recognise the Messiah by the token of the descending
   Dove, and how he saw and bare record that this is the Son of God.'
   John's testimony was echoed in Nathanael's confession. Undoubtedly he
   attached but vague ideas to the name, far less articulate and doctrinal
   than we have the privilege of doing. To him Son of God' could not have
   meant all that it ought to mean to us, but it meant something that he
   saw clearly, and a great deal beyond that he saw but dimly. It meant
   that God had sent, and was in some special sense the Father of, this
   Jesus of Nazareth.

   Thou art the King of Israel,' John had been preaching, The Kingdom of
   Heaven is at hand.' The Messiah was to be the theocratic King, the
   King, not of Judah' nor of the Jews,' but of Israel,' the nation that
   had entered into covenant with God. So the substance of the confession
   was the Messiahship of Jesus, as resting upon His special divine
   relationship and leading to His Kingly sway.

   Notice also the enthusiasm of the confession; one's ear hears clearly a
   tone of rapture in it. The joy-bells of the man's heart are all
   a-ringing. It is no mere intellectual acknowledgment of Christ as
   Messiah. The difference between mere head-belief and heart-faith lies
   precisely in the presence of these elements of confidence, of
   enthusiastic loyalty, and absolute submission.

   So the great question for each of us is, not, Do I believe as a piece
   of my intellectual creed that Christ is the Messiah, the Son of God,
   the King of Israel'? I suppose almost all my hearers here now do that.
   That will not make you a Christian, my friend. That will neither save
   your soul nor quiet your heart, nor bring you peace and strength in
   life, nor open the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven to you. A man may be
   miserable, wholly sunk in all manner of wickedness and evil, die the
   death of a dog, and go to punishment hereafter, though he believe that
   Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the King of Israel. You want
   something more than that. You want just this element of rapturous
   acknowledgment, of loyal submission, absolute obedience, of unfaltering
   trust.

   Look at these first disciples, six brave men that had all that loyalty
   and love to Him; though there was not a soul in the world but
   themselves to share their convictions. Do they not shame you? When He
   comes to you, as He does come, with this question, Whom do ye say that
   I am?' may God give you grace to answer, Thou art the Christ, the Son
   of the living God,' and not only to answer it with your lips, but to
   trust Him wholly with your hearts, and with enthusiastic devotion to
   bow your whole being in adoring wonder and glad submission at His feet.
   If we are Israelites indeed,' our hearts will crown Him as the King of
   Israel.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE FIRST DISCIPLES: V. BELIEVING AND SEEING

   Jesus answered and said unto him, Because I said unto thee, I saw thee
   under the fig tree, believest thou? thou shalt see greater things than
   these. 51. And He saith unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto you,
   Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and
   descending upon the Son of Man.'--JOHN i. 50, 51.

   Here we have the end of the narrative of the gathering together of the
   first disciples, which has occupied several sermons. We have had
   occasion to point out how each incident in the series has thrown some
   fresh light upon two main subjects, namely, upon some phase or other of
   the character and work of Jesus Christ, or upon the various ways by
   which faith, which is the condition of discipleship, is kindled in
   men's souls. These closing words may be taken as the crowning thoughts
   on both these matters.

   Our Lord recognises and accepts the faith of Nathanael and his fellows,
   but, like a wise Teacher, lets His pupils at the very beginning get a
   glimpse of how much lies ahead for them to learn; and in the act of
   accepting the faith gives just one hint of the great tract of yet
   uncomprehended knowledge of Him which lies before them; Because I said
   unto thee, I saw thee under the fig tree, believest thou? thou shalt
   see greater things than these.' He accepts Nathanael's confession and
   the confession of his fellows. Human lips have given Him many great and
   wonderful titles in this chapter. John called Him the Lamb of God'; the
   first disciples hailed Him as the Messias, which is the Christ';
   Nathanael fell before Him with the rapturous exclamation, Thou art the
   Son of God; Thou art the King of Israel!' All these crowns had been put
   on His head by human hands, but here He crowns Himself. He makes a
   mightier claim than any that they had dreamed of, and proclaims Himself
   to be the medium of all communication and intercourse between heaven
   and earth: Hereafter ye shall see heaven opened, and the angels of God
   ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.'

   So, then, there are two great principles that lie in these verses, and
   are contained in, first, our Lord's mighty promise to His new
   disciples, and second, in our Lord's witness to Himself. Let me say a
   word or two about each of these.

   I. Our Lord's promise to His new disciples.

   Christ's words here may be translated either as a question or as an
   affirmation. It makes comparatively little difference to the
   substantial meaning whether we read believest thou?' or thou
   believest.' In the former case there will be a little more vivid
   expression of surprise and admiration at the swiftness of Nathanael's
   faith, but in neither case are we to find anything of the nature of
   blame or of doubt as to the reality of his belief. The question, if it
   be a question, is no question as to whether Nathanael's faith was a
   genuine thing or not. There is no hint that he has been too quick with
   his confession, and has climbed too rapidly to the point that he has
   attained. But in either case, whether the word be a question or an
   affirmation, we are to see in it the solemn and glad recognition of the
   reality of Nathanael's confession and belief.

   Here is the first time that that word belief' came from Christ's lips;
   and when we remember all the importance that has been attached to it in
   the subsequent history of the Church, and the revolution in human
   thought which followed upon our Lord's demand of our faith, there is an
   interest in noticing the first appearance of the word. It was an epoch
   in the history of the world when Christ first claimed and accepted a
   man's faith.

   Of course the second part of this verse, Thou shalt see greater things
   than these,' has its proper fulfilment in the gradual manifestation of
   His person and character, which followed through the events recorded in
   the Gospels. His life of service, His words of wisdom, His deeds of
   power and of pity, His death of shame and of glory, His Resurrection
   and His Ascension, these are the greater things' which Nathanael is
   promised. They all lay unrevealed yet, and what our Lord means is
   simply this: If you will continue to trust in Me, as you have trusted
   Me, and stand beside Me, you will see unrolled before your eyes and
   comprehended by your faith the great facts which will make the
   manifestation of God to the world.' But though that be the original
   application of the words, yet I think we may fairly draw from them some
   lessons that are of importance to ourselves; and I ask you to look at
   the hint that they give us about three things,--faith and discipleship,
   faith and sight, faith and progress. Believest thou? thou shalt see
   greater things than these.'

   First, here is light thrown upon the relation between faith and
   discipleship. It is clear that our Lord here uses the word for the
   first time in the full Christian sense, that He regards the exercise of
   faith as being practically synonymous with being a disciple, that from
   the very first, believers were disciples, and disciples were believers.

   Then, notice still further that our Lord here employs the word belief'
   without any definition of what or whom it is that they were to believe.
   He Himself, and not certain thoughts about Him, is the true object of a
   man's faith. We may believe a proposition, but faith must grasp a
   person. Even when the person is made known to us by a proposition which
   we have to believe before we can trust the person, still the essence of
   faith is not the intellectual process of laying hold upon a certain
   thought, and acquiescing in it, but the moral process of casting myself
   in full confidence upon the Being that is revealed to me by the
   thought,--of laying my hand, and leaning my weight, on the Man about
   whom it tells me. And so faith, which is discipleship, has in it for
   its very essence the personal element of trust in Jesus Christ.

   Then, further, notice how widely different from our creed was
   Nathanael's creed, and yet how identical with our faith, if we are
   Christians, was Nathanael's faith. He knew nothing about the very heart
   of Christ's work, His atoning death. He knew nothing about the highest
   glory of Christ's person, His divine Sonship, in its unique and lofty
   sense. These lay unrevealed, and were amongst the greater things which
   he was yet to see; but though thus his knowledge was imperfect, and his
   creed incomplete as compared with ours, his faith was the very same. He
   laid hold upon Christ, he clave to Him with all his heart, he was ready
   to accept His teaching, he was willing to do His will, and as for the
   rest--Thou shalt see greater things than these.' So, dear brethren,
   from these words of my text here, from the unhesitating attribution of
   the lofty notion of faith to this man, from the way in which our Lord
   uses the word, are gathered these three points that I beseech you to
   ponder: there is no discipleship without faith; faith is the personal
   grasp of Christ Himself; the contents of creeds may differ whilst the
   element of faith remains the same. I beseech you let Christ come to you
   with the question of my text, and as He looks you in the eyes, hear Him
   say to you, Believest thou?'

   Secondly, notice how in this great promise to the new disciples there
   is light thrown upon another subject, viz. the connection between faith
   and sight. There is a great deal about seeing in this context. Christ
   said to the first two that followed Him, Come and see.' Philip met
   Nathanael's thin film of prejudice with the same words, Come and see.'
   Christ greeted the approaching Nathanael with When thou wast under the
   fig tree I saw thee.' And now His promise is cast into the same
   metaphor: Thou shalt see greater things than these.'

   There is a double antithesis here. I saw thee,' Thou shalt see Me.'
   Thou wast convinced because thou didst feel that thou wert the passive
   object of My vision. Thou shalt be still more convinced when
   illuminated by Me. Thou shalt see even as thou art seen. I saw thee,
   and that bound thee to Me; thou shalt see Me, and that will confirm the
   bond.'

   There is another antithesis, namely--between believing and seeing. Thou
   believest--that is thy present; thou shalt see, that is thy hope for
   the future.' Now I have already explained that, in the proper primary
   meaning and application of the words, the sight which is here promised
   is simply the observance with the outward eye of the historical facts
   of our Lord's life which were yet to be learned. But still we may
   gather a truth from this antithesis which will be of use to us. Thou
   believest--thou shalt see'; that is to say, in the loftiest region of
   spiritual experience you must believe first, in order that you may see.

   I do not mean, as is sometimes meant, by that statement that a man has
   to try to force his understanding into the attitude of accepting
   religious truth, in order that he may have an experience which will
   convince him that it is true. I mean a very much simpler thing than
   that, and a very much truer one, viz. this, that unless we trust to
   Christ and take our illumination from Him, we shall never behold a
   whole set of truths which, when once we trust Him, are all plain and
   clear to us. It is no mysticism to say that. What do you know about
   God?--I put emphasis upon the word know'--What do you know about Him,
   however much you may argue and speculate and think probable, and fear,
   and hope, and question, about Him? What do you know about Him apart
   from Jesus Christ? What do you know about human duty, apart from Him?
   What do you know of all that dim region that lies beyond the grave,
   apart from Him? If you trust Him, if you fall at His feet and say
   Rabbi! Thou art my Teacher and mine illumination,' then you will see.
   You will see God, man, yourselves, duty; you will see light upon a
   thousand complications and perplexities; and you will have a brightness
   above that of the noonday sun, streaming into the thickest darkness of
   death and the grave and the awful hereafter. Christ is the Light. In
   that Light shall we see light.' And just as it needs the sun to rise in
   order that my eye may behold the outer world, so it needs that I shall
   have Christ shining in my heaven to illuminate the whole universe, in
   order that I may see clearly. Believe and thou shalt see.' For only
   when we trust Him do the mightiest truths that affect humanity stand
   plain and clear before us.

   And besides that, if we trust Christ, we get a living experience of a
   multitude of facts and principles which are all mist and darkness to
   men except through their faith; an experience which is so vivid and
   brings such certitude as that it may well be called vision. The world
   says, Seeing is believing.' So it is about the coarse things that you
   can handle, but about everything that is higher than these invert the
   proverb, and you get the truth. Seeing is believing.' Yes, in regard to
   outward things. Believing is seeing in regard to God and spiritual
   truth. Believest thou? thou shalt see.'

   Then, thirdly, there is light here about another matter, the connection
   between faith and progress. Thou shalt see greater things than these.'
   A wise teacher stimulates his scholars from the beginning, by giving
   them glimpses of how much there is ahead to be learnt. That does not
   drive them to despair; it braces all their powers. And so Christ, as
   His first lesson to these men, substantially says, You have learnt
   nothing yet, you are only beginning.' That is true about us all. Faith
   at first, both in regard to its contents and its quality, is very
   rudimentary and infantile. A man when he is first converted--perhaps
   suddenly--knows after a fashion that he himself is a very sinful,
   wretched, poor creature, and he knows that Jesus Christ has died for
   him, and is his Saviour, and his heart goes out to Him, in confidence
   and love and obedience. But he is only standing at the door and peeping
   in as yet. He has only mastered the alphabet. He is but on the frontier
   of the promised land. His faith has brought him into contact with
   infinite power, and what will be the end of that? He will indefinitely
   grow. His faith has started him on a course to which there is no
   natural end. As long as it keeps alive he will be growing and growing,
   and getting nearer and nearer to the great centre of all.

   So here is a grand possibility opened out in these simple words, a
   possibility which alone meets what you need, and what you are craving
   for, whether you know it or not, namely, something that will give you
   ever new powers and acquirements; something which will ensure your
   closer and ever closer approach to an absolute object of joy and truth;
   something that will ensure you against stagnation and guarantee
   unceasing progress. Everything else gets worn out, sooner or later; if
   not in this world, then in another. There is one course on which a man
   can enter with the certainty that there is no end to it, that it will
   open out, and out, and out as he advances--with the certainty that,
   come life, come death, it is all the same.

   When the plant grows too tall for the greenhouse they lift the roof,
   and it grows higher still. Whether you have your growth in this lower
   world, or whether you have your top up in the brightness and the blue
   of heaven, the growth is in one direction. There is a way that secures
   endless progress, and here lies the secret of it: Thou believest! thou
   shalt see greater things than these.'

   Now, brethren, that is a grand possibility, and it is a solemn lesson
   for some of you. You professing Christian people, are you any taller
   than you were when you were born? Have you grown at all? Are you
   growing now? Have you seen any further into the depths of Jesus Christ
   than you did on that first day when you fell at His feet and said, Thou
   art the Son of God, Thou art the King of Israel'? His promise to you
   then was, Thou believest, thou shalt see greater things.' If you have
   not seen greater things it is because your faith has broken down, if it
   has not expired.

   II. Now let me turn to the second thought which lies in these great
   words.

   We have here, as I said, our Lord crowning Himself by His own witness
   to His own dignity. Hereafter ye shall see the heavens opened.' Mark
   how, with superbly autocratic lips, He bases this great utterance upon
   nothing else but His own word. Prophets ever said, Thus saith the
   Lord.' Christ ever said: Verily, verily, I say unto you.' Because He
   could swear by no greater, He sware by Himself.' He puts His own
   assurance instead of all argument and of all support to His words.

   Hereafter.' A word which is possibly not genuine, and is omitted, as
   you will observe, in the Revised Version. If it is to be retained it
   must be translated, not hereafter,' as if it were pointing to some
   indefinite period in the future, but from henceforth,' as if asserting
   that the opening heavens and the descending angels began to be
   manifested from that first hour of His official work. Ye shall see
   heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending.' That is
   an allusion from the story of Jacob at Bethel. We have found reference
   to Jacob's history already in the conversation with Nathanael, An
   Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile.' And here is an unmistakable
   reference to that story, when the fugitive, with his head on the stony
   pillow, and the violet Syrian sky, with all its stars, rounding itself
   above him, beheld the ladder on which the angels of God ascended and
   descended. So,' says Christ, you shall see, in no vision of the night,
   in no transitory appearance, but in a practical waking reality, that
   ladder come down again, and the angels of God moving upon it in their
   errands of mercy.'

   And who, or what, is this ladder? Christ. Do not read these words as
   meaning that the angels of God were to come down on Him to help, and to
   honour, and to succour Him as they did once or twice in His life, but
   as meaning that they are to ascend and descend by Him for the help and
   blessing of the whole world.

   That is to say, to put it into plain words, Christ is the sole medium
   of communication between heaven and earth, the ladder with its foot
   upon the earth in His humanity, and its top in the heavens. No man hath
   ascended up into heaven save He which came down from heaven, even the
   Son of Man which is in heaven.'

   My time will not allow me to expand these thoughts as I would have
   done; let me put them in the briefest outline. Christ is the medium of
   all communication between heaven and earth, inasmuch as He is the
   medium of all revelation. I have spoken incidentally about that in the
   former part of this sermon, so I do not dwell on it now. Christ is the
   ladder between heaven and earth, inasmuch as in Him the sense of
   separation, and the reality of separation, are swept away. Sin has shut
   heaven; there comes down from it many a blessing upon unthankful heads,
   but between it in its purity and the earth in its muddy foulness there
   is a great gulf fixed.' It is not because God is great and I am small,
   or because He is Infinite and I am a mere pin-point as against a great
   continent, it is not because He lives for ever, and my life is but a
   hand-breadth, it is not because of the difference between His
   Omniscience and my ignorance, His strength and my weakness, that I am
   parted from Him. Your sins have separated between you and your God,'
   and no man, build he Babels ever so high, can reach thither. There is
   one means by which the separation is at an end, and by which all
   objective hindrances to union, and all subjective hindrances, are alike
   swept away. Christ has come, and in Him the heavens have bended down to
   touch, and touching to bless, this low earth, and man and God are at
   one once more.

   He is the ladder, or sole medium of communication, inasmuch as by Him
   all divine blessings, grace, helps, and favours, come down angel-like,
   into our weak and needy hearts. Every strength, every mercy, every
   spiritual power, consolation in every sorrow, fitness for duty,
   illumination in darkness, all gifts that any of us can need, come to us
   down on that one shining way, the mediation and the work of the
   Divine-Human Christ, the Lord.

   He is the ladder, the sole medium of communication between heaven and
   earth, inasmuch as by Him my poor desires and prayers and
   intercessions, my wishes, my sighs, my confessions rise to God. No man
   cometh to the Father but by Me.' He is the ladder, the means of all
   communication between heaven and earth, inasmuch as at the last, if
   ever we enter there at all, we shall enter through Him and through Him
   alone, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.'

   Ah, dear brethren! men are telling us now that there is no connection
   between earth and heaven except such as telescopes and spectroscopes
   can make out. We are told that there is no ladder, that there are no
   angels, that possibly there is no God, or if that there be, we have
   nothing to do with Him nor He with us; that our prayers cannot get to
   His ears, if He have ears, nor His hand be stretched out to help us, if
   He have a hand. I do not know how this cultivated generation is to he
   brought back again to faith in God and delivered from that ghastly
   doubt which empties heaven and saddens earth to its victims, but by
   giving heed to the word which Christ spoke to the whole race while He
   addressed Nathanael, Ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God
   ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.' If He be the Son of God,
   then all these heavenly messengers reach the earth by Him. If He be the
   Son of Man, then every man may share in the gifts which through Him are
   brought into the world, and His Manhood, which evermore dwelt in
   heaven, even while on earth, and was ever girt about by angel
   presences, is at once the measure of what each of us may become, and
   the power by which we may become it.

   One thing is needful for this wonderful consummation, even our faith.
   And oh! how blessed it will be if in waste solitudes we can see the
   open heaven, and in the blackest night the blaze of the glory of a
   present Christ, and hear the soft rustle of angels' wings filling the
   air, and find in every place a house of God and a gate of heaven,'
   because He is there. All that may be yours on one condition: Believest
   thou? Thou shalt see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and
   descending upon the Son of Man.'
     __________________________________________________________________

JESUS THE JOY-BRINGER

   And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the
   mother of Jesus was there: 2. And both Jesus was called, and His
   disciples, to the marriage. 3. And when they wanted wine, the mother of
   Jesus saith unto Him, They have no wine. 4. Jesus saith unto her,
   Woman, what have I to do with thee? Mine hour is not yet come. 5. His
   mother saith unto the servants, Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it. 6.
   And there were set there six waterpots of stone, after the manner of
   the purifying of the Jews, containing two or three firkins apiece. 7.
   Jesus saith unto them, Fill the waterpots with water. And they filled
   them up to the brim. 8. And He saith unto them, Draw out now, and bear
   unto the governor of the feast. And they bare it. 9. When the ruler of
   the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and knew not whence
   it was: (but the servants which drew the water knew;) the governor of
   the feast called the bridegroom, 10. And saith unto him, Every man at
   the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk,
   then that which is worse; but thou hast kept the good wine until now.
   11. This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and
   manifested forth His glory; and His disciples believed on Him.'--JOHN
   ii. 1-11.

   The exact dating of this first miracle indicates an eye-witness. As
   Nazareth was some thirty miles distant from the place where John was
   baptizing, and Cana about four miles from Nazareth, the third day' is
   probably reckoned from the day of the calling of Philip. Jesus and His
   disciples seem to have been invited to the marriage feast later than
   the other guests, as Mary was already there. She appears to have been
   closely connected with the family celebrating the feast, as appears
   from her knowledge of the deficiency in the wine, and her direction to
   the servants.

   The first point, which John makes all but as emphatic as the miracle
   itself, is the new relation between Mary and Jesus, the lesson she had
   to learn, and her sweet triumphant trust. Now that she sees her Son
   surrounded by His disciples, the secret hope which she had nourished
   silently for so long bursts into flame, and she turns to Him with
   beautiful faith in His power to help, even in the small present need.
   What an example her first word to Him sets us all! Like the two sad
   sisters at Bethany, she is sure that to tell Him of trouble is enough,
   for that His own heart will impel Him to share, and perchance to
   relieve it. Let us tell Jesus our wants and leave Him to deal with them
   as He knows how.

   Of course, His addressing her as Woman' has not the meaning which it
   would have with us, for the term is one of respect and courtesy, but
   there is a plain intimation of a new distance in it, which is
   strengthened by the question, What is there in common between us?' What
   in common between a mother and her son! Yes, but she has to learn that
   the assumption of the position of Messiah in which her mother's pride
   so rejoiced, carried necessarily a consequence, the first of the swords
   which were to pierce that mother's heart of hers. That her Son should
   no more call her mother,' but woman,' told her that the old days of
   being subject to her were past for ever, and that the old relation was
   merged in the new one of Messiah and disciple--a bitter thought, which
   many a parent has to taste the bitterness of still, when wider outlooks
   and new sense of a vocation come to their children. Few mothers are
   able to accept the inevitable as Mary did, Jesus' hour' is not to be
   prescribed to Him, but His own consciousness of the fit time must
   determine His action. What gave Him the signal that the hour was struck
   is not told us, nor how soon after that moment it came. But the saying
   gently but decisively declares His freedom, His infallible accuracy,
   and certain intervention at the right time. We may think that He
   delays, but He always helps, and that right early.'

   Mary's sweet humility and strong trust come out wonderfully in her
   direction to the servants, which is the exact opposite of what might
   have been expected after the cold douche administered to her eagerness
   to prompt Jesus. Her faith had laid hold of the little spark of promise
   in that not yet,' and had fanned it into a flame. Then He will
   intervene, and I can leave Him to settle when.' How firm, though
   ignorant, must have been the faith which did not falter even at the
   bitter lesson and the apparent repulse, and how it puts to shame our
   feebler confidence in our better known Lord, if ever He delays our
   requests! Mary left all to Jesus; His commands were to be implicitly
   obeyed. Do we submit to Him in that absolute fashion both as to the
   time and the manner of His responses to our petitions?

   The next point is the actual miracle. It is told with remarkable
   vividness and equally remarkable reserve. We do not even learn in what
   precisely it consisted. Was all the water in the vessels turned into
   wine? Did the change affect only what was drawn out? No answer is
   possible to these questions. Jesus spoke no word of power, nor put
   forth His hand. His will silently effected the change on matter. So He
   manifested forth His glory as Creator and Sustainer, as wielding the
   divine prerogative of affecting material things by His bare volition.

   The reality of the miracle is certified by the jovial remark of the
   ruler of the feast.' As Bengel says: The ignorance of the ruler proves
   the goodness of the wine; the knowledge of the servants, the reality of
   the miracle.' His palate, at any rate, was not so dulled as to be
   unable to tell a good brand' when he tasted it, nor is there any reason
   to suppose that Jesus was supplying more wine to a company that had
   already had more than enough.

   The ruler's words are not meant to apply to the guests at that feast,
   but are quite general. But this Evangelist is fond of quoting words
   which have deeper meanings than the speakers dreamed, and with his
   mystically contemplative eye he sees hints and symbols of the spiritual
   in very common things. So we are not forcing higher meanings into the
   ruler's jest, but catching one intention of John's quotation of it,
   when we see in it an unconscious utterance of the great truth that
   Jesus keeps His best wine till the last. How many poor deluded souls
   are ever finding that the world does the very opposite, luring men on
   to be its slaves and victims by brilliant promises and shortlived
   delights, which sooner or later lose their deceitful lustre and become
   stale, and often positively bitter! The end of that mirth is
   heaviness.' The dreariest thing in all the world is a godless old age,
   and one of the most beautiful things in all the world is the calm
   sunset which so often glorifies a godly life that has been full of
   effort for Jesus, and of sorrows patiently borne as being sent by Him.


     Full often clad in radiant vest

     Deceitfully goes forth the morn,'

   but Christ more than keeps His morning's promises, and Christian
   experience is steadily progressive, if Christians cling close to Him,
   and Heaven will supply the transcendent confirmation of the blessed
   truth that was spoken unawares by the ruler' at that humble feast.

   What effect the miracle produced on others is not told; probably the
   guests shared the ruler's ignorance, but its effect on the disciples is
   that they believed on Him.' They had believed' already, or they would
   not have been disciples (John i. 50), but their faith was deepened as
   well as called forth afresh. Our faith ought to be continuously and
   increasingly responsive to His continuous manifestations of Himself
   which we can all find in our own experience.

   Jesus manifested His glory' in this first sign. What were the rays of
   that mild radiance? Surely the chief of them, in addition to the
   revelation of His sovereignty over matter, to which we have already
   referred, is that therein He hallowed the sweet sacred joys of marriage
   and family life, that therein He revealed Himself as looking with
   sympathetic eye on the ties that bind us together, and on the gladness
   of our common humanity, that therein He reveals Himself as able and
   glad to sanctify and elevate our joys and infuse into them a strange
   new fragrance and power. The water' of our ordinary lives is changed
   into wine.' Jesus became acquainted with grief' in order that He might
   impart to every believing and willing soul His own joy, and that by its
   remaining in us, our joy might be full.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE FIRST MIRACLE IN CANA -- THE WATER MADE WINE

   This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested
   forth His glory.'--JOHN ii. 11.

   The keynote of this Gospel was struck in the earlier verses of the
   first chapter in the great words, The Word was made flesh and dwelt
   among us, and we beheld His glory, full of grace and truth.' To these
   words there is an evident reference in this language. The Evangelist
   regards Christ's first miracle as the first ray of that forth-flashing
   glory of the Incarnate Word. To this Evangelist all miracles are
   especially important as being signs, which is the word he generally
   employs to designate them. They are not mere portents, but significant
   revelations as well as wonders. It is not, I think, accidental that
   there are just seven miracles of our Lord's, before His crucifixion,
   recorded by John, and one of the Risen Lord.

   These signs are all set forth by the Evangelist as manifestations of
   various aspects of that one white light, of uncreated glory which rays
   from Christ. They are, if I may so say, the sevenfold colours into
   which the one beam is analysed. Each of them might be looked at in turn
   as presenting some fresh thought of what the glory . . . full of grace
   and truth' is.

   I begin with the first of the series. What, then, is the glory of the
   only Begotten Son' which flashes forth upon us from the miracle? My
   object is simply to try to answer that question for you.

   I. First, then, we see here the revelation of His creative power.

   It is very noteworthy that the miraculous fact is veiled entirely in
   the narrative. Not a word is said of the method of operation, it is not
   even said that the miracle was wrought; we are only told what preceded
   it, and what followed it. Itself is shrouded in deep silence. The
   servants fill the water-pots.--Draw out now,' and they draw, and bear
   it to the governor of the feast.' Where the miraculous act comes in we
   do not know; what was its nature we cannot tell. How far it extended is
   left obscure. Was all the large quantity of water in these six great
   vessels of stone transformed into wine, or was the change effected in
   the moment when the portion that was wanted was drawn from them and on
   that portion only? We cannot answer the question. Probably, I think,
   the latter; but at all events a veil is dropped over the fact.

   Only this, we see that in this miracle, even more conspicuously than in
   any other of our Lord's, there are no means at all employed. Sometimes
   He used material vehicles, anointing a man's eyes with clay, or
   moistening the ear with the spittle; sometimes sending a man to bathe
   in the Pool of Siloam; sometimes laying His hand on the sick; sometimes
   healing from a distance by the mere utterance of His word. But here
   there is not even a word; no means of any kind employed, but the silent
   forth-putting of His will, which, without token, without visible
   audible indication of any sort, passes with sovereign power into the
   midst of material things and there works according to His own purpose.
   Is not this the signature of divinity, that without means the mere
   forth-putting of the will is all that is wanted to mould matter as
   plastic to His command? It is not even, He spake and it was done,' but
   silently He willed, and the conscious water knew its Lord, and
   blushed.' This is the glory of the Incarnate Word.

   Now that was no interruption of the order of things established in the
   Creation. There was no suspension of natural laws here. What happened
   was only this, that the power which generally works through mediating
   links came into immediate connection with the effect. What does it
   matter whether your engine transmits its powers through half a dozen
   cranks, or two or three less? What does it matter whether the chain be
   longer or shorter? Some parenthetical links are dropped here, that is
   all that is unusual. For in all ordinary natural operations, as we call
   them, the profound prologue of this Gospel teaches us to believe that
   Christ, the Eternal Word, works according to His will. He was the Agent
   of creation. He is the Agent of that preservation which is only a
   continual creation. In Him is life, and all living things live because
   of the continual presence and operation upon them of His divine power.
   And again I say, what is phenomenal and unusual in this miracle is but
   the suppression of two or three of the connecting links between the
   continual cause of all creatural existences, and its effect. So let us
   learn that whether through a long chain of so-called causes, or whether
   close up against the effect, without the intervention of these
   parenthetical and transmitting media, the divine power works. The power
   is one, and the reason for the effect is one, that Christ ever works in
   the world, and is that Eternal Word, without whom was not anything made
   that was made.' This beginning of miracles did Christ . . . and
   manifested His glory.'

   II. Then, again, we see here, I think, the revelation of one great
   purpose of our Lord's coming, to hallow all common, and especially all
   family, life.

   What a strange contrast there is between the simple gladness of the
   rustic village wedding and the tremendous scene of the Temptation in
   the wilderness, which preceded it only by a few days! What a strange
   contrast there is between the sublime heights of the first chapter and
   the homely incident which opens the ministry! What a contrast between
   the rigid asceticism of the Forerunner, who came neither eating nor
   drinking,' and the Son of Man, who enters thus freely and cheerfully
   into the common joys and relationships of human nature! How unlike the
   scene at the marriage-feast must have been to the anticipations of the
   half-dozen disciples that had gathered round Him, all a-tingling with
   expectation as to what would be the first manifestation of His
   Messianic power! The last thing they would have dreamed of would have
   been to find Him in the humble home in Cana of Galilee. Some people say
   this miracle is unworthy of Him, for it was wrought upon such a trivial
   occasion.' And was it a trivial occasion that prompted Him thus to
   commence His career, not by some high and strained and remote
   exhibition of more than human saintliness or power, but by entering
   like a Brother into the midst of common, homespun, earthly joys, and
   showing how His presence ennobled and sanctified these? Surely the
   world has gained from Him, among the many gifts that He has given to
   it, few that have been the fountain of more sacred sweetness and
   blessedness than is opened in that fact that the first manifestation of
   His glory had for its result the hallowing of the marriage tie.

   And is it not in accordance with the whole meaning and spirit of His
   works that forasmuch as the brethren were partakers of' anything, He
   Himself likewise should take part of the same,' and sanctify every
   incident of life by His sharing of it? So He protests against that
   faithless and wicked division of life into sacred and secular, which
   has wrought such harm both in the sacred and in the secular regions. So
   He protests against the notion that religion has to do with another
   world rather than with this. So He protests against the narrowing
   conception of His work which would remove from its influence anything
   that interests humanity. So He says, as it were, at the very beginning
   of His career, I am a Man, and nothing that is human do I reckon
   foreign to Myself.'

   Brethren! let us learn the lesson that all life is the region of His
   Kingdom; that the sphere of His rule is everything which a man can do
   or feel or think. Let us learn that where His footsteps have trod is
   hallowed ground. If a prince shares for a few moments in the
   festivities of his gathered people on some great occasion, how ennobled
   the feast seems! If he joins in their sports or in their occupations
   for a while as an act of condescension, how they return to them with
   renewed vigour! And so we. We have had our King in the midst of all our
   family life, in the midst of all our common duties; therefore are they
   consecrated. Let us learn that all things done with the consciousness
   of His presence are sacred. He has hallowed every corner of human life
   by His presence; and the consecration, like some pungent and perennial
   perfume, lingers for us yet in the else scentless air of daily life, if
   we follow His footsteps.

   Sanctity is not singularity. There is no need to withdraw from any
   region of human activity and human interest in order to develop the
   whitest saintliness, the most Christlike purity. The saint is to be in
   the world, but not of it; like the Master, who went straight from the
   wilderness and its temptations to the homely gladness of the rustic
   marriage.

   III. Still further, we have here a symbol of Christ's glory as the
   ennobler and heightener of all earthly joys.

   That may be taken with perhaps a permissible play of fancy as one
   meaning, at any rate, of the transformation of water into wine; the
   less savoury and fragrant and powerful liquid into the more so. Wine,
   in the Old Testament especially, is the symbol of gladness, and though
   it received a deeper and a sacreder meaning in the New Testament as
   being the emblem of His blood shed for us, it is the Old Testament
   point of view that prevails here. And therefore, I say, we may read in
   the incident the symbol of His transforming power. He comes, the Man of
   Sorrows, with the gift of joy in His hand. It is not an unworthy
   object--not unworthy, I mean, of a divine sacrifice--to make men glad.
   It is worth His while to come from Heaven to agonise and to die, in
   order that He may sprinkle some drops of incorruptible and everlasting
   joy over the weary and sorrowful hearts of earth. We do not always give
   its true importance to gladness in the economy of our lives, because we
   are so accustomed to draw our joys from ignoble sources that in most of
   our joys there is something not altogether creditable or lofty. But
   Christ came to bring gladness, and to transform its earthly sources
   into heavenly fountains; and so to change all the less sweet,
   satisfying, and potent draughts which we take from earth's cisterns
   into the wine of the Kingdom; the new wine, strong and invigorating,
   making glad the heart of man.'

   Our commonest blessings, our commonest joys, if only they be not foul
   and filthy, are capable of this transformation. Link them with Christ;
   be glad in Him. Bring Him into your mirth, and it will change its
   character. Like a taper plunged into a jar of oxygen, it will blaze up
   more brightly. Earth, at its best and highest, without Him is like some
   fair landscape lying in the shadow; and when He comes to it, it is like
   the same scene when the sun blazes out upon it, flashes from every bend
   of the rippling river, brings beauty into many a shady corner, opens
   all the flowering petals and sets all the birds singing in the sky. The
   whole scene changes when a beam of light from Him falls upon earthly
   joys. He will transform them and ennoble them and make them perpetual.
   Do not meddle with mirth over which you cannot make the sign of the
   Cross and ask Him to bless it; and do not keep Him out of your
   gladness, or it will leave bitterness on your lips, howsoever sweet it
   tastes at first.

   Ay! and not only can this Master transform the water at the marriage
   feast into the wine of gladness, but the cups that we all carry, into
   which our tears have dropped--upon these too He can lay His hand and
   change them into cups of blessing and of salvation.

   Blessed are they . . . who, passing through the valley of weeping,
   gather their tears into a well; the rain also covereth it with
   blessings.' So the old Psalm put the thought that sorrow may be turned
   into a solemn joy, and may lie at the foundation of our most flowery
   fruitfulness. And the same lesson we may learn from this symbol. The
   Christ who transforms the water of earthly gladness into the wine of
   heavenly blessedness, can do the same thing for the bitter waters of
   sorrow, and can make them the occasions of solemn joy. When the leaves
   drop we see through the bare branches. Shivering and cold they may
   look, but we see the stars beyond, and that is better. This beginning
   of miracles' will Jesus repeat in every sad heart that trusts itself to
   Him.

   IV. And last of all, we have here a token of His glory as supplying the
   deficiencies of earthly sources.

   His mother saith unto Him, "They have no wine."' The world's banquet
   runs out, Christ supplies an infinite gift. These great water-pots that
   stood there, if the whole contents of them were changed, as is
   possible, contained far more than sufficient for the modest wants of
   the little company. The water that flowed from each of them, in
   obedience to the touch of the servant's hand, if the change were
   effected then, as is possible, would flow on so long as any thirsted or
   any asked. And Christ gives to each of us, if we choose, a fountain
   that will spring unto life eternal. And when the world's platters are
   empty, and the world's cups are all drained dry, He will feed and
   satisfy the immortal hunger and the blessed thirst of every spirit that
   longs for Him.

   The rude speech of the governor of the feast may lend itself to another
   aspect of this same thought. He said, in jesting surprise, Thou hast
   kept the good wine until now,' whereas the world gives its best first,
   and when the palate is dulled and the appetite diminished, then that
   which is worse.' How true that is; how tragically true in some of our
   lives! In the individual the early days of hope and vigour, when all
   things were fresh and wondrous, when everything was apparelled in the
   glory of a dream, contrast miserably with the bitter experiences of
   life that most of us have made. Habit comes, and takes the edge off
   everything. We drag remembrance, like a lengthening chain, through all
   our life; and with remembrance come remorse and regret. The vision
   splendid' no more attends men, as they plod on their way through the
   weariness of middle life, or pass down into the deepening shadows of
   advancing and solitary old age. The best comes first, for the men who
   have no good but this world's. And some of you have got nothing in your
   cups but dregs that you scarcely care to drink.

   But Jesus Christ keeps the best till the last. His gifts become sweeter
   every day. No time can cloy them. Advancing years make them more
   precious and more necessary. The end is better in this course than the
   beginning. And when life is over, and we pass into the heavens, the
   word will come to our lips, with surprise and with thankfulness, as we
   find how much better it all is than we had ever dreamed it should be:
   Thou hast kept the good wine until now.'

   Oh, my brother! do not touch that cup that is offered to you by the
   harlot world, spiced and fragrant and foaming; at the last it biteth
   like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder.' But take the pure joys
   which the Christ, loved, trusted, obeyed, summoned to your feast and
   welcomed in your heart, will bring to you; and these shall grow and
   greaten until the perfection of the Heavens.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHRIST CLEANSING THE TEMPLE

   Take these things hence; make not My Father's house an house of
   merchandise.'--JOHN ii. 16.

   The other Evangelists do not record this cleansing of the Temple at the
   beginning of Christ's ministry, but, as we all know, tell of a similar
   act at its very close. John, on the other hand, has no notice of the
   latter incident. The question, then, naturally arises, are these
   diverse narratives accounts of the same event? The answer seems to me
   to be in the negative, because John's Gospel is evidently intended to
   supplement the other three, and to record incidents either unknown to,
   or unnoticed by, them, and, as a matter of fact, the whole of this
   initial visit of our Lord to Jerusalem is omitted by the three
   Evangelists. Then the two incidents are distinctly different in tone,
   in setting, and in the words with which our Lord accompanies them. They
   are both appropriate in the place in which they stand, the one as the
   initial and the other as all but the final act of His Messiahship. So
   we may learn from the repetition of this cleansing the solemn lesson:
   that outward reformation of religious corruptions is of small and
   transient worth. For in three years--perhaps in as many weeks--the
   abuse that He corrected returned in full force.

   Now, this narrative has many points of interest, but I think I shall
   best bring out its meaning if I remind you, by way of introduction,
   that the Temple of Jerusalem was succeeded by the Temple of the
   Christian Church, and that each individual Christian man is a temple.
   So there are three things that I want to set before you: what Christ
   did in the Temple; what He does in the Church; what He will do to each
   of us if we will let Him.

   I. First, then, what Christ did in the Temple.

   Now, the scene in our narrative is not unlike that which may be
   witnessed in any Roman Catholic country in the cathedral place or
   outside the church on the saint's day, where there are long rows of
   stalls, fitted up with rosaries, and images of the saint, and candles,
   and other apparatus for worship.

   The abuse had many practical grounds on which it could be defended. It
   was very convenient to buy sacrifices on the spot, instead of having to
   drag them from a distance. It was no less convenient to be able to
   exchange foreign money, possibly bearing upon it the head of an
   emperor, for the statutory half-shekel. It was profitable to the
   sellers, and no doubt to the priests, who were probably sleeping
   partners in the concern, or drew rent for the ground on which the
   stalls stood. And so, being convenient for all and profitable to many,
   the thing became a recognised institution.

   Being familiar it became legitimate, and no one thought of any
   incongruity in it until this young Nazarene felt a flash of zeal for
   the sanctity of His Father's house consuming Him. Catching up some of
   the reeds which served as bedding for the cattle, He twisted them into
   the semblance of a scourge, which could hurt neither man nor beast. He
   did not use it. It was a symbol, not an instrument. According to the
   reading adopted in the Revised Version, it was the sheep and cattle,
   not their owners, whom He drove out.' And then, dropping the scourge,
   He turned to the money-changers, and, with the same hand, overthrew
   their tables. And then came the turn of the sellers of doves. He would
   not hurt the birds, nor rob their owners. And so He neither overthrew
   nor opened the cages, but bade them Take these things hence'; and then
   came the illuminating words, Make not My Father's house a house of
   merchandise.'

   Now this incident is very unlike our Lord's usual method, even if we do
   not exaggerate the violence which He employed. It is unlike in two
   respects: in the use of compulsion, and in aiming at mere outward
   reformation. And both of these points are intimately connected with its
   place in His career.

   It was the first public appearance of Jesus before His nation as
   Messiah. He inaugurates His work by a claim--by an act of authority--to
   be the King of Israel and the Lord of the Temple. If we remember the
   words from the last prophet, in which Malachi says that the Messenger
   of the Covenant . . . shall suddenly come to His Temple, and purify the
   sons of Levi,' we get the significance of this incident. We have to
   mark in it our Lord's deliberate assumption of the role of Messiah; His
   shaping His conduct so as to recall to all susceptible hearts that last
   utterance of prophecy, and to recognise the fact that at the beginning
   of His career He was fully conscious of His Son-ship, and inaugurated
   His work by the solemn appeal to the nation to recognise Him as their
   Lord.

   And this is the reason, as I take it, why the anomalous incident is in
   its place at the beginning of His career no less than the repetition of
   it was at the close. And this is the explanation of the anomaly of the
   incident. It is His solemn, authoritative claiming to be God's
   Messenger, the Messiah long foretold.

   Then, further, this incident is a singular manifestation of Christ's
   unique power. How did it come that all these sordid hucksters had not a
   word to say, and did not lift a finger in opposition, or that the
   Temple Guard offered no resistance, and did not try to quell the
   unseemly disturbance, or that the very officials, when they came to
   reckon with Him, had nothing harsher to say than, What sign showest
   Thou unto us, seeing that Thou doest these things'? No miracle is
   needed to explain that singular acquiescence. We see in lower forms
   many instances of a similar thing. A man ablaze with holy indignation,
   and having a secret ally in the hearts of those whom He rebukes, will
   awe a crowd even if he does not infect them. But that is not the full
   explanation. I see here an incident analogous to that strange event at
   the close of Christ's ministry, when, coming out from beneath the
   shadows of the olives in the garden, He said to the soldiers Whom seek
   ye?' and they fell backwards and wallowed on the ground. An
   overwhelming impression of His personal majesty, and perhaps some
   forth-putting of that hidden glory which did swim up to the surface on
   the mountain of Transfiguration, bowed all these men before Him, like
   reeds before the wind. And though there was no recognition of His
   claim, there was something in the Claimant that forbade resistance and
   silenced remonstrance.

   Further, this incident is a revelation of Christ's capacity for
   righteous indignation. No two scenes can be more different than the two
   recorded in this chapter: the one that took place in the rural
   seclusion of Cana, nestling among the Galilean hills, the other that
   was done in the courts of the Temple swarming with excited
   festival-keepers; the one hallowing the common joys of daily life, the
   other rebuking the profanation of what assumed to be a great deal more
   sacred than a wedding festival; the one manifesting the love and
   sympathy of Jesus, His power to ennoble all human relationships, and
   His delight in ministering to need and bringing gladness, and the other
   setting forth the sterner aspect of His character as consumed with holy
   zeal for the sanctity of God's name and house. Taken together, one may
   say that they cover the whole ground of His character, and in some very
   real sense are a summary of all His work. The programme contains the
   whole of what is to follow hereafter.

   We may well take the lesson, which no generation ever needed more than
   the present, both by reason of its excellences and of its defects, that
   there were no love worthy of a perfect spirit in which there did not
   lie dormant a dark capacity of wrath, and that Christ Himself would not
   have been the Joy-bringer, the sympathising Gladdener which He
   manifested Himself as being in the beginning of miracles in Cana of
   Galilee' unless, side by side, there had lain in Him the power of holy
   indignation and, if need be, of stern rebuke. Brethren, we must retain
   our conception of His anger if we are not to maim our conception of His
   love. There is no wrath like the wrath of the Lamb. The Temple court,
   with the strange figure of the Christ with a scourge in His hand, is a
   revelation which this generation, with its exaggerated sentimentalism,
   with its shrinking, by reason of its good and of its evil, from the
   very notion of a divine retribution based upon the eternal antagonism
   between good and evil, most sorely needs.

   II. Now, secondly, notice what Christ does in His Church.

   I need not remind you how God's method of restoration is always to
   restore with a difference and a progress. The ruined Temple on Zion was
   not to be followed by another house of stone and lime, but by a
   spiritual house,' builded together for a habitation of God in the
   Spirit.' The Christian Church takes the place of that material
   sanctuary, and is the dwelling-place of God.

   That being so, let us take the lesson that that house, too, may be
   desecrated. There may be, as there were in the original Temple, the
   externals of worship, and yet, eating out the reality of these, there
   may be an inward mercenary spirit.

   Note how insensibly such corruption creeps in to a community. You
   cannot embody an idea in a form or in an external association without
   immediately dragging it down, and running the risk of degradation. It
   is just like a drop of quicksilver which you cannot expose to the air
   but instantaneously its brightness is dimmed by the scum that forms on
   its surface. A church as an outward institution is exposed to all the
   dangers to which other institutions are exposed. And these creep on
   insensibly, as this abuse had crept on. So it is not enough that we
   should be at ease in our consciences in regard to our practices as
   Christian communities. We become familiar with any abuse, and as we
   become familiar we lose the power of rightly judging of it. Therefore
   conscience needs to be guided and enlightened quite as much as to be
   obeyed.

   How long has it taken the Christian Church to learn the wickedness of
   slavery? Has the Christian Church yet learned the unchristianity of
   War? Are there no abuses amongst us, which subsequent generations will
   see to be so glaring that they will talk about us as we talk about our
   ancestors, and wonder whether we were Christians at all when we could
   tolerate such things? They creep on gradually, and they need continual
   watchfulness if they are not to assume the mastery.

   The special type of corruption which we find in this incident is one
   that besets the Church always. Of course, if I were preaching to
   ministers, I should have a great deal to say about that. For men that
   are necessarily paid for preaching have a sore temptation to preach for
   pay. But it is not only we professionals who have need to lay to heart
   this incident. It is all Christian communities, established and
   non-established churches, Roman Catholic and Protestant. The same
   danger besets them all. There must be money to work the outward
   business of the house of God. But what about people that run' churches
   as they run mills? What about people whose test of the prosperity of a
   Christian community is its balance-sheet? What about the people that
   hang on to religious communities and services for the sake of what they
   can make out of them? We have heard a great deal lately about what
   would happen if Christ came to Chicago.' If Christ came to any
   community of professing Christians in this land, do you not think He
   would need to have the scourge in His hand, and to say Make not My
   Father's house a house of merchandise'? He will come; He does come; He
   is always coming if we would listen to Him. And at long intervals He
   comes in some tremendous and manifest fashion, and overthrows the
   money-changers' tables.

   Ah, brethren! if Jesus Christ had not thus come, over and over again,
   to His Church, Christian men would have killed Christianity long ago.
   Did you ever think that Christianity is the only religion that has
   shown recuperative power and that has been able to fling off its
   peccant humours? They used to say--I do not know whether it is true or
   not--that Thames water was good to put on board ship because of its
   property of corrupting and then clearing itself, and becoming fit to
   drink. We and our brethren, all through the ages, have been corrupting
   the Water of Life. And how does it come to be sweet and powerful still?
   This tree has substance in it when it casts its leaves. That unique
   characteristic of Christianity, its power of reformation, is not
   self-reformation, but it is a coming of the Lord to His temple to
   purify the sons of Levi, that their offering may be pleasant as in days
   of yore.'

   So one looks upon the spectacle of churches labouring under all manner
   of corruptions; and one need not lose heart. The shortest day is the
   day before the year turns; and when the need is sorest the help is
   nearest. And so I, for my part, believe that very much of the
   organisations of all existing churches will have to be swept away. But
   I believe too, with all my heart--and I hope that you do--that, though
   the precious wheat is riddled in the sieve, and the chaff falls to the
   ground, not one grain will go through the meshes. Whatever becomes of
   churches, the Church of Christ shall never have its strength so sapped
   by abuses that it must perish, or its lustre so dimmed that the Lord of
   the Temple must depart from His sanctuary.

   III. Lastly, note what Christ will do for each of us if we will let
   Him.

   It is not a community only which is the temple of God. For the Apostles
   in many places suggest, and in some distinctly say, ye are the temples'
   individually, as well as the Temple collectively, of the Most High. And
   so every Christian soul--by virtue of that which is the deepest truth
   of Christianity, the indwelling of Christ in men's hearts by faith--is
   a temple of God; and every human soul is meant to be and may become
   such. That temple can be profaned. There are many ways in which
   professing Christians make it a house of merchandise. There are forms
   of religion which are little better than chaffering with God, to give
   Him so much service if He will repay us with so much Heaven. There are
   too many temptations, to which we yield, to bring secular thoughts into
   our holiest things. Some of us, by reason not of wishing wealth but of
   dreading penury, find it hard to shut worldly cares out of our hearts.
   We all need to be on our guard lest the atmosphere in which we live in
   this great city shall penetrate even into our moments of devotion, and
   the noise of the market within earshot of the Holy of Holies shall
   disturb the chant of the worshippers. It is Manchester's temptation,
   and it is one that most of us need to be guarded against.

   So engrossed, and, as we should say, necessarily engrossed--or, at all
   events, legitimately engrossed--are we in the pursuits of our daily
   commerce, that we have scarcely time enough or leisure of heart and
   mind enough to come into the secret place of the Most High.' The
   worshippers stop outside trading for beasts and doves, and they have no
   time to go into the Temple and present their offerings.

   It is our besetting danger. Forewarned is forearmed, to some extent.
   Would that we could all hear, as we go about our ordinary avocations,
   that solemn voice, Make not My Father's house a house of merchandise,'
   and could keep the inner sanctuary still from the noises, and remote
   from the pollutions, of the market hard by!

   We cannot cast out these or any other desecrating thoughts and desires
   by ourselves, except to a very small degree. And if we do, then there
   happens what our Lord warned us against in profound words. The house
   may be emptied of the evil tenant in some measure by our own resolution
   and self-reformation. But if it is not occupied by Him, it remains
   empty,' though it is swept and garnished.' Nature abhors a vacuum, and
   into the empty house there come the old tenant and seven brethren
   blacker than himself. The only way to keep the world out of my heart is
   to have Christ filling it. If we will ask Him He will come to us. And
   if He has the scourge in His hand, let Him be none the less welcome a
   guest for that. He will come, and when He enters, it will be like the
   rising of the sun, when all the beasts of the forest slink away and lay
   them down in their dens. It will be like the carrying of the Ark of the
   Covenant of the Lord of the whole earth into the temple of Dagon, when
   the fish-like image fell prone and mutilated on the threshold. If we
   say to Him, Arise, O Lord, into Thy rest, Thou and the Ark of Thy
   strength,' He will enter in, and by His entrance will make the place of
   His feet glorious' and pure.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE DESTROYERS AND THE RESTORER

   Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this Temple, and in three
   days I will raise it up.'--JOHN ii. 19.

   This is our Lord's answer to the Jewish request for a sign which should
   warrant His action in cleansing the Temple. There are two such
   cleansings recorded in the Gospels; this one His first public act, and
   another, omitted by John, but recorded in the other Gospels, which was
   almost His last public act.

   It has been suggested that these are but two versions of one incident;
   and although there is no objection in principle to admitting the
   possibility of that explanation, yet in fact it appears to me
   insufficient and unnecessary. For each event is appropriate in its own
   place. In each there is a distinct difference in tone. The incident
   recorded in the present chapter has our Lord's commentary, Make not My
   Father's house a house of merchandise'; in that recorded in the
   Synoptic Gospels the profanation is declared as greater, and the rebuke
   is more severe. The house of merchandise' has become, by their refusal
   to render to Him what was His, a den of thieves.' In the later incident
   there is a reference in our Lord's quotation from the Old Testament to
   the entrance of the Gentiles into the Kingdom. There is no such
   reference here. In the other Gospels there is no record of this
   question which the Jews asked, nor of our Lord's significant answer,
   whilst yet a caricatured and mistaken version of that answer was known
   to the other Evangelists, and is put by them into the mouths of the
   false witnesses at our Lord's trial. They thus attest the accuracy of
   our narrative even while they seem not to have known of the incident.

   All these things being taken into account, I think that we have to do
   with a double, of which there are several instances in the Gospels, the
   same event recurring under somewhat varied circumstances, and
   reflecting varied aspects of truth. But it is to our Lord's words in
   vindication of His right to cleanse the Temple rather than to the
   incident on which they are based that I wish to turn your attention
   now: Destroy this Temple,' said our Lord, as His sufficient and only
   answer to the demand for a sign, and in three days I will raise it up.'

   Now these words, enigmatical as they are, seem to me to be very
   profound and significant; and I wish, on this Easter Sunday, to look at
   them as throwing a light upon the gladness of this day. They suggest to
   me three things: I find in them, first, an enigmatical forecast of our
   Lord's own history; second, a prophetic warning of Israel's; and last,
   a symbolical foreshadowing of His world-wide work as the Restorer of
   man's destructions. Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise
   it up.'

   I. First then, I think, we see here an enigmatical forecast of our
   Lord's own history.

   Notice, first, that marvellous and unique consciousness of our Lord's
   as to His own dignity and nature. He spake of the temple of His body.'
   Think that here is a man, apparently one of ourselves, walking amongst
   us, living the common life of humanity, who declares that in Him, in an
   altogether solitary and peculiar fashion, there abides the fulness of
   Deity. Think that there has been a Man who said, In this place is One
   greater than the Temple.' And people have believed Him, and do believe
   Him, and have found that the tremendous audacity of the words is simple
   verity, and that Christ is, in inmost reality, all which the Temple was
   but in the poorest symbol. In it there had dwelt, though there dwelt no
   longer at the time when He was speaking, a material and symbolical
   brightness, the expression of something which, for want of a better
   name, we call the presence of God.' But what was that flashing fire
   between the cherubim that brooded over the Mercy-seat, with a light
   that was lambent and lustrous as the light of love and of life--what
   was that to the glory, moulded in meekness and garbed in gentleness,
   the glory that shone, merciful and hospitable and inviting--a tempered
   flame on which the poorest, diseased, blind eyes could look, and not
   wince--from the face and from the character of Jesus Christ the Lord?
   He is greater than the Temple, for in Him, in no symbol but in reality,
   abode and abides the fulness of that unnameable Being whom we name
   Father and God. And not only does the fulness abide, but in Him that
   awful Remoteness becomes for us a merciful Presence; the infinite abyss
   and closed sea of the divine nature hath an outlet, and becomes a river
   of water of life.' And as the ancient name of that Temple was the Tent
   of Meeting,' the place where Israel and God, in symbolical and
   ceremonial form, met together, so, in inmost reality in Christ's
   nature, Manhood and Divinity cohere and unite, and in Him all of us,
   the weak, the sinful, the alien, the rebellious, may meet our Father.
   He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.' In this place is One
   greater than the Temple.'

   And so this Jewish Peasant, at the very beginning of His earthly
   career, stands up there, in the presence of the ancestral sanctities
   and immemorial ceremonials which had been consecrated by all these ages
   and commanded by God Himself, and with autocratic hand sweeps them all
   on one side, as one that should draw a curtain that the statue might be
   seen, and remains poised Himself in the vacant place, that all eyes may
   look upon Him, and on Him alone. Destroy this Temple . . . . He spake
   of the temple of His body.'

   Still further, notice how here we have, at the very beginning of our
   Lord's career, His distinct prevision of how it was all going to end.
   People that are willing to honour Jesus Christ, and are not willing to
   recognise His death as the great purpose for which He came, tell us
   that, like as with other reformers and heroes and martyrs, His death
   was the result of the failure of His purpose. And some of them talk to
   us very glibly, in their so-called Lives of Jesus Christ' about the
   alteration in Christ's plan which came when He saw that His message was
   not going to be received. I do not enter upon all the reasons why such
   a construction of Christ's work cannot hold water, but here is one--for
   any one who believes this story before us--that at the very beginning,
   before He had gone half a dozen steps in His public career, when the
   issues of the experiment, if it was a man that was making the
   experiment, were all untried; when, if it were merely a
   martyr-enthusiast that was beginning his struggle, some flickering
   light of hope that He would be received of His brethren must have
   shone, or He would never have ventured upon the path--that then, with
   no mistake, with no illusion, with no expectation of a welcome and a
   Hosanna, but with the clearest certitude of what lay before Him, our
   Lord beheld and accepted His Cross. Its shadow fell upon His path from
   the beginning, because the Cross was the purpose for which He came. To
   this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world,' said
   He--when the reality of it was almost within arm's length of Him--to
   bear witness to the Truth,' and His bearing witness to the truth was
   perfected and accomplished on the Cross. Here, at the very commencement
   of His career, we have it distinctly set forth, the Son of Man came to
   give His life a ransom for many.'

   And, brethren, that fact is important, not only because it helps us to
   understand that His death is the centre of His work, but also because
   it helps us to a loving and tender thought of Him, how all His life
   long, with that issue distinctly before Him, He journeyed towards it of
   His own loving will; how every step that He took on earth's flinty
   roads, taken with bleeding and pure feet, He took knowing whither He
   was going. This Isaac climbs the mountain to the place of sacrifice,
   with no illusions as to what He is going up the mountain for. He knows
   that He goes up to be the lamb of the offering, and knowing it, He
   goes. Therefore let us love Him with love as persistent as was His own,
   who discerning the end from the beginning, willed to be born and to
   live because He had resolved to die, for you and me and every man.

   And then, further, we have here our Lord's claim to be Himself the
   Agent of His own resurrection. I will raise it up in three days.' Of
   course, in Scripture, we more frequently find the Resurrection treated
   as being the result of the power of God the Father. We more ordinarily
   read that Christ was raised; but sometimes we read, as here, that
   Christ rises, and we have solemn words of His own, I have power to lay
   it down, and I have power to take it again.' Think of a man saying, I
   am going to bring My own body from the dust of death,' and think of the
   man who said that doing it. If that is true, if this prediction was
   uttered, and being uttered was fulfilled--what then? I do not need to
   answer the question. My brother, this day declares that Jesus Christ is
   the Son of God. Destroy this Temple'--there is a challenge--and in
   three days I will raise it up'; and He did it. And He is the Lord of
   the Temple as well as the Temple. Down on your knees before Him, with
   all your hearts and with all your confidence, and worship, and trust,
   and love for evermore the Second Man,' who is the Lord from Heaven!'

   II. Now let us turn to the other aspects of these words. I think we see
   here, in the next place, a prophetic warning of the history of the men
   to whom He was speaking.

   There must be a connection between the interpretation of the words
   which our Evangelist assures us is the correct one, and the
   interpretation which would naturally have occurred to a listener, that
   by this Temple' our Lord really meant simply the literal building in
   which He spoke. There is such a connection, and though our Lord did not
   only mean the Temple, He did mean the Temple. To say so is not forcing
   double meanings in any fast and loose fashion upon Scripture, nor
   playing with ambiguities, nor indulging in any of the vices to which
   spiritualising interpretation of Scripture leads, but it is simply
   grasping the central idea of the words of my text. Rightly understood
   they lead us to this: The death of Christ was the destruction of the
   Jewish Temple and polity, and the raising again of Christ from the dead
   on the third day was the raising again of that destroyed Theocracy and
   Temple in a new and nobler fashion.' Let us then look for a moment, and
   it shall only be for a moment, at these two thoughts.

   If any one had said to any of that howling mob that stood round Christ
   at the judgment-seat of the High Priest, and fancied themselves
   condemning Him to death, because He had blasphemed the Temple: You, at
   this moment, are pulling down the holy and beautiful house in which
   your fathers praised; and what you are doing now is the destruction of
   your national worship and of yourselves,' the words would have been
   received with incredulity; and yet they were simple truth. Christ's
   death destroyed that outward Temple. The veil was rent in twain from
   the top to the bottom' at the moment He died; which was the declaration
   indeed that henceforward the Holiest of All was patent to the foot of
   every man, but was also the declaration that there was no more sanctity
   now within those courts, and that Temple, and priesthood, and
   sacrifice, and altar, and ceremonial and all, were antiquated. That
   which was perfect having come,' Christ's death having realised all
   which Temple-worship symbolised, that which was the shadow was put away
   when the substance appeared.

   And in another fashion, it is also true that the death of our Lord
   Jesus Christ, inflicted by Jewish hands, was the destruction of the
   Jewish worship, in the way of natural sequence and of divine
   chastisement. When the husbandmen rejected the Son who was sent last of
   all,' there was nothing more for it but that they should be cast out of
   the vineyard,' and the firebrand which the Roman soldier, forty years
   afterwards, tossed into the Holiest of All, and which burned the holy
   and beautiful house with fire, was lit on the day when Israel cried
   Crucify Him! Crucify Him!'

   Oh, brethren! What a lesson it is to us all of how blind even so-called
   religious zeal may be; how often it is true that men in their madness
   and their ignorance destroy the very institutions which they are trying
   to conserve! How it warns us to beware lest we, unknowing what we are
   about, and thinking that we are fighting for the honour of God, may
   really all the while be but serving ourselves and rejecting His message
   and His Messenger!

   And then let me remind you that another thing is also true, that just
   as the Jewish rejection of Christ was their own rejection as the people
   of God, and their attempted destruction of Christ the destruction of
   the Jewish Temple, so the other side of the truth is also here, viz.
   that His rising again is the restoration of the destroyed Temple in
   nobler and fairer form. Of course the one real Temple is the body of
   Jesus Christ, as we have said, where sacrifice is offered, where God
   dwells, where men meet with God. But in a secondary and derivative
   sense, in the place of the Jewish Temple has come the Christian Church,
   which is, in a far deeper and more inward fashion, what that ancient
   system aspired to be.

   Christ has builded up the Church on His Resurrection. On His
   Resurrection, I say, for there is nothing else on which it could rest.
   If men ask me what is the great evidence of Christ's Resurrection, my
   answer is--the existence in the world of a Church. Where did it come
   from? How is it possible to conceive that without the Resurrection of
   Jesus Christ such a structure as the Christian society should have been
   built upon a dead man's grave? It would have gone to pieces, as all
   similar associations would have gone. What had happened after that
   moment of depression which scattered them every man to his own, and led
   some of them to say, with pathetic use of the past tense to describe
   their vanished expectations, We trusted that it had been He which
   should have redeemed Israel'? What was the force that instead of
   driving them asunder drew them together? What was the power that,
   instead of quenching their almost dead hopes, caused them to flame up
   with renewed vigour heaven-high? How came it that that band of
   cowardly, dispirited Jewish peasants, who scattered in selfish fear and
   heart-sick disappointment, were in a few days found bearding all
   antagonism, and convinced that their hopes had only erred by being too
   faint and dim? The only answer is in their own message, which explained
   it all: Him hath God raised from the dead, whereof we are all
   witnesses.'

   The destroyed Temple disappears, and out of the dust and smoke of the
   vanishing ruins there rises, beautiful and serene, though incomplete
   and fragmentary and defaced with many a stain, the fairer reality, the
   Church of the living Christ. Destroy this Temple, and in three days I
   will raise it up.'

   III. Lastly, we have here a foreshadowing of our Lord's world-wide work
   as the Restorer of man's destructions.

   Man's folly, godlessness, worldliness, lust, sin, are ever working to
   the destruction of all that is sacred in humanity and in life, and to
   the desecrating of every shrine. We ourselves, in regard to our own
   hearts, which are made to be the temples of the living God,' are ever,
   by our sins, shortcomings, and selfishness, bringing pollution into the
   holiest of all; breaking down the carved work thereof with axes and
   hammers,' and setting up the abomination of desolation in the holy
   places of our hearts. We pollute them all--conscience, imagination,
   memory, will, intellect. How many a man listening to me now has his
   nature like the facade of some of our cathedrals, with the empty niches
   and broken statues proclaiming that wanton desecration and destruction
   have been busy there?

   My brother! what have you done with your heart? Destroy this temple.'
   Christ spoke to men who did not know what they were doing; and He
   speaks to you. It is the inmost meaning of the life of many of you.
   Hour by hour, day by day, action by action, you are devastating and
   profaning the sanctities of your nature, and the sacred places there
   where God ought to live.

   Listen to His confident promise. He knows that in me He is able to
   restore to more than pristine beauty all which I, by my sin, have
   destroyed; to reconsecrate all which I, by my profanity, have polluted;
   to cast out the evil deities that desecrate and deform the shrine; and
   to make my poor heart, if only I will let Him come in to the ruined
   chamber, a fairer temple and dwelling-place of God.

   In three days,' does He do it? In one sense--Yes! Thank God! the power
   that hallows and restores the desecrated and cast-down temple in a
   man's heart, was lodged in the world in those three days of death and
   resurrection. The fact that He died for our sins,' the fact that He was
   raised again for our justification,' are the plastic and architectonic
   powers which will build up any character into a temple of God.

   And yet more than forty and six years' will that temple have to be in
   building.' It is a lifelong task till the top-stone be brought forth.
   Only let us remember this: Christ, who is Architect and Builder,
   Foundation and Top-stone; ay! and Deity indwelling in the temple, and
   building it by His indwelling--this Christ is not one of those who
   begin to build and are not able to finish.' He realises all His plans.
   There are no ruined edifices in the City'; nor any half-finished fanes
   of worship within the walls of that great Jerusalem whose builder and
   maker is Christ.

   If you will put yourselves in His hands, and trust yourselves to Him,
   He will take away all your incompleteness, and will make you body,
   soul, and spirit, temples of the Lord God; as far above the loftiest
   beauty and whitest sanctity of any Christian character here on earth as
   is the building of God, the house not made with hands, eternal in the
   heavens,' above the earthly house of this tabernacle.'

   He will perfect this restoring work at the last, when His Word to His
   servant Death, as He points him to us, shall be Destroy this temple,
   and I will raise it up.'
     __________________________________________________________________

TEACHER OR SAVIOUR?

   The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto Him, Rabbi, we know that
   Thou art a Teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that
   Thou doest, except God be with him.'--JOHN iii. 2.

   The connection in which the Evangelist introduces the story of
   Nicodemus throws great light on the aspect under which we are to regard
   it. He has just been saying that upon our Lord's first visit to
   Jerusalem at the Passover there was a considerable amount of interest
   excited, and a kind of imperfect faith in Him drawn out, based solely
   on His miracles. He adds that this faith was regarded by Christ as
   unreliable; and he goes on to explain that our Lord exercised great
   reserve in His dealings with the persons who professed it, for the
   reason that He knew all men, and needed not that any should testify of
   man, for He knew what was in man.'

   Now, if you note that reiteration of the word man,' you will understand
   the description which is given of the person who is next introduced. He
   knew what was in man. There was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus,
   a ruler of the Jews.' It would have been enough to have said, There was
   a Pharisee.' When John says a man of the Pharisees,' he is not merely
   carried away by the echo in his ears of his own last words, but it is
   as if he had said, Now, here is one illustration of the sort of thing
   that I have been speaking about; one specimen of an imperfect faith
   built upon miracles; and one illustration of the way in which Jesus
   Christ dealt with it.'

   Nicodemus was a Pharisee.' That tells us the school to which he
   belonged, and the general drift of his thought. He was a ruler of the
   Jews.' That tells us that he held an official position in the supreme
   court of the nation, to which the Romans had left some considerable
   shadow of power in ecclesiastical matters. And this man comes to Christ
   and acknowledges Him. Christ deals with him in a very suggestive
   fashion. His confession, and the way in which our Lord received it, are
   what I desire to consider briefly in this sermon.

   I. Note then, first, this imperfect confession.

   Everything about it, pretty nearly, is wrong. He came to Jesus by
   night,' half-ashamed and wholly afraid of speaking out the conviction
   that was working in him. He was a man in position. He could not
   compromise himself in the eyes of his co-Sanhedrists. It would be a
   grave thing for a man like me to be found in converse with this new
   Rabbi and apparent Prophet. I must go cautiously, and have regard to my
   reputation and my standing in the world; and shall steal to Him by
   night.' There is something wrong with any convictions about Jesus
   Christ which let themselves be huddled up in secret. The true
   apprehension of Him is like a fire in a man's bones, that makes him
   weary of forbearing' when he locks his lips, and forces him to speak.
   If Christians can be dumb, there is something dreadfully wrong with
   their Christianity. If they do not regard Jesus Christ in such an
   aspect as to oblige them to stand out in the world and say, Whatever
   anybody says or thinks about it, I am Christ's man,' then be sure that
   they do not yet know Him as they ought to do.

   Nicodemus came to Jesus by night,' and therein condemned himself. He
   said, Rabbi, we know.' There is more than a soupcon of patronage in
   that. He is giving Jesus Christ a certificate, duly signed and sealed
   by Rabbinical authority. He evidently thinks that it is no small matter
   that he and some of his fellows should have been disposed to look with
   favour upon this new Teacher. And so he comes, if not patronising the
   young man, at all events extremely conscious of his own condescension
   in recognising Him with his We know.'

   Had he the right to speak for any of his colleagues? If so, then at
   that very early stage of our Lord's ministry there was a conviction
   beginning to work in that body of ecclesiastics which casts a very
   lurid light on their subsequent proceedings. It was a good long while
   after, when Jesus Christ's attitude towards them had been a little more
   clearly made out than it was at the beginning, that they said
   officially, As for this fellow, we know not whence He is.' They knew'
   when He did not seem to be trenching on their prerogatives, or driving
   His Ithuriel-spear through their traditional professions of orthodoxy
   and punctilious casuistries. But when He trod on their toes, when He
   ripped up their pretensions, when He began to show His antagonism to
   their formalism and traditionalism, then they did not know where He
   came from. And there are many of us who are very polite to Jesus Christ
   as long as He does not interfere with us, and who begin to doubt His
   authority when He begins to rebuke our sins.

   The man that said We know,' and then proceeded to tell Christ the
   grounds upon which He was accepted by him, was not in the position
   which becomes sinful men drawing near to their Saviour. We know that
   Thou art a Teacher'--contrast that, with its ring of complacency, and,
   if not superior, at least co-ordinate, authority, with Jesus! Master!
   have mercy on me,' or with Lord! save or I perish,' and you get the
   difference between the way in which a formalist, conceited of his
   knowledge, and a poor, perishing sinner, conscious of his ignorance and
   need, go to the Saviour.

   Further, this imperfect confession was of secondary value, because it
   was built altogether upon miraculous evidence. Now, there has been a
   great deal of exaggeration about the value of the evidence of miracle.
   The undue elevation to which it was lifted in the apologetic literature
   of the eighteenth century, when it was almost made out as if there was
   no other proof that Jesus came from God than that He wrought miracles,
   has naturally led, in this generation and in the last one, to an
   equally exaggerated undervaluing of its worth. Jesus Christ did appeal
   to signs; He did also most distinctly place faith that rested merely
   upon miracle as second best; when He said, for instance, If ye believe
   not Me, yet believe the works.' Nicodemus says, We know that Thou art a
   Teacher sent from God, because no man can do these miracles except God
   be with him.' Ah! Nicodemus! did not the substance of the teaching
   reveal the source of the teaching even more completely than the
   miracles that accompanied it? Surely, if I may use an old illustration,
   the bell that rings in to the sermon (which is the miracles) is less
   conclusive as to the divine source of the teaching than is the sermon
   itself. Christ Himself is His own best evidence, and His words shine in
   their own light, and need no signs in order to authenticate their
   source. The signs are there, and are precious in my eyes less as
   credentials of His authority than as revelations of His character and
   His work. They are wonders; that is much. They are proofs; as I
   believe. But, high above both of these characteristics, they are signs
   of the spiritual work that He does, and manifestations of His redeeming
   power. And so a faith that had no ears for the ring of the divine voice
   in the words, and no eyes for the beauty and perfection of the
   character, was vulgar and low and unreliable, inasmuch as it could give
   no better reason for itself than that Jesus had wrought miracles,

   I need not remind you of how noticeable it is that at this very early
   stage in our Lord's ministry there were a sufficient number of miracles
   done to be qualified by the Evangelist as many,' and to have been a
   very powerful factor in bringing about this real, though imperfect,
   faith. John has only told us of one miracle prior to this; and the
   other Evangelists do not touch upon these early days of our Lord's
   ministry at all. So that we are to think of a whole series of works of
   power and supernatural grace which have found no record in these short
   narratives. How much more Jesus Christ was, and did, and said, than any
   book can ever tell! These are but parts of His ways; a whisper of His
   power. The fulness of it remains unrevealed after all revelation.

   But the central deficiency of this confession lies in the altogether
   inadequate conception of Jesus Christ and His work which it embodies.
   We know that Thou art a Teacher, a miracle-worker, a man sent from God,
   and in communion with Him.' These are large recognitions, far too large
   to be spoken of any but a select few of the sons of men. But they fall
   miserably beneath the grandeur, and do not even approach within sight
   of the central characteristic, of Christ and of His work. Nicodemus is
   the type of large numbers of men nowadays. All the people that have a
   kind of loose, superficial connection with Christianity re-echo
   substantially his words. They compliment Jesus Christ out of His
   divinity and out of His redeeming work, and seem to think that they are
   rather conferring an honour upon Christianity when they condescend to
   say, We, the learned pundits of literature; we, the arbiters of taste;
   we, the guides of opinion; we, the writers in newspapers and magazines
   and periodicals; we, the leaders in social and philanthropic
   movements--we recognise that Thou art a Teacher.' Yes, brethren, and
   the recognition is utterly inadequate to the facts of the case, and is
   insult, and not recognition.

   II. Let me ask you to look now, in the next place, at the way in which
   Jesus Christ deals with this imperfect confession.

   It was a great thing for a young Rabbi from Nazareth, who had no
   certificate from the authorities, to find an opening thus into the very
   centre of the Sanhedrim. There is nothing in life, to an ardent young
   soul, at the beginning of his career--especially if he feels that he
   has a burden laid upon him to deliver to his fellows--half so sweet as
   the early recognition by some man of wisdom and weight and influence,
   that he too is a messenger from God. In later years praise and
   acknowledgment cloy. And one might have expected some passing word from
   the Master that would have expressed such a feeling as that, if He had
   been only a young Teacher seeking for recognition. I remember that in
   that strange medley of beauty and absurdity, the Koran, somewhere or
   other, there is an outpouring of Mahomet's heart about the blessedness
   of his first finding a soul that would believe in him. And it is
   strange that Jesus Christ had no more welcome for this man than the
   story tells that He had. For He meets him without a word of
   encouragement; without a word that seemed to recognise even a growing
   and a groping confidence, and yet He would not quench the smoking
   flax.' Yes! sometimes the kindest way to deal with an imperfect
   conception is to show unsparingly why it is imperfect; and sometimes
   the apparent repelling of a partial faith is truly the drawing to
   Himself by the Christ of the man, though his faith be not approved.

   So, notice how our Lord meets the imperfections of this acknowledgment.
   He begins by pointing out what is the deepest and universal need of
   men. Nicodemus had said, Rabbi, we know that Thou art a Teacher come
   from God.' And Christ says, Verily, verily, I say unto you, ye must be
   born again.' What has that to do with Nicodemus's acknowledgment?
   Apparently nothing; really everything. For, if you will think for a
   moment, you will see how it meets it precisely, and forces the Rabbi to
   deepen his conception of the Lord. The first thing that you and I want,
   for our participation in the Kingdom of God, is a radical out-and-out
   change in our whole character and nature. Ye must be born again'; now,
   whatever more that means, it means, at all events, this--a
   thorough-going renovation and metamorphosis of a man's nature, as the
   sorest need that the world and all the individuals that make up the
   world have.

   The deepest ground of that necessity lies in the fact of sin. Brother,
   we can only verify our Lord's assertion by honestly searching the
   depths of our own hearts, and looking at ourselves in the light of God.
   Think what is meant when we say, He is Light, and in Him is no darkness
   at all.' Think of that absolute purity, that, to us, awful aversion
   from all that is evil, from all that is sinful. Think of what sort of
   men they must be who can see the Lord. And then look at yourself. Are
   we fit to pass that threshold? Are we fit to gaze into that Face? Is it
   possible that we should have fellowship with Him? Oh, brethren, if we
   rightly meditate upon two facts, the holiness of God and our own
   characters, I think we shall feel that Jesus Christ has truly stated
   the case when He says, Ye must be born again.' Unless you and I can get
   ourselves radically changed, there is no Heaven for us; there is no
   fellowship with God for us. We must stand before Him, and feel that a
   great gulf is fixed between us and Him.

   And so when a man comes with his poor little Thou art a Teacher,' no
   words are wanted in order to set in glaring light the utter inadequacy
   of such a conception as that. What the world wants is not a Teacher, it
   is a Life-giver. What men want is not to be told the truth; they know
   it already. What they want is not to be told their duty; they know that
   too. What they want is some power that shall turn them clean round. And
   what each of us wants before we can see the Lord is that, if it may be,
   something shall lay hold of us, and utterly change our natures, and
   express from our hearts the black drop that lies there tainting
   everything.

   Now, this necessity is met in Jesus Christ. For there were two musts'
   in His talk with Nicodemus, and both of them bore directly on the one
   purpose of deepening Nicodemus's inadequate conception of what He was
   and what He did. He said, Ye must be born again,' in order that his
   hearer, and we, might lay to heart this, that we need something more
   than a Teacher, even a Life-giver; and He said, The Son of Man must be
   lifted up,' in order that we might all know that in Him the necessity
   is met, and that the Son of Man, who came down from Heaven, and is in
   Heaven, even whilst He is on earth, is the sole ladder by which men can
   ascend into Heaven and gaze upon God.

   Thus it is Christ's work as Redeemer, Christ's sacrifice on the Cross,
   Christ's power as bringing to the world a new and holy life, and
   breathing it into all that trust in Him, which make the very centre of
   His work. Set by the side of that this other, Thou art a Teacher sent
   from God.' Ah, brethren, that will not do; it will not do for you and
   me! We want something a great deal deeper than that. The secret of
   Jesus is not disclosed until we have passed into the inner shrine,
   where we learn that He is the Sacrifice for the world, and the Source
   and Fountain of a new life. I beseech you, take Christ's way of dealing
   with this certificate of His character given by the Rabbi who did not
   know his own necessities, and ponder it.

   Mark the underlying principle which is here--viz. if you want to
   understand Christ you must understand sin; and whoever thinks lightly
   of it will think meanly of Him. An underestimate of the reality, the
   universality, the gravity of the fact of sin lands men in the
   superficial and wholly impotent conception, Rabbi! Thou art a Teacher
   sent from God.' A true knowledge of myself as a sinful man, of my need
   of pardon, of my need of cleansing, of my need of a new nature, which
   must be given from above, and cannot be evolved from within, leads me,
   and I pray it may lead you, to cast yourself down before Him, with no
   complaisant words of intellectual recognition upon your lips, but with
   the old cry, Lord! be merciful to me a sinner.'

   III. And now, dear friends, one last word. Notice when and where this
   imperfect disciple was transformed into a courageous confessor.

   We do not know what came immediately of this conversation. We only know
   that some considerable time after, Nicodemus had not screwed himself up
   to the point of acknowledging out and out, like a brave man, that he
   was Christ's follower; but that he timidly ventured in the Sanhedrim to
   slip in a remonstrance ingeniously devised to conceal his own opinions,
   and yet to do some benefit to Christ, when he said, Does our law judge
   any man before it hear him?' And, of course, the timid remonstrance was
   swept aside, as it deserved to be, by the ferocious antagonism of his
   co-Sanhedrists.

   But when the Cross came, and it had become more dangerous to avow
   discipleship, he plucked up courage, or rather courage flowed into him
   from that Cross, and he went boldly and craved the body of Jesus,' and
   got it, and buried it. No doubt when he looked at Jesus hanging on the
   Cross, he remembered that night in Jerusalem when the Lord had said,
   The Son of Man must be lifted up,' and he remembered how He had spoken
   about the serpent lifted in the wilderness, and a great light blazed in
   upon him, which for ever ended all hesitation and timidity for him. And
   so he was ready to be a martyr, or anything else, for the sake of Him
   whom he now found to be far more than a Teacher,' even the Sacrifice by
   whose stripes he was healed.

   Dear brethren, I bring that Cross to you now, and pray you to see there
   Christ's real work for us, and for the world. He has taught us, but He
   has done more. He has not only spoken, He has died. He has not only
   shown us the path on which to walk, He has made it possible for us to
   walk in it. He is not merely one amongst the noble band that have
   guided and inspired and instructed humanity, but He stands alone--not a
   Teacher, but the Redeemer, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins
   of the world.'

   If He is a Teacher, take His teachings, and what are they? These, that
   He is the Son of God; that He came from God'; that He went to God';
   that He gives His life a ransom for many'; that He is to be the Judge
   of mankind; that if we trust in Him, our sins are forgiven and our
   nature is renewed. Do not go picking and choosing amongst His
   teachings, for these which I have named are as surely His as Whatsoever
   ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them,' or any
   other of the moral teachings which the world professes to admire. Take
   the whole teachings of the whole Christ, and you will confess Him to be
   the Redeemer of your souls, and the Life-giver by whom, and by whom
   alone, we enter the Kingdom of God.
     __________________________________________________________________

WIND AND SPIRIT

   The wind bloweth where it listeth, and them hearest the sound thereof,
   but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every
   one that is born of the Spirit.'--JOHN iii. 8.

   Perhaps a gust of night wind swept round the chamber where Nicodemus
   sat listening to Jesus, and gave occasion for this condensed parable.
   But there is occasion sufficient for it in the word Spirit,' which,
   both in the language in which our Lord addressed the ruler of the
   Sanhedrim, and in that which John employed in recording the
   conversation, as in our own English, means both spirit' and breath.'
   This double signification of the word gives rise to the analogies in
   our text, and it also raises the question as to the precise meaning of
   the text. There are two alternatives, one adopted by our Authorised and
   Revised Version, and one which you will find relegated to the margin of
   the latter. We may either read the wind bloweth' or the Spirit
   breathes.' I must not be tempted here to enter into a discussion of the
   grounds upon which the one or the other of these two renderings may be
   preferred. Suffice it to say that I adhere to the rendering which lies
   before us, and find here a comparison between the salient
   characteristics of the physical fact and the operations of the Divine
   Spirit upon men's spirits.

   But then, there is another step to be taken. Our Lord has just been
   laying down the principle that like begets like, that flesh produces
   flesh, and spirit, spirit. And so, applying that principle, He says
   here, not as might be expected, So is the work of the Divine Spirit in
   begetting new life in men,' but So is he that is born of the Spirit.'
   There are three things brought into relation with one another: the
   physical fact; the operations of the Spirit of God, of which that
   physical fact in its various characteristics may be taken as a symbol;
   and the result of its operations in the new man who is made after the
   image of Him that created him.'

   It is to the last of these that I wish to turn. Here you have the ideal
   of the Christian life, considered as the product of the free Spirit of
   God, the picture of what all Christian people have the capacity of
   being, the obligation to be, and are, just in the measure in which that
   new life, which the Spirit of God bestows, is dominant in them and
   moulding their character. So I take these characteristics just as they
   arise.

   I. Here you have the freedom of the new life.

   The wind bloweth where it listeth.' Of course, in these days of weather
   forecasts and hoisting cones, we know that the wind is subject to as
   rigid physical laws as any other phenomena. But Jesus Christ speaks
   here, as the Bible always speaks about Nature, from two points of
   view--one the popular, regarding the thing as it looks on the surface,
   and the other what I may call the poetico-devout--finding sermons in
   stones, books in the running brooks,' and hints of the spiritual world
   in all the phenomena of the natural. So, just as in spite of
   meteorological science, there has passed into common speech the
   proverbial simile as free as the wind,' so Jesus Christ says here, The
   wind bloweth where it listeth, . . . so is every one that is born of
   the Spirit.' He passes by the intermediate link, the Spirit that is the
   parent of the life, and deals with the resulting life and declares that
   it is self-impelled and self-directed. Is that a characteristic to be
   desired or admired? Is doing as we list precisely the description of
   the noblest life? It is the description of the purely animal one. It is
   the description of an entirely ignoble and base one. It may become the
   description of an atrociously criminal one. But we do not generally
   think that a man that says Thus I will; thus I command; let the fact
   that I will it stand in the place of all reason,' is speaking from a
   lofty point of view.

   But there are two sorts of listing.' There is the listing which is the
   yielding to the mob of ignoble passions and clamant desires of the
   animal nature within us, and there is the listing' which is obeying the
   impulses of a higher will, that has been blended with ours. And there
   you come to the secret of true freedom, which does not consist in doing
   as I like, but in liking to do as God wishes me to do. When our Lord
   says where it listeth,' He implies that a change has passed over a man,
   when that new life is born within him, whereby the law, the known will
   of God, is written upon his heart, and, inscribed on these fleshly
   tables, becomes no longer an iron force external to him, but a vital
   impulse within him. That is freedom, to have my better will absolutely
   conterminous and coincident with the will of God, so far as I know it.
   Just as a man is not imprisoned by limits beyond which he has no desire
   to go, so freedom, and elevation, and nobility come by obeying, not the
   commands of an external authority, but the impulse of an inward life.

   Ye have not received the spirit of bondage,' because God hath given us
   the Spirit of power, and of love, and of self-control, which keeps down
   that base and inferior listing,' and elevates the higher and the nobler
   one, Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty,' because duty
   has become delight, and there is no desire in the new and higher nature
   for anything except that which God enjoins. The true freedom is when,
   by the direction of our will, we change must' into I delight to do Thy
   will.' So we are set free from the bondage and burden of a law that is
   external, and is not loved, and are brought into the liberty of, for
   dear love's sake, doing the will of the beloved.


     Myself shall to my darling be

     Both law and impulse,'

   says one of the poets about a far inferior matter. It is true in
   reference to the Christian life, and the liberty wherewith Christ hath
   made us free,'

   But, then, in order freely to understand the sweep and the greatness of
   this perfect law of liberty, we must remember that the new life is
   implanted in us precisely in order that we may suppress, and, if need
   be, cast out and exorcise, that lower listing,' of which I have said
   that it is always ignoble and sometimes animal. For this freedom will
   bring with it the necessity for continual warfare against all that
   would limit and restrain it--namely, the passions and desires and
   inclinations of our baser or nobler, but godless, self. These are, as
   it were, deposed by the entrance of the new life. But it is a dangerous
   thing to keep dethroned and discrowned tyrants alive, and the best
   thing is to behead them, as well as to cast them from their throne. If
   ye, through the Spirit, do put to death the deeds' and inclinations and
   wills of the flesh, ye shall live'; and if you do not, they will live
   and will kill you. So the freedom of the new life is a militant
   freedom, and we have to fight to maintain it. As Burke said about the
   political realm, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance,' so we say
   about the new life of the Christian man--he is free only on condition
   that he keeps well under hatches the old tyrants, who are ever plotting
   and struggling to have dominion once again.

   Still further, whilst this new life makes us free from the harshness of
   a law that can only proclaim duty, and also makes us free from our own
   baser selves, it makes us free from all human authority. The true
   foundation of the Christian democracy is that each individual soul has
   direct and immediate access to, and direct and real possession of, God,
   in his spirit and life. Therefore, in the measure in which we draw into
   ourselves the new life and the Spirit of God shall we be independent of
   men round us, and be able to say, With me it is a very small matter to
   be judged of you or of man's judgment.' That new life ought to make men
   original, in the deep and true sense of the word, as drawing their
   conceptions of duty and their methods of life, not at second hand from
   other men, but straight from God Himself. If the Christian Church was
   fuller of that divine life than it is, it would be fuller of all
   varieties of Christian beauty and excellence, and all these would be
   the work of that one and the selfsame Spirit dividing to every man
   severally as He will.' If this congregation were indeed filled with the
   new life, there would be an exuberance of power, and a harmonious
   diversity of characteristics about it, and a burning up of the
   conventionalities of Christian profession such as we do not dream of
   to-day. The wind bloweth where it listeth.'

   II. Here we have this new life in its manifestation.

   Thou hearest the sound,' or, as the Word might literally be rendered,
   the voice thereof,' from the little whisper among the young soft leaves
   of the opening beeches in our woods to-day, up to the typhoon that
   spreads devastation over leagues of tropical ocean. That voice, now a
   murmur, now a roar, is the only manifestation of the unseen force that
   sweeps around us. And if you are a Christian man or woman your new life
   should be thus perceptible to others, in a variety of ways, no doubt,
   and in many degrees of force. You cannot show its roots; you are bound
   to show its fruits. You cannot lay bare your spirits, and say to the
   world, Look! there is the presence of a divine germ in me,' but you can
   go about amongst men, and witness to the possession of it by the life
   that you live. There are a great many Christian people from whom, if
   you were to listen ever so intently, you would not hear a sough or a
   ripple. There is a dead calm; the rushing mighty wind' has died down;
   and there is nothing but a greasy swell upon the windless ocean. The
   wind bloweth,' and the sound' is heard. The wind ceases, and there is a
   hideous silence. And that is the condition of many a man and woman that
   has a name to live and is dead. Does anybody hear the whisper of that
   breath in your life, Christian man? It is not for me to answer the
   question; it is for you to ask it and answer it for yourselves.

   And Christians should be in the world, as the very breath of life
   amidst stagnation. When the Christian Church first sprung into being it
   did come into that corrupt, pestilential march of ancient heathenism
   with healing on its wings, and like fresh air from the pure hills into
   some fever-stricken district. Wherever there has been a new outburst,
   in the experience of individuals and of churches, of that divine life,
   there has come, and the world has felt that there has come, a new force
   that breathes over the dry bones, and they live. Alas, alas! that so
   frequently the professing Christian Church has ceased to discharge its
   plain function, to breathe on the slain that they may live.

   They are curing, or say they are curing, consumption nowadays, by
   taking the patient and keeping him in the open air, and letting the
   wind of heaven blow freely about him. That, and not shutting people in
   warm chambers, and coddling them with the prescriptions of social and
   political reformation, that is the cure for the world's diseases.
   Wherever the new life is vigorous in men, men will hear the sound
   thereof, and recognise that it comes from heaven.

   III. Lastly, here we have the new life in its double secret.

   I have been saying that it has a means of manifestation which all
   Christian people are bound to exemplify. But our Lord draws a broad
   distinction between that which can be manifested and that which cannot.
   As I said, you can show the leaves and the fruits; the roots are
   covered. Thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it
   cometh, nor whither it goeth.'

   The origin of that new life is hid with Christ in God.' And so, since
   we are not dependent upon external things for the communication of the
   life, we should not be dependent upon them for its continuation and its
   nourishment, and we should realise that, if we are Christians, we are
   living in two regions, and, though as regards the surface life we
   belong to the things of time, as regards the deepest life, we belong to
   eternity. All the surface springs may run dry. What then? As long as
   there is a deep-seated fountain that comes welling up, the fields will
   be green, and we may laugh at famine and drought. If it be true that
   our lives are hid with Christ in God,' then it ought to be true that
   the nourishments, as well as the direction and impulse of them, are
   drawn from Him, and that we seek not so much for the abundance of the
   things that minister to the external as for the fulness of those that
   sustain the inward, the true life, the life of Christ in the soul.

   The world does not know where that Christian life comes from. If you
   are a Christian, you ought to bear in your character a certain
   indefinable something that will suggest to the people round you that
   the secret power of your life is other than the power which moulds
   theirs. You may be naturalised, and you may speak fairly well the
   language of the country in which you are a sojourner, but there ought
   to be something in your accent which tells where you come from, and
   betrays the foreigner. We ought to move amongst men, having about us
   that which cannot be explained by what is enough to explain their
   lives. A Christian life should be the manifestation to the world of the
   supernatural.

   They know not whence it cometh nor whither it goeth.' No; that new life
   in its feeblest infancy, and before it speaks, if I may so say, is, by
   its very existence, a prophet, and declares that there must be, beyond
   this bank and shoal of time,' a region to which it is native, and in
   which it may grow to maturity. You will find in your greenhouses
   exotics that stand there, after all your pains and coals, stunted, and
   seeming to sigh for the tropical heat which is their home. The earnest
   of our inheritance, the first-fruits of the Spirit, the Christian life
   which originated in, and is sustained by, the flowing of the divine
   life into us, demands that, somehow or other, the stunted plant should
   be lifted and removed into that higher house where these are
   planted'--and what shall be the spread of its branches, and the lustre
   of its leaves, and what the gorgeousness of its blossoms, and what the
   perennial sweetness of its fruits then and there, it doth not yet
   appear.'

   They know not whither it goeth.' And even those who themselves possess
   it know not, nor shall know, through the ages of a progressive
   approximation to the ever-approached and never-attained perfection.
   This spake He of the Holy Ghost, which they that believe on Him should
   receive.' Trust Christ, and the law of the Spirit of Life in Christ
   Jesus shall make you free from the law of sin and death.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE BRAZEN SERPENT

   Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness.'--JOHN iii. 14.

   This is the second of the instances in this Gospel in which our Lord
   lays His hand upon an institution or incident of the Old Testament, as
   shadowing forth some aspect of His work. In the first of these
   instances, under the image of the ladder that Jacob saw, our Lord
   presented Himself as the sole medium of communication between heaven
   and earth; here He goes a step further into the heart of His work, and
   under the image, very eloquent to the Pharisee to whom He was speaking,
   of the brazen serpent lifted up on the pole in the desert, proclaims
   Himself as the medium of healing and of life to a poisoned world.

   Now, Nicodemus has a great many followers to-day. He took up a position
   which many take up. He recognised Christ as a Teacher, and was willing
   to accord to the almost unknown young man from Galilee the coveted
   title of Rabbi.' He came to Him with a little touch of condescension,
   and evidently thought that for him, a ruler of the Jews, a member of
   the upper and educated classes, to be willing to speak of Jesus as a
   Teacher, was an endorsement that the young aspirant might be gratified
   to receive. Rabbi, we know that Thou art a Teacher sent from God'--but
   he stopped there. He is not the only one who compliments Jesus Christ,
   while he degrades Him from His unique position. Now, to this inadequate
   conception of our Lord's Person and work, Christ opposed the solemn
   insistence on the incapacity of human nature as it is, to enter into
   communion with, and submission to, God. And then He passes on to
   speak--in precise parallelism with the position that He took up when He
   likened Himself to the Ladder of Jacob's vision--of Himself as being
   the Son of Man that came down from Heaven, and therefore is able to
   reveal heavenly things. In my text He further unveils in symbol the
   mystery and dignity of His Person and of His work, whilst He speaks of
   a mysterious lifting up of this Son of Man who came down from heaven.
   These are the truths that the conception of Christ as a great Teacher
   needs for its completion; the contrariety of human nature with the
   divine will, the Incarnation of the Son of God, the Crucifixion of the
   Incarnate Son. And so we have here three points, to which I desire to
   turn, as setting forth the conception of His own work which Jesus
   Christ presented as completing the conception of it, to which Nicodemus
   had attained.

   I. There is, first, the lifting up of the Son of Man.

   Now, of course, the sole purpose of setting that brazen serpent on the
   pole was to render it conspicuous, and all that Nicodemus could then
   understand by the symbol was that, in some unknown way, this
   heaven-descended Son of Man should be set forth before Israel and the
   world as being the Healer of all their diseases. But we are wiser,
   after the event, than the ruler of the Jews could be at the threshold
   of Christ's ministry. We have also to remember that this is not the
   only occasion, though it is the first, on which our Lord used this very
   significant expression. For twice over in this Gospel we find it upon
   His lips--once when, addressing the unbelieving multitude, He says When
   ye have lifted up the Son of Man, then shall ye know that I am He'; and
   once when in soliloquy, close on Calvary, He says, as the vision of a
   world flocking to Him rises before Him on occasion of the wish of a few
   Greek proselytes to see Him, I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men
   unto Me.' We do not need, though we have, the Evangelist's commentary,
   this He spake signifying what death He should die.'

   So, if we accept the historical veracity of this Gospel, we here
   perceive Jesus Christ, at the very beginning of His career, and before
   the dispositions of the nation towards Him had developed themselves in
   action, discerning its end, and seeing, gaunt and grim before Him, the
   Cross that was lifted up on Calvary. Enthusiasts and philanthropists
   and apostles of all sorts, in the regions of science and beneficence
   and morals and religion, begin their career with trusting that their
   brethren should have understood' that God was speaking through them.
   But no illusion of that sort, according to these Evangelists, drew
   Jesus Christ out of His seclusion at Nazareth and impelled Him on His
   career. From the beginning He knew that the Cross was to be the end.
   That Cross was not to Him a necessity, accepted as the price of
   faithfulness in doing His work, so that His attitude was, I will speak
   what is in Me, though I die for it,' but it was to Him the very heart
   of the work which He came to do. Therefore, after He had said to the
   ruler of the Jews that the Son of Man, as descended from Heaven, was
   able to speak of heavenly things, He added the deeper necessity, He
   must be lifted up.' Where lay the must'? In the requirement of the work
   which He had set Himself to do. Beneath this great saying there lies a
   pathetic, stern, true conception of the condition of human nature. That
   desert encampment, with the poisoned men dying on every hand, is the
   emblem under which Jesus Christ, the gentlest and the sweetest soul
   that ever lived, looked out upon humanity. And it was because the facts
   of human nature called for something far more than a teacher that He
   said the Son of Man must be lifted up.' For what they needed, and what
   He had set Himself to bring, could only be brought by One who yielded
   Himself up for the sins of the whole world.

   But that must,' which thus arose from the requirements of the task that
   He had set before Him, had its source in His own heart; it was no
   necessity imposed upon Him from without. True, it was a necessity laid
   on Him by filial obedience, but also true, it was the necessity
   accepted by Him in pursuance of the impulse of His own heart. He must
   die because He must save, and He must save because He loved. So He was
   not nailed to the Cross by the nails and hammers of the Roman soldiers,
   and the taunt that was flung at Him as He hung there had a deeper
   meaning, as scoffs thrown at Him and His cause ordinarily have, than
   the scoffers understood: He saved others,' and therefore Himself He
   cannot save.'

   So here we have Christ accepting, as well as discerning, the Cross. And
   we have more than that. We have Christ looking at the Cross as being,
   not humiliation, but exaltation. The Son of Man must be lifted up.' And
   what does that mean? It means the same thing that He said when, near
   the end, He declared, The hour is come that the Son of Man should be
   glorified.' We are accustomed to speak--and we speak rightly--of His
   death as being the lowest point of the humiliation which was inherent
   in the very fact of His humanity. He condescended to be born; He
   stooped yet more to die. But whilst that is true, the other side is
   also true--that in the Cross Christ is lifted up, and that it is His
   Throne. For what see we there? The highest exhibition, the tenderest
   revelation, of His perfect love. And what see we there besides? The
   supreme manifestation of the highest power.


     'Twas great to speak a world from nought,

     'Tis greater to redeem.'

   To save humanity, to make it possible that men should receive that
   second birth, and should enter into the Kingdom of God--that was a
   greater work, because a work not only of creation, but of restoration,
   than it was to send forth the stars on their courses and to preserve'
   the ancient heavens from wrong.' There is a revelation of divine might
   when we lift up our eyes on high,' and see how, because He is great in
   power, not one faileth.' But there is a mightier revelation of divine
   power when we see how, from amidst the ruins of humanity, He can
   restore the divine image, and piece together, as it were, without sign
   of flaw or crack or one fragment wanting, the fair image that was
   shattered into fragments by the blow of Sin's heavy mace. Power in its
   highest operation, power in its tenderest efficacy, power in its widest
   sweep, are set forth on the Cross of Christ, and that weak Man hanging
   there, dying in the dark, is the power of God' as well as the wisdom of
   God.' The Cross is Christ's Throne, but it is His sovereign
   manifestation of love and power only if it is what, as I believe He
   told us it was, and what His servants from His lips caught the
   interpretation of it as being, the death for the sins of the
   sin-stricken world. Unless we can believe that, when He died, He died
   for us, I know not why Christ's death should appeal to our love. But if
   we recognise--as I pray that we all may recognise--that our deep need
   for something far more than Teacher or Pattern has been met in that
   great one Sacrifice for sins for ever,' then the magnetism of the Cross
   begins to tell, and we understand what He meant when He said, I, if I
   be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me.' Brethren, the Cross is His
   Throne, from which He rules the world, and if you strike His sacrifice
   for sins out of your conception of His work, you have robbed Him of
   sovereignty, and taken out of His hand the sceptre by which He governs
   the hearts and wills of rebellious and restored men.

   II. Notice, again, how we have here the look at the uplifted Son of
   Man.

   I do not need to paint for you what your own imaginations can
   sufficiently paint for yourselves--the scene in the wilderness where
   the dying men from the very outskirts of the camp could turn a filmy
   eye to the brazen serpent hanging in their midst. That look is the
   symbol of what we need, in order that the life-giving power of Christ
   should enter into our death. There is no better description of the act
   of Christian faith than that picture of the dying Israelite turning his
   languid eye to the symbol of healing and life. That trust which Jesus
   emphasises here in whosoever believeth on Him,' He opposes very
   emphatically to Nicodemus's confession, We know that Thou art a
   Teacher.' We know--you have to go a step further, Nicodemus! We know';
   well and good, but are you included in whosoever believeth'? Faith is
   an advance on credence. There is an intellectual side to it, but its
   essence is what is the essence of trust always, the act of the will
   throwing itself on that which is discerned to be trustworthy. You know
   that a given man is reliable--that is not relying on him. You have to
   go a step further. And so, dear brethren, you may believe thirty-nine
   or thirty-nine thousand Articles with an unfaltering credence, and you
   may be as far away from faith as if you did not believe one of them.
   There may be a perfect belief and an absolute want of faith. And on the
   other hand, blessed be God! there may be a real and an operative trust
   with a very imperfect or mistaken creed. The wild flowers on the rock
   bloom fair and bright, though they have scarcely any soil in which to
   strike their roots, and the plants in the most fertile garden may fail
   to produce flowers and seed. So trust and credence are not always of
   the same magnitude.

   This trust is no arbitrary condition. The Israelite was bid to turn to
   the brazen serpent. There was no connection between his look and his
   healing, except in so far as the symbol was a help to, and looking at
   it was a test of, his faith in the healing power of God. But it is no
   arbitrary appointment, as many people often think it is, which connects
   inseparably together the look of faith and the eternal life that Christ
   gives. For seeing that salvation is no mere external gift of shutting
   up some outward Hell and opening the door to some outward Heaven, but
   is a state of heart and mind, of relation to God, the only way by which
   that salvation can come into a man's heart is that he, knowing his need
   of it, shall trust Christ, and through Him the new life will flow into
   his heart. Faith is trust, and trust is the stretching out of the hand
   to take the precious gift, the opening of the heart for the influx of
   the grace, the eating of the bread, the drinking of the water, of life.

   It is the only possible condition. God forbid that I should even seem
   to depreciate other forms of healing men's evils and redressing men's
   wrongs, and diminishing the sorrows of humanity! We welcome them all;
   but education, art, culture, refinement, improved environment, bettered
   social and political conditions, whilst they do a great deal, do not go
   down to the bottom of the necessity. And after you have built your
   colleges and art museums and stately pleasure-houses, and set every man
   in an environment that is suited to develop him, you will find out what
   surely the world might have found out already, that, as in some stately
   palace built in the Campagna, the malaria is in the air, and steals in
   at the windows, and infects all the inhabitants. Thank God for all
   these other things! but you cannot heal a man who has poison in his
   veins by administering cosmetics, and you cannot put out Vesuvius with
   a jugful of water. If the camp is to be healed, the Christ must be
   lifted up.

   III. And now, lastly, here we have the life that comes with a look at
   the lifted-up Son of Man.

   Those of you who are using the Revised Version will see that there is a
   little change made here, partly by the exclusion of a clause and partly
   by changing the order of the words. The alteration is not only nearer
   the original text, but brings out a striking thought. It reads that
   whosoever believeth may in Him have eternal life.' Now, it is far too
   late a period of my discourse to enlarge upon all that these great
   words would suggest to us, but let me just, in a sentence or two, mark
   the salient points.

   Eternal life'; do not bring that down to the narrow and inadequate
   conception of unending existence. It involves that, but it means a
   great deal more. It means a life of such a sort as is worth calling
   life, which is a life in union with God, and therefore full of
   blessedness, full of purity, full of satisfaction, full of desire and
   aspiration, and all these with the stamp of unendingness deeply
   impressed upon them. And that is what comes to us through the look. Not
   only is the process of dying arrested, but there is substituted for it
   a new process of growing possession of a new life. You must be born
   again,' Christ had been saying to Nicodemus. The change that passes
   upon a man when once he has anchored his trust on Jesus Christ, the
   uplifted Son of Man, is so profound that it is nothing else than a new
   birth, and a new life comes into his veins untainted by the poison, and
   with no proclivity to death.

   May have eternal life'--now, here, on the instant. That eternal life is
   no future gift to be bestowed upon mortal men when they have passed
   through the agony of death, but it is a gift which comes to us here,
   and may come to any man on the instant of his looking to Jesus Christ.

   May in Him have eternal life'--union with Christ by faith, that
   profound incorporation--if I may use the word--into Him, which the New
   Testament sets forth in all sorts of aspects as the very foundation of
   the blessings of Christianity; that union is the condition of eternal
   life. So, dear brethren, we all need that the poison shall be cast out
   of our veins. We all need that the tendency downwards to a condition
   which can only be described as death may be arrested, and the motion
   reversed. We all need that our knowledge shall be vitalised into faith.
   We all need that the past shall be forgiven, and the power of sin upon
   us in the present shall be cancelled. The blood of Jesus Christ
   cleanseth from all sin,' because it was shed for the remission of the
   sins of the many, and is transfused, an untainted principle of life,
   into our veins. What Jesus said to Nicodemus by night in that quiet
   chamber in Jerusalem, what He said in effect and act upon the Cross,
   when uplifted there, is what He says to each of us from the Throne
   where He is now lifted up: Whosoever believeth shall in Me have eternal
   life.' Take Him at His word, and you will find that it is true.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHRIST'S MUSTS

   . . . Even so must the Son of Man be lifted up.'--JOHN iii. 14.

   I have chosen this text for the sake of one word in it, that solemn
   must' which was so often on our Lord's lips. I have no purpose of
   dealing with the remainder of this clause, nor indeed with it at all,
   except as one instance of His use of the expression. But I have felt it
   might he interesting, and might set old truths in a brighter light, if
   we gather together the instances in which Christ speaks of the great
   necessity which dominated His life, and shaped even small acts.

   The expression is most frequently used in reference to the Passion and
   Resurrection. There are many instances in the Gospels, in which He
   speaks of that must. The first of these is that of my text. Then there
   is another class, of which His word to His mother when a
   twelve-year-old child may be taken as a type: Wist ye not that I must
   be about My Father's business?' where the mysterious consciousness of a
   special relation to God in the child's heart drew Him to the Temple and
   to His Father's work. Other similar instances are those in which He
   responded to the multitude when they wanted to keep Him to themselves:
   I must preach in other cities also'; or as when He said, I must work
   the works of Him that sent Me while it is day.'

   Yet another aspect of the same necessity is presented when, looking far
   beyond the earthly work and suffering, He discerned the future triumph
   which was to be the issue of these, and said, Other sheep I have . . .
   them also I must bring.'

   And yet another is in reference to a very small matter: His selection
   of a place for a few hours' rest on His last fateful journey to
   Jerusalem, when He said, Zaccheus, . . . to-day I must abide at thy
   house.'

   Now, if we put these instances together, we shall get some precious
   glimpses into our Lord's heart, and His view of life.

   I. Here we see Christ recognising and accepting the necessity for His
   death.

   My text, if we accept John's Gospel, contributes an altogether new
   element to our conception of our Lord as announcing His death. For the
   other three Gospels lay emphasis on it as being part of His teaching,
   especially during the later stage of His ministry. But it does not
   follow that He began to think about it or to see it, when He began to
   speak about it. There are reasons for the earlier comparative
   reticence, and there is no ground for the conclusion that then first
   began to dawn upon a disappointed enthusiast the grim reality that His
   work was not going to prosper, and that martyrdom was necessary. That
   is a notion that has been frequently upheld of late years, but to me it
   seems altogether incongruous with the facts of the case. And, if John's
   Gospel is a true record, that theory is shivered against this text,
   which represents Him at the very beginning of His career--the time
   when, according to that other theory, He was full of the usual buoyant
   and baseless anticipations of a reformer commencing His course--as
   telling Nicodemus, Even so must the Son of Man be lifted up.' In like
   manner, in the previous chapter of this same Gospel, we have the
   significant though enigmatical utterance: Destroy this Temple, and in
   three days I will raise it up'; with the Evangelist's authoritative
   comment: He spake of the Temple of His body.' So, from the beginning of
   His career, the end was clear before Him.

   And why must He go to the Cross? Not merely, as the other Evangelists
   put it, in order that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the
   prophets.' It was not that Jesus must die because the prophets had said
   that Messiah should, but that the prophets had said that Messiah should
   because Jesus must. There was a far deeper necessity than the
   fulfilment of any prophetic utterance, even the necessity which shaped
   that utterance. The work of Jesus Christ could not be done unless He
   died. He could not be the Saviour of the world unless He was the
   sacrifice for the sins of the world.

   We cannot see all the grounds of that solemn imperative, but this we
   can see, that it was because of the requirements of the divine
   righteousness, and because of the necessities of sinful men. And so
   Christ's was no martyr's death, who had to die as the penalty of the
   faithful discharge of His duty. It was not the penalty that He paid for
   doing His work, but it was the work itself. Not that gracious life, nor
   the loveliness of perfect deeds,' nor His words of sweet wisdom, nor
   His acts of transcendent power, equalled only by the pity that moved
   the power, completed His task, but He came to give His life a ransom
   for many.'

   Must' is a hard word. It may express an unwelcome necessity. Was this
   necessity unwelcome? When He said, The Son of Man must be lifted up,'
   was He shrinking, or reluctantly submitting? Ah, no! He must die
   because He would save, and He would save because He did love. His
   filial obedience to God coincided with His pity for men: and not merely
   in obedience to the requirements of the divine righteousness, but in
   compassion for the necessities of sinners, necessity was laid upon Him.

   Oh, brethren! nothing held Christ to the Cross but His own desire to
   save us. Neither priests nor Romans carried Him thither. What fastened
   Him to it was not the nails driven by rude hands. And the reason why He
   did not, as the taunters bade Him do, come down from it, was neither a
   physical nor a moral necessity unwelcome to Himself, but the yielding
   of His own will to do all which was needed for man's salvation.

   This sacrifice was bound to the altar by the cords of love. We have
   heard of martyrs who have refused to be tied to the stake, and have
   kept themselves motionless in the centre of the fierce flames by the
   force of their wills. Jesus Christ fastened Himself to the Cross and
   died because He would.

   And, oh! if we think of that sweet, serene life as having clear before
   it from the very first steps that grim end, how infinitely it gains in
   pathetic beauty and in heart-touchingness! What wonderful
   self-abnegation! How he was at leisure from Himself, with a heart of
   pity for every sorrow, and loins girt for all service, though during
   all His life the Cross closed the vista! Think that human shrinking was
   felt by Him, think that it was so held back that His purpose never
   faltered, think that each of us may say, He must die because He would
   save me'; and then ask, What shall I render to the Lord for all His
   benefits toward me?'

   II. In a second class of these utterances, we see Christ impelled by
   filial obedience and the consciousness of His mission.

   Wist ye not that I must be about My Father's business?' That was a
   strange utterance for a boy of twelve. It seems to negative the
   supposition that what is called the Messianic consciousness' dawned
   upon Jesus Christ first after His baptism and the descent of the
   Spirit. But however that may be, it and the similar passages to which I
   have already referred, bearing upon His discharge of His work prior to
   His death, teach that the necessity was an inward necessity springing
   from His consciousness of Sonship, and His recognition of the work that
   He had to do. And so He is our great Example of spontaneous obedience,
   which does violence to itself if it does not obey. It was instinct that
   sent the boy into the Temple. Where should a Son be but in His Father's
   house? How could He not be doing His Father's business?

   Thus He stands before us, the pattern for the only obedience that is
   worth calling so, the obedience which would be pained and ill at ease
   unless it were doing the work of God. Religion is meant to make it a
   second nature, or, as I have ventured to call it, an instinct--a
   spontaneous, uncalculating, irrepressible desire--to be in fellowship
   with God, and to be doing His will. That is the meaning of our
   Christianity. There is no obedience in reluctant obedience; forced
   service is slavery, not service. Christianity is given for the specific
   purpose that it may bring us so into touch with Jesus Christ as that
   the mind which was in Him may be in us; and that we too may be able to
   say, with a kind of wonder that people should have expected to find us
   in any other place, or doing anything else, Wist ye not that because I
   am a Son, I must be about my Father's business?' As certainly as the
   sunflower follows the sun, so certainly will a man animated by the mind
   that was in Jesus Christ, like Him find his very life's breath in doing
   the Father's will.

   So then, brethren, what about our grudging service? What about our
   reluctant obedience? What about the widespread mistake that religion
   prohibits wished-for things and enforces unwelcome duties? If my
   Christianity does not make me recoil from what it forbids, and spring
   eagerly to what it commends, my Christianity is of very little use. If
   when in the Temple we are like idle boys in school, always casting
   glances at the clock and the door, and wishing ourselves outside, we
   may just as well be out as in. Glad obedience is true obedience. Only
   he who can say, Thy law is within my heart, and I do Thy will because I
   love Thee, and cannot but do as Thou desirest,' has found the joy
   possible to a Christian life. It is not harsh and crabbed,' as those
   that look upon it from the outside may suppose,' but musical and full
   of sweetness. There is nothing more blessed than when I choose' covers
   exactly the same ground as I ought.' And when duty is delight, delight
   will never become disgust, nor joy pass away.

   III. We see, in yet another use of this great must,' Christ
   anticipating His future triumph.

   Other sheep I have which are not of this fold; them also I must bring,
   and there shall be one flock and one Shepherd.' Striking as these words
   are in themselves, they are still more striking when we notice their
   connection; for they follow immediately upon His utterance about laying
   down His life for the sheep. So, then, this was a work beyond the
   Cross, and whatever it was, it was to be done after He had died.

   I need not point out to you how far afield Christ's vision goes out
   into the dim, waste places, where on the dark mountains the straying
   sheep are torn and frightened and starving. I need not dwell upon how
   far ahead in the future His glance travels, or how magnificent and how
   rebuking to our petty narrowness this great word is. There shall be one
   flock' (not fold); and they shall be one, not because they are within
   the bounds of any visible fold,' but because they are gathered round
   the one Shepherd, and in their common relation to Him are knit together
   in unity.

   But what sort of a Man is this who considers that His widest work is to
   be done by Him after He is dead? Them also I must bring.' Thou? how?
   when? Surely such words as these, side by side with a clear prevision
   of the death that was so soon to come, are either meaningless or the
   utterance of an arrogance bordering on insanity, or they anticipate
   what an Evangelist declares did take place--that the Lord was taken up
   into heaven and sat at the right hand of God,' whilst His servants went
   everywhere preaching the Word, the Lord also working with them and
   confirming the Word' with the signs He wrought.

   Them also I must bring.' That is not merely a necessity rooted in the
   nature of God and the wants of men. It is not merely a necessity
   springing from Christ's filial obedience and sense of a mission; but it
   is a must' of destiny, a must' which recognises the sure results of His
   passion; a must' which implies the power of the Cross to be the
   reconciliation of the world. And so for all pessimistic thoughts
   to-day, or at any time, and when Christian men's hearts may be
   trembling for the Ark of God--although, perhaps, there may be little
   reason for the tremor--and in the face of all blatant antagonisms and
   of proud Goliaths despising the foolishness of preaching,' we fall back
   upon Christ's great must.' It is written in the councils of Heaven more
   unchangeably than the heavens; it is guaranteed by the power of the
   Cross; it is certain, by the eternal life of the crucified Saviour,
   that He will one day be the King of humanity, and must bring His
   wandering sheep to couch in peace, one flock round one Shepherd.

   IV. Lastly, we have Christ applying the greatest principle to the
   smallest duty.

   Zaccheus! make haste and come down; to-day I must abide in thy house.'
   Why must He? Because Zaccheus was to be saved, and was worth saving.
   What was the must'? To stop for an hour or two on His road to the
   Cross. So He teaches us that in a life penetrated by the thought of the
   divine will, which we gladly obey, there are no things too great, and
   none too trivial, to be brought under the dominion of that law, and to
   be regulated by that divine necessity. Obedience is obedience, whether
   in large things or in small. There is no scale of magnitude applicable
   to the distinction between God's will and that which is not God's will.
   Gravitation rules the motes that dance in the sunshine as well as the
   mass of Jupiter. A triangle with its apex in the sun, and its base
   beyond the solar system, has the same properties and comes under the
   same laws as one that a schoolboy scrawls upon his slate. God's truth
   is not too great to rule the smallest duties. The star in the East was
   a guide to the humble house at Bethlehem, and there are starry truths
   high in the heavens that avail for our guidance in the smallest acts of
   life.

   So, brethren, bring your doings under that all-embracing law of
   duty--duty, which is the heathen expression for the will of God. There
   are great regions of life in which lower necessities have play.
   Circumstances, our past, bias and temper, relationship, friendship,
   civic duty, and the like--all these bring their necessities; but let us
   think of them all as being, what indeed they are, manifestations to us
   of the will of our Father. There are great tracts of life in which
   either of two courses may be right, and we are left to the decision of
   choice rather than of duty; but high above all these, let us see
   towering that divine necessity. It is a daily struggle to bring I will'
   to coincide with I ought'; and there is only one adequate and always
   powerful way of securing that coincidence, and that is to keep close to
   Jesus Christ and to drink in His spirit. Then, when duty and delight
   are conterminous, the rough places will be plain, and the crooked
   things straight, and every mountain shall be brought low, and every
   valley shall be exalted,' and life will be blessed, and service will be
   freedom. Joy and liberty and power and peace will fill our hearts when
   this is the law of our being; All that the Lord hath spoken, that must
   I do.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE LAKE AND THE RIVER

   God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that
   whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting
   life.'--JOHN iii. 16.

   I venture to say that my text shows us a lake, a river, a pitcher, and
   a draught. God so loved the world'--that is the lake. A lake makes a
   river for itself--God so loved the world that He gave His . . . Son.'
   But the river does not quench any one's thirst unless he has something
   to lift the water with: God so loved the world that He gave His . . .
   Son, that whosoever believeth on Him.' Last comes the draught: shall
   not perish, but have everlasting life.'

   I. The great lake, God's love.

   Before Jesus Christ came into this world no one ever dreamt of saying
   God loves.' Some of the Old Testament psalmists had glimpses of that
   truth and came pretty near expressing it. But among all the gods many
   and lords many,' there were lustful gods and beautiful gods, and idle
   gods, and fighting gods and peaceful gods: but not one of whom
   worshippers said, He loves.' Once it was a new and almost incredible
   message, but we have grown accustomed to it, and it is not strange any
   more to us. But if we would try to think of what it means, the whole
   truth would flash up into fresh newness, and all the miseries and
   sorrows and perplexities of our lives would drift away down the wind,
   and we should be no more troubled with them. God loves' is the greatest
   thing that can be said by lips.

   God . . . loved the world.' Now when we speak of loving a number of
   individuals--the broader the stream, the shallower it is, is it not?
   The most intense patriot in England does not love her one
   ten-thousandth part as well as he loves his own little girl. When we
   think or feel anything about a great multitude of people, it is like
   looking at a forest. We do not see the trees, we see the whole wood.
   But that is not how God loves the world. Suppose I said that I loved
   the people in India, I should not mean by that that I had any feeling
   about any individual soul of all those dusky millions, but only that I
   massed them all together; or made what people call a generalisation of
   them. But that is not the way in which God loves. He loves all because
   He loves each. And when we say, God so loved the world,' we have to
   break up the mass into its atoms, and to think of each atom as being an
   object of His love. We all stand out in God's love just as we should do
   to one another's eyes, if we were on the top of a mountain-ridge with a
   clear sunset sky behind us. Each little black dot of the long
   procession would be separately visible. And we all stand out like that,
   every man of us isolated, and getting as much of the love of God as if
   there was not another creature in the whole universe but God and
   ourselves. Have you ever realised that when we say, He loved the
   world,' that really means, as far as each of us is concerned, He loves
   me? And just as the whole beams of the sun come pouring down into every
   eye of the crowd that is looking up to it, so the whole love of God
   pours down, not upon a multitude, an abstraction, a community, but upon
   every single soul that makes up that community. He loves us all because
   He loves us each. We shall never get all the good of that thought until
   we translate it, and lay it upon our hearts. It is all very well to
   say, Ah yes! God is love,' and it is all very well to say He loves the
   world.' But I will tell you what is a great deal better--to say--what
   Paul said--Who loved me and gave Himself for me.'

   Now, there is one other suggestion that I would make to you before I go
   on, and that is that all through the New Testament, but especially in
   John's Gospel, the world' does not only mean men, but sinful men, men
   separated from God. And the great and blessed truth taught here is
   that, however I may drag myself away from God, I cannot drive Him away
   from me, and that however little I may care for Him, or love Him, or
   think about Him, it does not make one hairs-breadth of difference as to
   the fact that He loves me. I know, of course, that if a man does not
   love Him back again, God's love has to take shapes that it would not
   otherwise take, which may be extremely inconvenient for the man. But
   though the shape may alter, must alter, the fact remains; and every
   sinful soul on the earth, including Judas Iscariot--who is said to head
   the list of crimes--has God's love resting upon him.

   II. The river.

   Now, to go back to my metaphor, the lake makes a river. God so loved
   the world that He gave His only begotten Son.'

   So then, it was not Christ's death that turned God from hating and
   being angry, but it was God's love that appointed Christ's death. If
   you will only remember that, a great many of the shallow and popular
   objections to the great doctrine of the Atonement disappear at once.
   God so loved . . . that He gave.' But some people say that when we
   preach that Jesus Christ died for our sins, that God's wrath might not
   fall upon men, our teaching is immoral, because it means Christ came,
   and so God loved.' It is the other way about, friend. God so loved
   . . . that He gave.'

   But now let me carry you back to the Old Testament. Do you remember the
   story of the father taking his boy who carried the bundle of wood and
   the fire, and tramping over the mountains till they reached the place
   where the sacrifice was to be offered? Do you remember the boy's
   question that brings tears quickly to the reader's eyes: Here is the
   wood, and here is the fire, where is the lamb'? Do you not think it
   would be hard for the father to steady his voice and say, My son, God
   will provide the lamb'? And do you remember the end of that story? The
   Angel of the Lord said unto Abraham, Because thou hast done this thing,
   and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from Me, therefore
   blessing I will bless thee,' etc. Remember that one of the Apostles
   said, using the very same word that is used in Genesis as to Abraham's
   giving up his son to God, He spared not His own Son, but delivered Him
   up to the death for us all.' Does not that point to a mysterious
   parallel? Somehow or other--we have no right to attempt to say
   how--somehow or other, God not only sent His Son, as it is said in the
   next verse to my text, but far more tenderly, wonderfully,
   pathetically, God gave--gave up His Son, and the sacrifice was
   enhanced, because it was His only begotten Son.

   Ah! dear brethren, do not let us be afraid of following out all that is
   included in that great word, God . . . loved the world.' For there is
   no love which does not delight in giving, and there is no love that
   does not delight in depriving itself, in some fashion, of what it
   gives. And I, for my part, believe that Paul's words are to be taken in
   all their blessed depth and wonderfulness of meaning when he says, He
   gave up'--as well as gave--Him to the death for us all.'

   And now, do you not think that we are able in some measure to estimate
   the greatness of that little word so'? God so loved'--so deeply, so
   holily, so perfectly--that He gave His only begotten Son'; and the gift
   of that Son is, as it were, the river by which the love of God comes to
   every soul in the world.

   Now there are a great many people who would like to put the middle part
   of this great text of ours into a parenthesis. They say that we should
   bring the first words and the last words of this text together, and
   never mind all that lies between. People who do not like the doctrine
   of the Cross would say, God so loved the world that He gave . . .
   everlasting life'; and there an end. If there is a God, and if He loves
   the world, why cannot He save the world without more ado? There is no
   need for these interposed clauses. God so loved the world that
   everybody will go to heaven'--that is the gospel of a great many of
   you; and it is the gospel of a great many wise and learned people. But
   it is not John's Gospel, and it is not Christ's Gospel. The beginning
   and the end of the text cannot be buckled up together in that
   rough-and-ready fashion. They have to be linked by a chain; and there
   are two links in the chain: God forges the one, and we have to forge
   the other. God so loved the world that He gave'--then He has done His
   work. That whosoever believeth'--that is your work. And it is in vain
   that God forges His link, unless you will forge yours and link it up to
   His. God so loved the world,' that is step number one in the process;
   that He gave,' that is step number two; and then there comes another
   that'--that whosoever believeth,' that is step number three; and they
   are all needed before you come to number four, which is the
   landing-place and not a step--should not perish, but have everlasting
   life.'

   III. The pitcher.

   I come to what I called the pitcher, with which we draw the water for
   our own use--that whosoever believeth.' You perhaps say, Yes, I
   believe. I accept every word of the Gospel, I quite believe that Jesus
   Christ died, as a matter of history; and I quite believe that He died
   for men's sins.' And what then? Is that what Jesus Christ meant by
   believing? To believe about Him is not to believe on Him; and unless
   you believe on Him you will get no good out of Him. There is the lake,
   and the river must flow past the shanties in the clearing in the
   forest, if the men there are to drink. But it may flow past their
   doors, as broad as the Mississippi, and as deep as the ocean; but they
   will perish with thirst, unless they dip in their hands, like Gideon's
   men, and carry the water to their own lips. Dear friend, what you have
   to do--and your soul's salvation, and your peace and joy and nobleness
   in this life and in the next depend absolutely upon it--is simply to
   trust in Jesus Christ and His death for your sins.

   I sometimes wish we had never heard that word faith.' For as soon as we
   begin to talk about faith,' people begin to think that we are away up
   in some theological region far above everyday life. Suppose we try to
   bring it down a little nearer to our businesses and bosoms, and instead
   of using a word that is kept sacred for employment in religious
   matters, and saying faith,' we say trust.' That is what you give to
   your wives and husbands, is it not? And that is exactly what you have
   to give to Jesus Christ, simply to lay hold of Him as a man lays hold
   of the heart that loves him, and leans his whole weight upon it. Lean
   hard on Him, hang on Him, or, to take the other metaphor that is one of
   the Old Testament words for trust, flee for refuge' to Him. Fancy a man
   with the avenger of blood at his back, and the point of the pursuer's
   spear almost pricking his spine--don't you think he would make for the
   City of Refuge with some speed? That is what you have to do. He that
   believeth, and by trust lays hold of the Hand that holds him up, will
   never fall; and he that does not lay hold of that Hand will never
   stand, to say nothing of rising. And so by these two links God's love
   of the world is connected with the salvation of the world.

   IV. The draught.

   Finally, we have here the draught of living water. Did you ever think
   why our text puts should not perish' first? Is it not because, unless
   we put our trust in Him, we shall certainly perish, and because,
   therefore, that certainty of perishing must be averted before we can
   have everlasting life'?

   Now I am not going to enlarge on these two solemn expressions,
   perishing' and everlasting life.' I only say this: men do not need to
   wait until they die before they perish.' There are men and women here
   now who are dead--dead while they live, and when they come to die, the
   perishing, which is condemnation and ruin, will only be the making
   visible, in another condition of life, of what is the fact to-day. Dear
   brethren, you do not need to die in order to perish in your sins, and,
   blessed be God, you can have everlasting life before you die. You can
   have it now, and there is only one way to have it, and that is to lay
   hold of Him who is the Life. And when you have Jesus Christ in your
   heart, whom you will be sure to have if you trust Him, then you will
   have life--life eternal, here and now, and death will only make
   manifest the eternal life which you had while you were alive here, and
   will perfect it in fashions that we do not yet know anything about.

   Only remember, as I have been trying to show you, the order that runs
   through this text. Remember the order of these last words, and that we
   must first of all be delivered from eternal and utter death, before we
   can be invested with the eternal and absolute life.

   Now, dear brethren, I dare say I have never spoken to the great
   majority of you before; it is quite possible I may never speak to any
   of you again. I have asked God to help me to speak so as that souls
   should be drawn to the Saviour. And I beseech you now, as my last word,
   that you would listen, not to me, but to Him. For it is He that says to
   us, God so loved the world, that He gave His Son, that
   whosoever'--whosoever,' a blank cheque, like the M. or N. of the
   Prayer-book, or the A. B. of a schedule; you can put your own name in
   it--that whosoever believeth on Him shall not perish, but have'--here,
   now--everlasting life.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE WEARIED CHRIST

   Jesus therefore, being wearied with His journey, sat thus on the well.
   . . . He said unto them, I have meat to eat that ye know not of.'--JOHN
   iv. 6, 32.

   Two pictures result from these two verses, each striking in itself, and
   gaining additional emphasis by the contrast. It was during a long hot
   day's march that the tired band of pedestrians turned into the fertile
   valley. There, whilst the disciples went into the little hill-village
   to purchase, if they could, some food from the despised inhabitants,
   Jesus, apparently too exhausted to accompany them, sat thus on the
   well.' That little word thus seems to have a force difficult to
   reproduce in English. It is apparently intended to enhance the idea of
   utter weariness, either because the word wearied' is in thought to be
   supplied, sat, being thus wearied, on the well'; or because it conveys
   the notion which might be expressed by our just as He was'; as a tired
   man flings Himself down anywhere and anyhow, without any kind of
   preparation beforehand, and not much caring where it is that he rests.

   Thus, utterly worn out, Jesus Christ sits on the well, whilst the
   western sun lengthens out the shadows on the plain. The disciples come
   back, and what a change they find. Hunger gone, exhaustion ended, fresh
   vigour in their wearied Master. What had made the difference? The
   woman's repentance and joy. And He unveils the secret of His
   reinvigoration when He says, I have meat to eat that ye know not
   of'--the hidden manna. My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me,
   and to finish His work.'

   Now, I think if we take just three points of view, we shall gain the
   lessons of this remarkable contrast. Note, then, the wearied Christ;
   the devoted Christ; the reinvigorated Christ.

   I. The wearied Christ.

   How precious it is to us that this Gospel, which has the loftiest
   things to say about the manifest divinity of our Lord, and the glory
   that dwelt in Him, is always careful to emphasise also the manifest
   limitations and weaknesses of the Manhood. John never forgets either
   term of his great sentence in which all the gospel is condensed, the
   Word became flesh.' Ever he shows us the Word'; ever the flesh.' Thus
   it is he only who records the saying on the Cross, I thirst.' It is he
   who tells us how Jesus Christ, not merely for the sake of getting a
   convenient opening of a conversation, or to conciliate prejudices, but
   because He needed what He asked, said to the woman of Samaria, Give Me
   to drink.' So the weariness of the Master stands forth for us as
   pathetic proof that it was no shadowy investiture with an apparent
   Manhood to which He stooped, but a real participation in our
   limitations and weaknesses, so that work to Him was fatigue, even
   though in Him dwelt the manifest glory of that divine nature which
   fainteth not, neither is weary.'

   Not only does this pathetic incident teach us for our firmer faith, and
   more sympathetic and closer apprehension, the reality of the Manhood of
   Jesus Christ, but it supplies likewise some imperfect measure of His
   love, and reveals to us one condition of His power. Ah! if He had not
   Himself known weariness He never could have said, Come unto Me, all ye
   that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' It was
   because Himself took our infirmities,' and amongst these the weakness
   of tired muscles and exhausted frame, that He giveth power to the
   faint, and to them that have no might He increaseth strength.' The
   Creator must have no share in the infirmities of the creature. It must
   be His unwearied power that calls them all by their names; and because
   He is great in might not one' of the creatures of His hand can fail.'
   But the Redeemer must participate in that from which He redeems; and
   the condition of His strength being made perfect in our weakness' is
   that our weakness shall have cast a shadow upon the glory of His
   strength. The measure of His love is seen in that, long before Calvary,
   He entered into the humiliation and sufferings and sorrows of humanity;
   a condition of His power is seen in that, forasmuch as the children
   were partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part
   of the same,' not only that through death He might deliver' from death,
   but that in life He might redeem from the ills and sorrows of life.

   Nor does that exhausted Figure, reclining on Jacob's Well, preach to us
   only what He was. It proclaims to us likewise what we should be. For if
   His work was carried on to the edge of His capacity, and if He shrank
   not from service because it involved toil, what about the professing
   followers of Jesus Christ, who think that they are exempted from any
   form of service because they can plead that it will weary them? What
   about those who say that they tread in His footsteps, and have never
   known what it was to yield up one comfort, one moment of leisure, one
   thrill of enjoyment, or to encounter one sacrifice, one act of
   self-denial, one aching of weariness for the sake of the Lord who bore
   all for them? The wearied Christ proclaims His manhood, proclaims His
   divinity and His love, and rebukes us who consent to walk in the way of
   His commandments' only on condition that it can be done without dust or
   heat; and who are ready to run the race that is set before us, only if
   we can come to the goal without perspiration or turning a hair. Jesus,
   being wearied with His journey, sat thus on the well.'

   II. Still further, notice here the devoted Christ.

   It is not often that He lets us have a glimpse into the innermost
   chambers of His heart, in so far as the impelling motives of His course
   are concerned. But here He lays them bare. My meat is to do the will of
   Him that sent Me, and to finish His work.'

   Now, it is no mere piece of grammatical pedantry when I ask you to
   notice that the language of the original is so constructed as to give
   prominence to the idea that the aim of Christ's life was the doing of
   the Father's will; and that it is the aim rather than the actual
   performance and realisation of the aim which is pointed at by our Lord.
   The words would be literally rendered My meat is that I may do the will
   of Him that sent Me and finish His work'--that is to say, the very
   nourishment and refreshment of Christ was found in making the
   accomplishment of the Father's commandment His ever-impelling motive,
   His ever-pursued goal. The expression carries us into the inmost heart
   of Jesus, dealing, as it does, with the one all-pervading motive rather
   than with the resulting actions, fair and holy as these were.

   Brethren, the secret of our lives, if they are at all to be worthy and
   noble, must be the same--the recognition, not only as they say now,
   that we have a mission, but that there is a Sender; which is a wholly
   different view of our position, and that He who sends is the loving
   Father, who has spoken to us in that dear Son, who Himself made it His
   aim thus to obey, in order that it might be possible for us to re-echo
   His voice, and to repeat His aim. The recognition of the Sender, the
   absolute submission of our wills to His, must run through all the life.
   You may do your daily work, whatever it be, with this for its motto,
   the will of the Lord be done'; and they who thus can look at their
   trade, or profession, and see the trivialities and monotonies of their
   daily occupations, in the transfiguring light of that great thought,
   will never need to complain that life is small, ignoble, wearisome,
   insignificant. As with pebbles in some clear brook with the sunshine on
   it, the water in which they are sunk glorifies and magnifies them. If
   you lift them out, they are but bits of dull stone; lying beneath the
   sunlit ripples they are jewels. Plunge the prose of your life, and all
   its trivialities, into that great stream, and it will magnify and
   glorify the smallest and the homeliest. Absolute submission to the
   divine will, and the ever-present thrilling consciousness of doing it,
   were the secret of Christ's life, and ought to be the secret of ours.

   Note the distinction between doing the will and perfecting the work.
   That implies that Jesus Christ, like us, reached forward, in each
   successive act of obedience to the successive manifestations of the
   Father's will, to something still undone. The work will never be
   perfected or finished except on condition of continual fulfilment,
   moment by moment, of the separate behests of that divine will. For the
   Lord, as for His servants, this was the manner of obedience, that He
   pressed towards the mark,' and by individual acts of conformity secured
   that at last the whole work' should have been so completely
   accomplished that He might be able to say upon the Cross, It is
   finished.' If we have any right to call ourselves His, we too have thus
   to live.

   III. Lastly, notice the reinvigorated Christ.

   I have already pointed out the lovely contrast between the two
   pictures, the beginning and the end of this incident; so I need not
   dwell upon that. The disciples wondered when they found that Christ
   desired and needed none of the homely sustenance that they had brought
   to Him. And when He answered their sympathy rather than their
   curiosity--for they did not ask Him any questions, but they said to
   Him, Master, eat'--with I have meat to eat that ye know not of,' they,
   in their blind, blundering fashion, could only imagine that some one
   had brought Him something. So they gave occasion for the great words
   upon which we have been touching.

   Notice, however, that Christ here sets forth the lofty aim at
   conformity to the divine will and fulfilment of the divine Work as
   being the meat of the soul. It is the true food for us all. The spirit
   which feeds upon such food will grow and be nourished. And the soul
   which feeds upon its own will and fancies, and not upon the plain brown
   bread of obedience, which is wholesome, though it be often bitter, will
   feed upon ashes, which will grate upon the teeth and hurt the palate.
   Such a soul will be like those wretched infants that are discovered
   sometimes at baby-farms,' starved and stunted, and not grown to half
   their right size. If you would have your spirits strong, robust, well
   nourished, live by obedience, and let the will of God be the food of
   your souls, and all will be well.

   Souls thus fed can do without a good deal that others need. Why,
   enthusiasm for anything lifts a man above physical necessities and
   lower desires, even in its poorest forms. A regiment of soldiers making
   a forced march, or an athlete trying to break the record, will tramp,
   tramp on, not needing food, or rest, or sleep, until they have achieved
   their purpose, poor and ignoble though it may be. In all regions of
   life, enthusiasm and lofty aims make the soul lord of the body and of
   the world.

   And in the Christian life we shall be thus lords, exactly in proportion
   to the depth and earnestness of our desires to do the will of God. They
   who thus are fed can afford to scorn delights and live laborious days.'
   They who thus are fed can afford to do with plain living, if there be
   high impulses as well as high thinking. And sure I am that nothing is
   more certain to stamp out the enthusiasm of obedience which ought to
   mark the Christian life than the luxurious fashion of living which is
   getting so common to-day amongst professing Christians.

   It is not in vain that we read the old story about the Jewish boys
   whose faces were radiant and whose flesh was firmer when they were fed
   on pulse and water than on all the wine and dainties of the Babylonish
   court. Set a knife to thy throat if thou be a man given to appetite,'
   and let us remember that the less we use, and the less we feel that we
   need, of outward goods, the nearer do we approach to the condition in
   which holy desires and lofty aims will visit our spirits.

   I commend to you, brethren, the story of our text, in its most literal
   application, as well as in the loftier spiritual lessons that may be
   drawn from it. To be near Christ, and to desire to live for Him,
   delivers us from dependence upon earthly things; and in those who thus
   do live the old word shall be fulfilled, Better is a little that a
   righteous man hath, than the abundance of many wicked.'
     __________________________________________________________________

GIVE ME TO DRINK'

   . . . Jesus saith unto her, Give Me to drink . . . . Jesus saith unto
   her, I that speak unto thee am He.'--JOHN iv. 7, 26.

   This Evangelist very significantly sets side by side our Lord's
   conversations with Nicodemus and with the woman of Samaria. The persons
   are very different: the one a learned Rabbi of reputation, influence,
   and large theological knowledge of the then fashionable kind; the other
   an alien woman, poor--for she had to do this menial task of
   water-drawing in the heat of the day--and of questionable character.

   The diversity of persons necessitates great differences in the form of
   our Lord's address to each; but the resemblances are as striking as the
   divergencies. In both we have His method of gradually unveiling the
   truth to a susceptible soul, beginning with symbol and a hint,
   gradually enlarging the hint and translating the symbol; and finally
   unveiling Himself as the Giver and the Gift. There is another
   resemblance; in both the characteristic gift is that of the Spirit of
   Life, and, perhaps, in both the symbol is the same. For we read in one
   of water and the Spirit'; and in the other of the fountain within,
   springing into everlasting life. However that may be, the process of
   teaching is all but identical in substance in both cases, though in
   form so various.

   The words of our Lord which I have taken for our text now are His first
   and last utterance in this conversation. What a gulf lies between! They
   are linked together by the intervening sayings, and constitute with
   these a great ladder, of which the foot is fast on earth, and the top
   fixed in heaven. On the one hand, He owns the lowest necessities; on
   the other, He makes the highest claims. Let us ponder on this
   remarkable juxtaposition, and try to gather the lessons that are plain
   in it.

   I. First, then, I think we see here the mystery of the dependent
   Christ.

   Give Me to drink': I am He.' Try to see the thing for a moment with the
   woman's eyes. She comes down from her little village, up amongst the
   cliffs on the hillside, across the narrow, hot valley, beneath the
   sweltering sunshine reflected from the bounding mountains, and she
   finds, in the midst of the lush vegetation round the ancient well, a
   solitary, weary Jew, travel-worn, evidently exhausted--for His
   disciples had gone away to buy food, and He was too wearied to go with
   them--looking into the well, but having no dipper or vessel by which to
   get any of its cool treasure. We lose a great deal of the meaning of
   Christ's request if we suppose that it was merely a way of getting into
   conversation with the woman, a breaking of the ice.' It was a great
   deal more than that. It was the utterance of a felt and painful
   necessity, which He Himself could not supply without a breach of what
   He conceived to be His filial dependence. He could have brought water
   out of the well. He did not need to depend upon the pitcher that the
   disciples had perhaps unthinkingly carried away with them when they
   went to buy bread. He did not need to ask the woman to give, but He
   chose to do so. We lose much if we do not see in this incident far more
   than the woman saw, but we lose still more if we do not see what she
   did see. And the words which the Master spoke to her are no mere way of
   introducing a conversation on religious themes; but He asked for a
   draught which He needed, and which He had no other way of getting.

   So, then, here stands, pathetically set forth before us, our Lord's
   true participation in two of the distinguishing characteristics of our
   weak humanity--subjection to physical necessities and dependence on
   kindly help. We find Him weary, hungry, thirsty, sometimes slumbering.
   And all these instances are documents and proofs for us that He was a
   true man like ourselves, and that, like ourselves, He depended on the
   woman that ministered to Him' for the supply of His necessities, and so
   knew the limitations of our social and else helpless humanity.

   But then a wearied and thirsty man is nothing of much importance. But
   here is a Man who humbled Himself to be weary and to thirst. The
   keynote of this Gospel, the one thought which unlocks all its
   treasures, and to the elucidation of which, in all its aspects, the
   whole book is devoted, is, The Word was made flesh.' Only when you let
   in the light of the last utterance of our text, I that speak unto thee
   am He,' do we understand the pathos, the sublimity, the depth and
   blessedness of meaning which lie in the first one, Give Me to drink.'
   When we see that He bowed Himself, and willingly stretched out His
   hands for the fetters, we come to understand the significance of these
   traces of His manhood. The woman says, with wonder, How is it that
   Thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me?' and that was wonderful. But, as
   He hints to her, if she had known more clearly who this Person was,
   that seemed to be a Jew, a deeper wonder would have crept over her
   spirit. The wonder is that the Eternal Word should need the water of
   the well, and should ask it of a poor human creature.

   And why this humiliation? He could, as I have said, have wrought a
   miracle. He that fed five thousand, He that had turned water into wine
   at the rustic marriage-feast, would have had no difficulty in quenching
   His thirst if he had chosen to use His miraculous power therefore. But
   He here shows us that the true filial spirit will rather die than cast
   off its dependence on the Father, and the same motive which led Him to
   reject the temptation in the wilderness, and to answer with sublime
   confidence, Man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word from
   the mouth of God,' forbids Him here to use other means of securing the
   draught that He so needed than the appeal to the sympathy of an alien,
   and the swift compassion of a woman's heart.

   And then, let us remember that the motive of this willing acceptance of
   the limitations and weaknesses of humanity is, in the deepest analysis,
   simply His love to us; as the mediaeval hymn has it, Seeking me, Thou
   satest weary.'

   In that lonely Traveller, worn, exhausted, thirsty, craving for a
   draught of water from a stranger's hand, is set forth the glory of the
   Father, full of grace and truth.' A strange manifestation of divine
   glory this! But if we understand that the glory of God is the lustrous
   light of His self-revealing love, perhaps we shall understand how, from
   that faint, craving voice, Give Me to drink,' that glory sounds forth
   more than in the thunders that rolled about the rocky peak of Sinai.
   Strange to think, brethren, that the voice from those lips dry with
   thirst, which was low and weak, was the voice that spoke to the sea,
   Peace! be still,' and there was a calm; that said to demons, Come out
   of him!' and they evacuated their fortress; that cast its command into
   the grave of Lazarus, and he came forth; and which one day all that are
   in the grave shall hear, and hearing shall obey. Give Me to drink.' I
   that speak unto thee am He.'

   II. Secondly, we may note here the self-revealing Christ.

   The process by which Jesus gradually unveils His full character to this
   woman, so unspiritual and unsusceptible as she appeared at first sight
   to be, is interesting and instructive. It would occupy too much of your
   time for me to do more than set it before you in the barest outline.
   Noting the singular divergence between the two sayings which I have
   taken as our text, it is interesting to notice how the one gradually
   merges into the other. First of all, Jesus Christ, as it were, opens a
   finger of His hand to let the woman have a glimpse of the gift lying
   there, that that may kindle desire, and hints at some occult depth in
   His person and nature all undreamed of by her yet, and which would be
   the occasion of greater wonder, and of a reversal of their parts, if
   she knew it. Then, in answer to her, half understanding that He meant
   more than met the ear, and yet opposing the plain physical difficulties
   that were in the way, in that He had nothing to draw with, and the well
   is deep,' and asking whether He were greater than our father Jacob, who
   also had given, and given not only a draught, but the well, our Lord
   enlarges her vision of the blessedness of the gift, though He says but
   little more of its nature, except in so far as that may be gathered
   from the fact that the water that He will give will be a permanent
   source of satisfaction, forbidding the pangs of unquenched desire ever
   again to be felt as pangs; and from the other fact that it will be an
   inward possession, leaping up with a fountain's energy, and a life
   within itself, towards, and into everlasting life. Next, he strongly
   assails conscience and demands repentance, and reveals Himself as the
   reader of the secrets of the heart. Then He discloses the great truths
   of spiritual worship. And, finally, as a prince in disguise might do,
   He flings aside the mantle of which He had let a fold or two be blown
   back in the previous conversation, and stands confessed. I that speak
   unto thee am He.' That is to say, the kindling of desire, the proffer
   of the all-satisfying gift, the quickening of conscience, the
   revelation of a Father to be worshipped in spirit and in truth, and the
   final full disclosure of His person and office as the Giver of the gift
   which shall slake all the thirsts of men--these are the stages of His
   self-revelation.

   Then note, not only the process, but the substance of the revelation of
   Himself. The woman had a far more spiritual and lofty conception of the
   office of Messiah than the Jews had. It is not the first time that
   heretics have reached a loftier ideal of some parts of the truth than
   the orthodox attain. To the Jew the Messiah was a conquering king, who
   would help them to ride on the necks of their enemies, and pay back
   their persecutions and oppressions. To this Samaritan woman--speaking,
   I suppose, the conceptions of her race--the Messiah was One who was to
   tell us all things.'

   Jesus Christ accepts the position, endorses her anticipations, and in
   effect presents Himself before her and before us as the Fountain of all
   certitude and knowledge in regard to spiritual matters. For all that we
   can know, or need to know, with regard to God and man and their mutual
   relations; for all that we can or need know in regard to manhood, its
   ideal, its obligations, its possibilities, its destinies; for all that
   we need to know of men in their relation to one another, we have to
   turn to Jesus Christ, the Messiah, who will tell us all things.' He is
   the Fountain of light; He is the Foundation of certitude; and they who
   seek, not hypotheses and possibilities and conjectures and dreams, but
   the solid substance of a reliable knowledge, must grasp Him, and esteem
   the words of His mouth and the deeds of His life more than their
   necessary food.

   He meets this woman's conceptions as He had met those of Nicodemus. To
   him He had unveiled Himself as the Son of God, and the Son of Man who
   came down from heaven, and is in heaven, and ascends to heaven. To the
   woman He reveals Himself as the Messiah, who will tell us all truth,
   and to both as the Giver of the gift which shall communicate and
   sustain and refresh the better life. But I cannot help dwelling for a
   moment upon the remarkable, beautiful, and significant designation
   which our Lord employs here. I that speak unto thee.' The word in the
   original, translated by our version speak,' is even more sweet, because
   more familiar, and conveys the idea of unrestrained frank intercourse.
   Perhaps we might render I who am talking with Thee!' and that our Lord
   desired to emphasise to the woman's heart the notion of His familiar
   intercourse with her, Messiah though He were, seems to me confirmed by
   the fact that He uses the same expression, with additional grace and
   tenderness about it, when He says, with such depth of meaning, to the
   blind man whom He had healed, Thou hast both seen Him,' with the eyes
   to which He gave sight and object of sight, and it is He that talketh
   with thee.' The familiar Christ who will come and speak to us face to
   face and heart to heart, as a man speaketh with his friend,' is the
   Christ who will tell us all things, and whom we may wholly trust.

   Note too how this revelation has for its condition the docile
   acceptance of the earlier and imperfect teachings. If the woman had not
   yielded herself to our Lord's earlier words, and, though with very dim
   insight, yet with a heart that sought to be taught, followed Him as He
   stepped from round to round of the ascending ladder, she had never
   stood on the top and seen this great vision. If you see nothing more in
   Jesus Christ than a man like yourself, compassed with our infirmities,
   and yet sweet and gracious and good and pure, be true to what you know,
   and put it into practice, and be ready to accept all the light that
   dawns. They that begin down at the bottom with hearing Give me to
   drink,' may stand at the top, and hear Him speak to them His unveiled
   truth and His full glory. To him that hath shall be given.' If any man
   wills to do His will he shall know of the teaching.'

   III. Lastly, we have here the universal Christ.

   The woman wondered that, being a Jew, He spoke to her. As I have said,
   our Lord's first utterance is simply the expression of a real physical
   necessity. But it is none the less what the woman felt it to be, a
   strange overleaping of barriers that towered very high. A Samaritan, a
   woman, a sinner, is the recipient of the first clear confession from
   Jesus Christ of His Messiahship and dignity. She was right in her
   instinct that something lay behind His sweeping aside of the barriers
   and coming so close to her with His request. These two, the prejudices
   of race and the contempt for woman, two of the crying evils of the old
   world, were overpassed by our Lord as if He never saw them. They were
   too high for men's puny limbs; they made no obstacle to the march of
   His divine compassion. And therein lies a symbol, if you like, but none
   the less a prophecy that will be fulfilled, of the universal adaptation
   and destination of the Gospel, and its independence of all distinctions
   of race and sex, condition, moral character. In Jesus Christ there is
   neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, neither bond nor free'; ye are
   all one in Christ.' If He had been but a Jew, it was wonderful that He
   should talk to a Samaritan. But there is nothing in the character and
   life of Christ, as recorded in Scripture, more remarkable and more
   plain than the entire absence of any racial peculiarities, or of
   characteristics owing to His position in space or time. So unlike His
   nation was He that the very elite of His nation snarled at Him and
   said, Thou art a Samaritan!' So unlike them was He that one feels that
   a character so palpitatingly human to its core, and so impossible to
   explain from its surroundings, is inexplicable, but on the New
   Testament theory that He is not a Jew, or man only, but the Son of Man,
   the divine embodiment of the ideal of humanity, whose dwelling was on
   earth, but His origin and home in the bosom of God. Therefore Jesus
   Christ is the world's Christ, your Christ, my Christ, every man's
   Christ, the Tree of Life that stands in the midst of the garden, that
   all men may draw near to it and gather of its fruit.

   Brother, answer His proffer of the gift as this woman did: Sir, give me
   this water, that I thirst not; neither go all the way to the world's
   broken cisterns to draw'; and He will put into your hearts that
   indwelling fountain of life, so that you may say like this woman's
   townspeople: Now I have heard Him myself, and know that this is indeed
   the Christ, the Saviour of the world.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE GIFT AND THE GIVER

   Jesus answered and said unto her, If thou knewest the gift of God, and
   who it is that saith unto thee, Give Me to drink; thou wouldest have
   asked of Him, and He would have given thee living water.'--JOHN iv. 10.

   This Gospel has two characteristics seldom found together: deep thought
   and vivid character-drawing. Nothing can be more clear-cut and dramatic
   than the scene in the chapter before us. There is not a word of
   description of this Samaritan woman. She paints herself, and it is not
   a beautiful picture. She is apparently of the peasant class, from a
   little village nestling on the hill above the plain, come down in the
   broiling sunshine to Jacob's well. She is of mature age, and has had a
   not altogether reputable past. She is frivolous, ready to talk with
   strangers, with a tongue quick to turn grave things into jests; and yet
   she possesses, hidden beneath masses of unclean vanities, a conscience
   and a yearning for something better than she has, which Christ's words
   awoke, and which was finally so enkindled as to make her fit to receive
   the full declaration of His Messiahship, which Pharisees and priests
   could not be trusted with.

   I need scarcely do more than remind you of the way in which the
   conversation between this strangely assorted pair began. The solitary
   Jew, sitting spent with travel on the well, asks for a draught of
   water; not in order to get an opening for preaching, but because He
   needs it. She replies with an exclamation of light wonder, half a jest
   and half a sarcasm, and challenging a response in the same tone.

   But Christ lifts her to a higher level by the words of my text, which
   awed levity, and prepared for a fuller revelation. Thou dost wonder
   that I, being a Jew, ask drink of thee, a Samaritan. If thou knewest
   who I am, thy wonder at My asking would be more. If thou knewest what I
   have to give, we should change places, and thou wouldest ask, and I
   should bestow.'

   So then, we have here gift, Giver, way of getting, and ignorance that
   hinders asking. Let us look at these.

   I. First, the gift of God. Now it is quite clear that our Lord means
   the same thing, whatever it may be, by the two expressions, the gift of
   God' and the living water.' For, unless He does, the whole sequence of
   my text falls to pieces. Living water' was suggested, no doubt, by the
   circumstances of the moment. There, in the well, was an ever-springing
   source, and, says He, a like supply, ever welling up for thirsty lips
   and foul hands, ever sweet and ever sufficient, God is ready to give.

   We may remember how, all through Scripture, we hear the tinkle of these
   waters as they run. The force of the expression is to be gathered
   largely from the Old Testament and the uses of the metaphor there. It
   has been supposed that by the living water' which God gives is here
   meant some one specific gift, such as that of the Holy Spirit, which
   sometimes is expressed by the metaphor. Rather I should be disposed to
   say the living water' is eternal life. With Thee is the fountain of
   life.' And so, in the last resort, the gift of God is God Himself.
   Nothing else will suffice for us, brethren. We need Him, and we need
   none but Him.

   Our Lord, in the subsequent part of this conversation, again touches
   upon this great metaphor, and suggests one or two characteristics,
   blessings, and excellences of it. It shall be in him,' it is something
   that we may carry about with us in our hearts, inseparable from our
   being, free from all possibility of being filched away by violence,
   being rent from us by sorrows, or even being parted from us by death.
   What a man has outside of him he only seems to have. Our only real
   possessions are those which have passed into the substance of our
   souls. All else we shall leave behind. The only good is inward good;
   and this water of life slakes our thirst because it flows into the
   deepest place of our being, and abides there for ever.

   Oh! you that are seeking your satisfaction from fountains that remain
   outside of you after all your efforts, learn that all of them, by
   reason of their externality, will sooner or later be broken cisterns
   that can hold no water.' And I beseech you, if you want rest for your
   souls and stilling for their yearnings, look for it there, where only
   it can be found, in Him, who not only dwells in the heavens to rule and
   to shower down blessings, but enters into the waiting heart and abides
   there, the inward, and therefore the only real, possession and riches.
   It shall be in him a fountain of water.'

   It is springing up'--with an immortal energy, with ever fresh fulness,
   by its own inherent power, needing no pumps nor machinery, but ever
   welling forth its refreshment, an emblem of the joyous energy and
   continual freshness of vitality, which is granted to those who carry
   God in their hearts, and therefore can never be depressed beyond
   measure, nor ever feel that the burden of life is too heavy to bear, or
   its sorrows too sharp to endure.

   It springs up into eternal life,' for water must seek its source, and
   rise to the level of its origin, and this fountain within a man, that
   reaches up ever towards the eternal life from which it came, and which
   it gives to its possessor, will bear him up, as some strong spring will
   lift the clods that choked its mouth, will bear him up towards the
   eternal life which is native to it, and therefore native to him.

   Brethren, no man is so poor, so low, so narrow in capacity, so limited
   in heart and head, but that he needs a whole God to make him restful.
   Nothing else will. To seek for satisfaction elsewhere is like sailors
   who in their desperation, when the water-tanks are empty, slake their
   thirst with the treacherous blue that washes cruelly along the battered
   sides of their ship. A moment's alleviation is followed by the
   recurrence, in tenfold intensity, of the pangs of thirst, and by
   madness, and death. Do not drink the salt water that flashes and rolls
   by your side when you can have recourse to the fountain of life that is
   with God.

   Oh!' you say, commonplace, threadbare pulpit rhetoric.' Yes! Do you
   live as if it were true? It will never be too threadbare to be dinned
   into your head until it has passed into your lives and regulated them.

   II. Now, in the next place, notice the Giver.

   Jesus Christ blends in one sentence, startling in its boldness, the
   gift of God, and Himself as the Bestower. This Man, exhausted for want
   of a draught of water, speaks with parched lips a claim most singularly
   in contrast with the request which He had just made: I will give thee
   the living water.' No wonder that the woman was bewildered, and could
   only say, The well is deep, and Thou hast nothing to draw with.' She
   might have said, Why then dost Thou ask me?' The words were meant to
   create astonishment, in order that the astonishment might awaken
   interest, which would lead to the capacity for further illumination.
   Suppose you had been there, had seen the Man whom she saw, had heard
   the two things that she heard, and knew no more about Him than she
   knew, what would you have thought of Him and His words? Perhaps you
   would have been more contemptuous than she was. See to it that, since
   you know so much that explains and warrants them, you do not treat them
   worse than she did.

   Jesus Christ claims to give God's gifts. He is able to give to that
   poor, frivolous, impure-hearted and impure-lifed woman, at her request,
   the eternal life which shall still all the thirst of her soul, that had
   often in the past been satiated and disgusted, but had never been
   satisfied by any of its draughts.

   And He claims that in this giving He is something more than a channel,
   because, says He, If thou hadst asked of Me I would give thee.' We
   sometimes think of the relation between God and Christ as being
   typified by that of some land-locked sea amidst remote mountains, and
   the affluent that brings its sparkling treasures to the thirsting
   valley. But Jesus Christ is no mere vehicle for the conveyance of a
   divine gift, but His own heart, His own power, His own love are in it;
   and it is His gift just as much as it is God's.

   Now I do not do more than pause for one moment to ask you to think of
   what inference is necessarily involved in such a claim as this. If we
   know anything about Jesus Christ at all, we know that He spoke in this
   tone, not occasionally, but habitually. It will not do to pick out
   other bits of His character or actions and admire these and ignore the
   characteristic of His teachings--His claims for Himself. And I have
   only this one word to say, if Jesus Christ ever said anything the least
   like the words of my text, and if they were not true, what was He but a
   fanatic who had lost His head in the fancy of His inspiration? And if
   He said these words and they were true, what is He then? What but that
   which this Gospel insists from its beginning to its end that He
   was--the Eternal Word of God, by whom all divine revelation from the
   beginning has been made, and who at last became flesh' that we might
   receive of His fulness,' and therein be filled with all the fulness of
   God.' Other alternative I, for my part, see none.

   But I would have you notice, too, the connection between these human
   needs of the Saviour and His power to give the divine gift. Why did He
   not simply say to this woman, If thou knewest who I am?' Why did He use
   this periphrasis of my text, Who it is that saith unto thee, "Give Me
   to drink"'? Why but because He wanted to fix her attention on the
   startling contradiction between His appearance and His claims--on the
   one hand asserting divine prerogative, on the other forcing into
   prominence human weakness and necessity, because these two things, the
   human weakness and the divine prerogative, are inseparably braided
   together and intertwined. Some of you will remember the great scene in
   Shakespeare where the weakness of Caesar is urged as a reason for
   rejecting his imperial authority:--

   Ay! and that tongue of his, that bade the Romans Mark him, and write
   his speeches in their books, Alas! it cried, "Give me some drink, . . .
   Like a sick girl."'

   And the inference that is drawn is, how can he be fit to be a ruler of
   men? But we listen to our Caesar and Emperor, when He asks this woman
   for water, and when He says on the Cross, I thirst,' and we feel that
   these are not the least of His titles to be crowned with many crowns.
   They bring Him nearer to us, and they are the means by which His love
   reaches its end, of bestowing upon us all, if we will have it, the cup
   of salvation. Unless He had said the one of these two things, He never
   could have said the other. Unless the dry lips had petitioned, Give Me
   to drink,' the gracious lips could never have said, I will give thee
   living water.' Unless, like Jacob of old, this Shepherd could say, In
   the day the drought consumed Me,' it would have been impossible that
   the flock shall hunger no more, neither shall they thirst any more,
   . . . for the Lamb that is in the midst of the throne shall lead them
   to living fountains of water.'

   III. Again, notice how to get the gift.

   Christ puts together, as if they were all but contemporaneous, thou
   wouldst have asked of Me,' and I would have given thee.' The hand on
   the telegraph transmits the message, and back, swift as the lightning,
   flashes the response. The condition, the only condition, and the
   indispensable condition, of possessing that water of life--the summary
   expression for all the gifts of God in Jesus Christ, which at the last
   are essentially God Himself--is the desire to possess it turned to
   Jesus Christ. Is it not strange that men should not desire; is it not
   strange and sad that such foolish creatures are we that we do not want
   what we need; that our wishes and needs are often diametrically
   opposite? All men desire happiness, but some of us have so vitiated our
   tastes and our palates by fiery intoxicants that the water of life
   seems dreadfully tasteless and unstimulating, and so we will rather go
   back again to the delusive, poisoned drinks than glue our lips to the
   river of God's pleasures.

   But it is not enough that there should be the desire. It must be turned
   to Him. In fact the asking of my text, so far as you and I are
   concerned, is but another way of speaking the great keyword of personal
   religion, faith in Jesus Christ. For they who ask, know their
   necessity, are convinced of the power of Him to whom they appeal to
   grant their requests, and rely upon His love to do so. And these three
   things, the sense of need, the conviction of Christ's ability to save
   and to satisfy, and of His infinite love that desires to make us
   blessed--these three things fused together make the faith which
   receives the gift of God.

   Remember, brethren, that another of the scriptural expressions for the
   act of trusting in Him, is taking, not asking. You do not need to ask,
   as if for something that is not provided. What we all need to do is to
   open our eyes to see what is there. If we like to put out our hands and
   take it. Why should we be saying, Give me to drink,' when a pierced
   hand reaches out to us the cup of salvation, and says, Drink ye all of
   it'? Ho, every one that thirsteth, come . . . and drink . . . without
   money and without price.'

   There is no other condition but desire turned to Christ, and that is
   the necessary condition. God cannot give men salvation, as veterinary
   surgeons drench unwilling horses--forcing the medicine down their
   throats through clenched teeth. There must be the opened mouth, and
   wherever there is, there will be the full supply. Ask, and ye shall
   receive'; take, and ye shall possess.

   IV. Lastly, mark the ignorance that prevents asking.

   Jesus Christ looked at this poor woman and discerned in her, though, as
   I said, it was hidden beneath mountains of folly and sin, a thirsty
   soul that was dimly longing for something better. And He believed that,
   if once the mystery of His being and the mercy of God's gifts were
   displayed before her, she would melt into a yearning of desire that is
   certain to be fulfilled. In some measure the same thing is true of us
   all. For surely, surely, if only you saw realities, and things as they
   are, some of you would not be content to continue as you are--without
   this water of life. Blind, blind, blind, are the men who grope at
   noon-day as in the dark and turn away from Jesus. If you knew, not with
   the head only, but with the whole nature, if you knew the thirst of
   your soul, the sweetness of the water, the readiness of the Giver, and
   the dry and parched land to which you condemn yourselves by your
   refusal, surely you would bethink yourself and fall at His feet and
   ask, and get, the water of life.

   But, brethren, there is a worse case than ignorance; there is the case
   of people that know and refuse, not by reason of imperfect knowledge,
   but by reason of averted will. And I beseech you to ponder whether that
   may not be your condition. Whosoever will, let him come.' Ye will not
   come unto Me that ye might have life.' I do not think I venture much
   when I say that I am sure there are people hearing me now, not
   Christians, who are as certain, deep down in their hearts, that the
   only rest of the soul is in God, and the only way to get it is through
   Christ, as any saint of God's ever was. But the knowledge does not
   touch their will because they like the poison and they do not want the
   life.

   Oh! dear friends, the instantaneousness of Christ's answer, and the
   certainty of it, are as true for each of us as they were for this
   woman. The offer is made to us all, just as it was to her. We can
   gather round that Rock like the Israelites in the wilderness, and slake
   every thirst of our souls from its outgushing streams. Jesus Christ
   says to each of us, as He did to her, tenderly, warningly, invitingly,
   and yet rebukingly, If thou knewest . . . thou wouldst ask, . . . and I
   would give.'

   Take care lest, by continual neglect, you force Him at last to change
   His words, and to lament over you, as He did over the city that He
   loved so well, and yet destroyed. If thou hadst known in thy day the
   things that belong to thy peace. But now they are hid from thine eyes.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE SPRINGING FOUNTAIN

   The water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water,
   springing up into everlasting life.'--JOHN iv. 14.

   There are two kinds of wells, one a simple reservoir, another
   containing the waters of a spring. It is the latter kind which is
   spoken about here, as is clear not only from the meaning of the word in
   the Greek, but also from the description of it as springing up.' That
   suggests at once the activity of a fountain. A fountain is the emblem
   of motion, not of rest. Its motion is derived from itself, not imparted
   to it from without. Its silvery column' rises ever heavenward, though
   gravitation is too strong for it, and drags it back again.

   So Christ promises to this ignorant, sinful Samaritan woman that if she
   chose He would plant in her soul a gift which would thus well up, by
   its own inherent energy, and fill her spirit with music, and
   refreshment, and satisfaction.

   What is that gift? The answer may be put in various ways which really
   all come to one. It is Himself, the unspeakable Gift, His own greatest
   gift; or it is the Spirit which they that believe on Him should
   receive,' and whereby He comes and dwells in men's hearts; or it is the
   resulting life, kindred with the life bestowed, a consequence of the
   indwelling Christ and the present Spirit.

   And so the promise is that they who believe in Him and rest upon His
   love shall receive into their spirits a new life principle which shall
   rise in their hearts like a fountain, springing up into everlasting
   life.'

   I think we shall best get the whole depth and magnitude of this great
   promise if, throwing aside all mere artificial order, we simply take
   the words as they stand here in the text, and think, first, of Christ's
   gift as a fountain within; then as a fountain springing, leaping up, by
   its own power; and then as a fountain springing into everlasting life.'

   I. First, Christ's gift is represented here as a fountain within.

   Most men draw their supplies from without; they are rich, happy,
   strong, only when externals minister to them strength, happiness,
   riches. For the most of us, what we have is that which determines our
   felicity.

   Take the lowest type of life, for instance, the men of whom the
   majority, alas! I suppose, in every time is composed, who live
   altogether on the low plane of the world, and for the world alone,
   whether their worldliness take the form of sensuous appetite, or of
   desire to acquire wealth and outward possessions. The thirst of the
   body is the type of the experience of all such people. It is satisfied
   and slaked for a moment, and then back comes the tyrannous appetite
   again. And, alas! the things that you drink to satisfy the thirst of
   your souls are too often like a publican's adulterated beer, which has
   got salt in it, and chemicals, and all sorts of things to stir up,
   instead of slaking and quenching, the thirst. So he that loveth silver
   shall not be satisfied with silver, nor he that loveth abundance with
   increase.' The appetite grows by what it feeds on, and a little lust
   yielded to to-day is a bigger one to-morrow, and half a glass to-day
   grows to a bottle in a twelvemonth. As the old classical saying has it,
   he who begins by carrying a calf, before long is able to carry an ox';
   so the thirst in the soul needs and drinks down a constantly increasing
   draught.

   And even if we rise up into a higher region and look at the experience
   of the men who have in some measure learned that a man's life
   consisteth not in the abundance of the things that he possesseth,' nor
   in the abundance of the gratification that his animal nature gets, but
   that there must be an inward spring of satisfaction, if there is to be
   any satisfaction at all; if we take men who live for thought, and
   truth, and mental culture, and yield themselves up to the enthusiasm
   for some great cause, and are proud of saying, My mind to me a kingdom
   is,' though they present a far higher style of life than the former,
   yet even that higher type of man has so many of his roots in the
   external world that he is at the mercy of chances and changes, and he,
   too, has deep in his heart a thirst that nothing, no truth, no wisdom,
   no culture, nothing that addresses itself to one part of his nature,
   though it be the noblest and the loftiest, can ever satisfy and slake.

   I am sure I have some such people in my audience, and to them this
   message comes. You may have, if you will, in your own hearts, a
   springing fountain of delight and of blessedness which will secure that
   no unsatisfied desires shall ever torment you. Christ in His fulness,
   His Spirit, the life that flows from both and is planted within our
   hearts, these are offered to us all; and if we have them we carry
   inclosed within ourselves all that is essential to our felicity; and we
   can say, I have learned in whatsoever state I am therewith to be
   self-satisfying,' not with the proud, stoical independence of a man who
   does not want either God or man to make him blessed, but with the
   humble independence of a man who can say my sufficiency is of God.'

   No independence of externals is possible, nor wholesome if it were
   possible, except that which comes from absolute dependence on Jesus
   Christ.

   If you have Christ in your heart then life is possible, peace is
   possible, joy is possible, under all circumstances and in all places.
   Everything which the soul can desire, it possesses. You will be like
   the garrison of a beleaguered castle, in the courtyard of which is a
   sparkling spring, fed from some source high up in the mountains, and
   finding its way in there by underground channels which no besiegers can
   ever touch. Sorrows will come, and make you sad, but though there may
   be much darkness round about you, there will be light in the darkness.
   The trees may be bare and leafless, but the sap has gone down to the
   roots. The world may be all wintry and white with snow, but there will
   be a bright little fire burning on your own hearthstone. You will carry
   within yourselves all the essentials to blessedness. If you have Christ
   in the vessel' you can smile at the storm. They that drink from earth's
   fountains shall thirst again'; but they who have Christ in their hearts
   will have a fountain within which will not freeze in the bitterest
   cold, nor fail in the fiercest heat. The water that I shall give him
   shall be in him a fountain.'

   II. Christ's gift is a springing fountain.

   The emblem, of course, suggests motion by its own inherent impulse.
   Water may be stagnant, or it may yield to the force of gravity and
   slide down a descending river-bed, or it may be pumped up and lifted by
   external force applied to it, or it may roll as it does in the sea,
   drawn by the moon, driven by the winds, borne along by currents that
   owe their origin to outward heat or cold. But a fountain rises by an
   energy implanted within itself, and is the very emblem of joyous, free,
   self-dependent and self-regulated activity.

   And so, says Christ, The water that I shall give him shall be in him a
   springing fountain'; it shall not lie there stagnant, but leap like a
   living thing, up into the sunshine, and flash there, turned into
   diamonds, when the bright rays smile upon it.

   So here is the promise of two things: the promise of activity, and of
   an activity which is its own law.

   The promise of activity. There seems small blessing, in this overworked
   world, in a promise of more active exertion; but what an immense part
   of our nature lies dormant and torpid if we are not Christians! How
   much of the work that is done is dreary, wearisome, collar-work,
   against the grain. Do not the wheels of life often go slowly? Are you
   not often weary of the inexpressible monotony and fatigue? And do you
   not go to your work sometimes, though with a fierce feeling of
   need-to-do-it,' yet also with inward repugnance? And are there not
   great parts of your nature that have never woke into activity at all,
   and are ill at ease, because there is no field of action provided for
   them? The mind is like millstones; if you do not put the wheat into
   them to grind, they will grind each other's faces. So some of us are
   fretting ourselves to pieces, or are sick of a vague disease, and are
   morbid and miserable because the highest and noblest parts of our
   nature have never been brought into exercise. Surely this promise of
   Christ's should come as a true Gospel to such, offering, as it does, if
   we will trust ourselves to Him, a springing fountain of activity in our
   hearts that shall fill our whole being with joyous energy, and make it
   a delight to live and to work. It will bring to us new powers, new
   motives; it will set all the wheels of life going at double speed. We
   shall be quickened by the presence of that mighty power, even as a dim
   taper is brightened and flames up when plunged into a jar of oxygen.
   And life will be delightsome in its hardest toil, when it is toil for
   the sake of, and by the indwelling strength of, that great Lord and
   Master of our work.

   And there is not only a promise of activity here, but of activity which
   is its own law and impulse. That is a blessed promise in two ways. In
   the first place, law will be changed into delight. We shall not be
   driven by a commandment standing over us with whip and lash, or coming
   behind us with spur and goad, but that which we ought to do we shall
   rejoice to do; and inclination and duty will coincide in all our lives
   when our life is Christ's life in us.

   That should be a blessing to some of you who have been fighting against
   evil and trying to do right with more or less success, more or less
   interruptedly and at intervals, and have felt the effort to be a burden
   and a wearisomeness. Here is a promise of emancipation from all that
   constraint and yoke of bondage which duty discerned and unloved ever
   lays upon a man's shoulders. When we carry within us the gift of a life
   drawn from Jesus Christ, and are able to say like Him, Lo, I come to do
   Thy will, and Thy law is within my heart,' only then shall we have
   peace and joy in our lives. The law of the Spirit of life in Christ
   Jesus makes us free from the law of sin and death.'

   And then, in the second place, that same thought of an activity which
   is its own impulse and its own law, suggests another aspect of this
   blessedness, namely, that it sets us free from the tyranny of external
   circumstances which absolutely shape the lives of so many of us. The
   lives of all must be to a large extent moulded by these, but they need
   not, and should not be completely determined by them. It is a miserable
   thing to see men and women driven before the wind like thistledown.
   Circumstances must influence us, but they may either influence us to
   base compliance and passive reception of their stamp, or to brave
   resistance and sturdy nonconformity to their solicitations. So used,
   they will influence us to a firmer possession of the good which is most
   opposite to them, and we shall be the more unlike our surroundings, the
   more they abound in evil. You can make your choice whether, if I may so
   say, you shall be like balloons that are at the mercy of the gale and
   can only shape their course according as it comes upon them and blows
   them along, or like steamers that have an inward power that enables
   them to keep their course from whatever point the wind blows, or like
   some sharply built sailing-ship that, with a strong hand at the helm,
   and canvas rightly set, can sail almost in the teeth of the wind and
   compel it to bear her along in all but the opposite direction to that
   in which it would carry her if she lay like a log on the water.

   I beseech you all, and especially you young people, not to let the
   world take and shape you, like a bit of soft clay put into a
   brick-mould, but to lay a masterful hand upon it, and compel it to help
   you, by God's grace, to be nobler, and truer, and purer.

   It is a shame for men to live the lives that so many amongst us live,
   as completely at the mercy of externals to determine the direction of
   their lives as the long weeds in a stream that yield to the flow of the
   current. It is of no use to preach high and brave maxims, telling men
   to assert their lordship over externals, unless we can tell them how to
   find the inward power that will enable them to do so. But we can preach
   such noble exhortations to some purpose when we can point to the great
   gift which Christ is ready to give, and exhort them to open their
   hearts to receive that indwelling power which shall make them free from
   the dominion of these tyrant circumstances and emancipate them into the
   liberty of the sons of God.' The water that I shall give him shall be
   in him a leaping fountain.'

   III. The last point here is that Christ's gift is a fountain springing
   up into everlasting life.'

   The water of a fountain rises by its own impulse, but howsoever its
   silver column may climb it always falls back into its marble basin. But
   this fountain rises higher, and at each successive jet higher, tending
   towards, and finally touching, its goal, which is at the same time its
   course. The water seeks its own level, and the fountain climbs until it
   reaches Him from whom it comes, and the eternal life in which He lives.
   We might put that thought in two ways. First, the gift is eternal in
   its duration. The water with which the world quenches its thirst
   perishes. All supplies and resources dry up like winter torrents in
   summer heat. All created good is but for a time. As for some, it
   perishes in the use; as for other, it evaporates and passes away, or is
   as water spilt upon the ground which cannot be gathered up'; as for
   all, we have to leave it behind when we go hence. But this gift springs
   into everlasting life, and when we go it goes with us. The Christian
   character is identical in both worlds, and however the forms and
   details of pursuits may vary, the essential principle remains one. So
   that the life of a Christian man on earth and his life in heaven are
   but one stream, as it were, which may, indeed, like some of those
   American rivers, run for a time through a deep, dark canyon, or in an
   underground passage, but comes out at the further end into broader,
   brighter plains and summer lands; where it flows with a quieter current
   and with the sunshine reflected on its untroubled surface, into the
   calm ocean. He has one gift and one life for earth and heaven--Christ
   and His Spirit, and the life that is consequent upon both.

   And then the other side of this great thought is that the gift tends
   to, is directed towards, or aims at and reaches, everlasting life. The
   whole of the Christian experience on earth is a prophecy and an
   anticipation of heaven. The whole of the Christian experience of earth
   evidently aims towards that as its goal, and is interpreted by that as
   its end. What a contrast that is to the low and transient aims which so
   many of us have! The lives of many men go creeping along the surface
   when they might spring heavenwards. My friend! which is it to be with
   you? Is your life to be like one of those Northern Asiatic rivers that
   loses itself in the sands, or that flows into, or is sluggishly lost
   in, a bog; or is it going to tumble over a great precipice, and fall
   sounding away down into the blackness; or is it going to leap up into
   everlasting life'? Which of the two aims is the wiser, is the nobler,
   is the better?

   And a life that thus springs will reach what it springs towards. A
   fountain rises and falls, for the law of gravity takes it down; this
   fountain rises and reaches, for the law of pressure takes it up, and
   the water rises to the level of its source. Christ's gift mocks no man,
   it sets in motion no hopes that it does not fulfil; it stimulates to no
   work that it does not crown with success. If you desire a life that
   reaches its goal, a life in which all your desires are satisfied, a
   life that is full of joyous energy, that of a free man emancipated from
   circumstances and from the tyranny of unwelcome law, and victorious
   over externals, open your hearts to the gift that Christ offers you;
   the gift of Himself, of His death and passion, of His sacrifice and
   atonement, of His indwelling and sanctifying Spirit.

   He offered all the fulness of that grace to this Samaritan woman, in
   her ignorance, in her profligacy, in her flippancy. He offers it to
   you. His offer awoke an echo in her heart, will it kindle any response
   in yours? Oh! when He says to you, The water that I shall give will be
   in you a fountain springing into everlasting life,' I pray you to
   answer as she did--Sir!--Lord--give me this water, that I thirst not;
   neither come to earth's broken cisterns to draw.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE SECOND MIRACLE

   This is again the second miracle that Jesus did, when He was come out
   of Judaea into Galilee.'--JOHN iv. 54.

   The Evangelist evidently intends us to connect together the two
   miracles in Cana. His object may, possibly, be mainly chronological,
   and to mark the epochs in our Lord's ministry. But we cannot fail to
   see how remarkably these two miracles are contrasted. The one takes
   place at a wedding, a homely scene of rural festivity and gladness. But
   life has deeper things in it than gladness, and a Saviour who preferred
   the house of feasting to the house of mourning would be no Saviour for
   us. The second miracle, then, turns to the darker side of human
   experience. The happiest home has its saddened hours; the truest
   marriage joy has associated with it many a care and many an anxiety.
   Therefore, He who began by breathing blessing over wedded joy goes on
   to answer the piteous pleading of parental anxiety. It was fitting that
   the first miracle should deal with gladness, for that is God's purpose
   for His creatures, and that the second should deal with sicknesses and
   sorrows, which are additions to that purpose made needful by sin.

   Again, the first miracle was wrought without intercession, as the
   outcome of Christ's own determination that His hour for working it was
   come. The second miracle was drawn from Him by the imperfect faith and
   the agonising pleading of the father.

   But the great peculiarity of this second miracle in Cana is that it is
   moulded throughout so as to develop and perfect a weak faith. Notice
   how there are three words in the narrative, each of which indicates a
   stage in the history. Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not
   believe.' . . . The man believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto
   him, and he went his way.' . . . Himself believed and his whole house.'

   We have here, then, Christ manifested as the Discerner, the Rebuker,
   the Answerer, and therefore the Strengthener, of a very insufficient
   and ignorant faith. It is a lovely example of the truth of that ancient
   prophecy, He will not quench the smoking flax.' So these three stages,
   as it seems to me, are the three points to observe. We have, first of
   all, Christ lamenting over an imperfect faith. Then we have Him
   testing, and so strengthening, a growing faith. And then we have the
   absent Christ rewarding and crowning a tested faith. I think if we look
   at these three stages in the story we shall get the main points which
   the Evangelist intends us to observe.

   I. First, then, we have here our Lord lamenting over an ignorant and
   sensuous faith.

   At first sight His words, in response to the hurried, eager appeal of
   the father, seem to be strangely unfeeling, far away from the matter in
   hand. Think of how breathlessly, feeling that not an instant is to be
   lost, the poor man casts himself at the Master's feet, and pleads that
   his boy is at the point of death.' And just think how, like a dash of
   cold water upon this hot impatience, must have come these strange words
   that seem to overleap his case altogether, and to be gazing beyond
   him--Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe.' What has
   that to do with me and my dying boy, and my impatient agony of
   petition?' It has everything to do with you.'

   It is the revelation, first of all, of Christ's singular calmness and
   majestic leisure, which befitted Him who needed not to hurry, because
   He was conscious of absolute power. As when the pleading message was
   sent to Him: He whom Thou lovest is sick, He abode still two days in
   the same place where He was'; because He loved Lazarus and Martha and
   Mary; and just as when Jairus is hurrying Him to the bed where his
   child lies dead, He pauses on the way to attend to the petition of
   another sufferer; so, in like calmness of majestic leisure, He here
   puts aside the apparently pressing and urgent necessity in order to
   deal with a far deeper, more pressing one.

   For in the words there is not only a revelation of our Lord's majestic
   leisure, but there is also an indication of what He thought of most
   importance in His dealing with men. It was worthy of His care to heal
   the boy; it was far more needful that He should train and lead the
   father to faith. The one can wait much better than the other.

   And there is in the words, too, something like a sigh of profound
   sorrow. Christ is not so much rebuking as lamenting. It is His own
   pained heart that speaks; He sees in the man before Him more than the
   man's words indicated; reading his heart with that divine omniscience
   which pierces beyond the surface, and beholding in him the very same
   evil which affected all his countrymen. So He speaks to him as one of a
   class, and thus somewhat softens the rebuke even while the answer to
   the nobleman's petition seems thereby to become still less direct, and
   His own sorrowful gaze at the wide-reaching spirit of blindness seems
   thereby to become more absorbed and less conscious of the individual
   sufferer kneeling at His feet.

   Christ had just come from Samaria, the scorn of the Jews, and there He
   had found people who needed no miracles, whose conception of the
   Messiah was not that of a mere wonder-worker, but of one who will tell
   us all things,' and who believed on Him not because of the portents
   which He wrought, but because they heard Him themselves, and His words
   touched their consciences and stirred strange longings in their hearts.
   On the other hand, this Evangelist has carefully pointed out in the
   preceding chapters how such recognition as Christ had thus far received
   in His own country' had been entirely owing to His miracles, and had
   been therefore regarded by Christ Himself as quite unreliable (chap.
   ii. 23-25), while even Nicodemus, the Pharisee, had seen no better
   reason for regarding Him as a divinely sent Teacher than these miracles
   that Thou doest.' And now here He is no sooner across the border again
   than the same spirit meets Him. He hears it even in the pleading,
   tearful tones of the father's voice, and that so clearly that it is for
   a moment more prominent even to His pity than the agony and the prayer.
   And over that Christ sorrows. Why? Because, to their own impoverishing,
   the nobleman and his fellows were blind to all the beauty of His
   character. The graciousness of His nature was nothing to them. They had
   no eyes for His tenderness and no ears for His wisdom; but if some
   vulgar sign had been wrought before them, then they would have run
   after Him with their worthless faith. And that struck a painful chord
   in Christ's heart when He thought of how all the lavishing of His love,
   all the grace and truth which shone radiant and lambent in His life,
   fell upon blind eyes, incapable of beholding His beauty; and of how the
   manifest revelation of a Godlike character had no power to do what
   could be done by a mere outward wonder.

   This is not to disparage the miraculous evidence.' It is only to put in
   its proper place the spirit, which was blind to the self-attesting
   glory of His character, which beheld it and did not recognise it as the
   glory of the Only Begotten of the Father.'

   That very same blindness to the divine which is in Jesus Christ,
   because material things alone occupy the heart and appeal to the mind,
   is still the disease of humanity. It still drives a knife into the
   loving heart of the pitying and helpful Christ. The special form which
   it takes in such a story as this before us is long since gone. The
   sense-bound people of this generation do not ask for signs. Miracles
   are rather a hindrance than a help to the reception of Christianity in
   many quarters. People are more willing to admire, after a fashion, the
   beauty of Christ's character, and the exalted purity of His teaching
   (meaning thereby, generally, the parts of it which are not exclusively
   His), than to accept His miracles. So far round has the turn in the
   wheel gone in these days.

   But although the form is entirely different the spirit still remains.
   Are there not plenty of us to whom sense is the only certitude? We
   think that the only knowledge is the knowledge that comes to us from
   that which we can see and touch and handle, and the inferences that we
   may draw from these; and to many all that world of thought and beauty,
   all those divine manifestations of tenderness and grace, are but mist
   and cloudland. Intellectually, though in a somewhat modified sense,
   this generation has to take the rebuke: Except ye see, ye will not
   believe.'

   And practically do not the great mass of men regard the material world
   as all-important, and work done or progress achieved there as alone
   deserving the name of work' or progress,' while all the glories of a
   loving Christ are dim and unreal to their sense-bound eyes? Is it not
   true to-day, as it was in the old time, that if a man would come among
   you, and bring you material good, that would be the prophet for you?
   True wisdom, beauty, elevating thoughts, divine revelations; all these
   go over your heads. But when a man comes and multiplies loaves, then
   you say, This is of a truth the prophet that should come into the
   world.' Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe.'

   And on the other side, is it not sadly true about those of us who have
   the purest and the loftiest faith, that we feel often as if it was very
   hard, almost impossible, to keep firm our grasp of One who never is
   manifested to our sense? Do we not often feel, O that I could for once,
   for once only, hear a voice that would speak to my outward ear, or see
   some movement of a divine hand'? The loftiest faith still leans
   towards, and has an hankering after, some external and visible
   manifestation, and we need to subject ourselves to the illuminating
   rebuke of the Master who says, Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will
   not believe,' and, therefore, your faith that craves the support of
   some outward thing, and often painfully feels that it is feeble without
   it, is as yet but very imperfect and rudimentary.

   II. And so we have here, as the next stage of the narrative, our Lord
   testing, and thus strengthening, a growing faith.

   The nobleman's answer to our Lord's strange words sounds, at first
   sight, as if these had passed over him, producing no effect at all.
   Sir, come down ere my child die'; it is almost as if he had said, Do
   not talk to me about these things at present. Come and heal my boy.
   That is what I want; and we will speak of other matters some other
   time.' But it is not exactly that. Clearly enough, at all events, he
   did not read in Christ's words a reluctance to yield to his request,
   still less a refusal of it. Clearly he did not misunderstand the sad
   rebuke which they conveyed, else he would not have ventured to
   reiterate his petition. He does not pretend to anything more than he
   has, he does not seek to disclaim the condemnation that Christ brings
   against him, nor to assume that he has a loftier degree or a purer kind
   of faith than he possesses. He holds fast by so much of Christ's
   character as he can apprehend; and that is the beginning of all
   progress. What he knows he knows. He has sore need; that is something.
   He has come to the Helper; that is more. He is only groping after Him,
   but he will not say a word beyond what he knows and feels; and,
   therefore, there is something in him to work upon; and faith is already
   beginning to bud and blossom. And so his prayer is his best answer to
   Christ's word: Sir, come down ere my child die.'

   Ah! dear brethren, any true man who has ever truly gone to Christ with
   a sense even of some outward and temporal need, and has ever really
   prayed at all, has often to pass through this experience, that the
   first result of his agonising cry shall be only the revelation to him
   of the unworthiness and imperfection of his own faith, and that there
   shall seem to be strange delay in the coming of the blessing so longed
   for. And the true attitude for a man to take when there is unveiled
   before him, in his consciousness, in answer to his cry for help, the
   startling revelation of his own unworthiness and imperfection--the true
   answer to such dealing is simply to reiterate the cry. And then the
   Master bends to the petition, and because He sees that the second
   prayer has in it less of sensuousness than the first, and that some
   little germ of a higher faith is beginning to open, He yields, and yet
   He does not yield. Sir, come down ere my child die.' Jesus saith unto
   him, Go thy way, thy son liveth.'

   Why did He not go with the suppliant? Why, in the act of granting, does
   He refuse? For the suppliant's sake. The whole force and beauty of the
   story come out yet more vividly if we take the contrast between it and
   the other narrative, which presents some points of similarity with
   it--that of the healing of the centurion's servant at Capernaum. There
   the centurion prays that Christ would but speak, and Christ says, I
   will come.' There the centurion does not feel that His presence is
   necessary, but that His word is enough. Here the nobleman says Come,'
   because it has never entered his mind that Christ can do anything
   unless He stands like a doctor by the boy's bed. And he says, too,
   Come, ere my child die,' because it has never entered his mind that
   Christ can do anything if his boy has once passed the dark threshold.

   And because his faith is thus feeble, Christ refuses its request,
   because He knows that so to refuse is to strengthen. Asked but to
   speak' by a strong faith, He rewards it by more than it prays, and
   offers to come.' Asked to come' by a weak faith, He rewards it by less,
   which yet is more, than it had requested; and refuses to come, that He
   may heal at a distance; and thus manifests still more wondrously His
   power and His grace.

   His gentle and wise treatment is telling; and he who was so sense-bound
   that unless he saw signs and wonders he would not believe,' turns and
   goes away, bearing the blessing, as he trusts, in his hands, while yet
   there is no sign whatever that he has received it.

   Think of what a change had passed upon that man in the few moments of
   his contact with Christ. When he ran to His feet, all hot and
   breathless and impatient, with his eager plea, he sought only for the
   deliverance of his boy, and sought it at the moment, and cared for
   nothing else. When he goes away from Him, a little while afterwards, he
   has risen to this height, that he believes the bare word, and turns his
   back upon the Healer, and sets his face to Capernaum in the confidence
   that he possesses the unseen gift. So has his faith grown.

   And that is what you and I have to do. We have Christ's bare word, and
   no more, to trust to for everything. We must be content to go out of
   the presence-chamber of the King with only His promise, and to cleave
   to that. A feeble faith requires the support of something sensuous and
   visible, as some poor trailing plant needs a prop round which it may
   twist its tendrils. A stronger faith strides away from the Master,
   happy and peaceful in its assured possession of a blessing for which it
   has nothing to rely upon but a simple bare word. That is the faith that
   we have to exercise. Christ has spoken. That was enough for this man,
   who from the babyhood of Christian experience sprang at once to its
   maturity. Is it enough for you? Are you content to say, Thy word, Thy
   naked word, is all that I need, for Thou hast spoken, and Thou wilt do
   it'?

   Go thy way; thy son liveth.' What a test! Suppose the father had not
   gone his way, would his son have lived? No! The son's life and the
   father's reception from Christ of what he asked were suspended upon
   that one moment. Will he trust Him, or will he not? Will he linger, or
   will he depart? He departs, and in the act of trusting he gets the
   blessing, and his boy is saved.

   And look how the narrative hints to us of the perfect confidence of the
   father now. Cana was only a few miles from Capernaum. The road from the
   little city upon the hill down to where the waters of the lake flashed
   in the sunshine by the quays of Capernaum was only a matter of a few
   hours; but it was the next day, and well on into the next day, before
   he met the servants that came to him with the news of his boy's
   recovery. So sure was he that his petition was answered that he did not
   hurry to return home, but leisurely and quietly went onwards the next
   day to his child. Think of the difference between the breathless rush
   up to Cana, and the quiet return from it. He that believeth shall not
   make haste.'

   III. And so, lastly, we have here the absent Christ crowning and
   rewarding the faith which has been tested.

   We have the picture of the father's return. The servants meet him.
   Their message, which they deliver before he has time to speak, is
   singularly a verbal repetition of the promise of the Master, Thy son
   liveth.' His faith, though it be strong, has not yet reached to the
   whole height of the blessing, for he inquires at what hour he began to
   amend,' expecting some slow and gradual recovery; and he is told that
   at the seventh hour,' the hour when the Master spoke, the fever left
   him,' and all at once and completely was he cured. So, more than his
   faith had expected is given to him; and Christ, when he lays His hand
   upon a man, does His work thoroughly, though not always at once.

   Why was the miracle wrought in that strange fashion? Why did our Lord
   fling out His power as from a distance rather than go and stand at the
   boy's bedside? We have already seen the reason in the peculiar
   condition of the father's mind; but now notice what it was that he had
   learned by such a method of healing, not only the fact of Christ's
   healing power, but also the fact that the bare utterance of His will,
   whether He were present or absent, had power. And so a loftier
   conception of Christ would begin to dawn on him.

   And for us that working of Christ at a distance is prophetic. It
   represents to us His action to-day. Still He answers our cries that He
   would come down to our help by sending forth from the city on the
   hills, the city of the wedding feast, His healing power to descend upon
   the sick-beds and the sorrows and the sins that afflict the villages
   beneath. He sendeth forth His commandment upon earth, His word runneth
   very swiftly.'

   This new experience enlarged and confirmed the man's faith. The second
   stage to which he had been led by Christ's treatment was simply belief
   in our Lord's specific promise, an immense advance on his first
   position of belief which needed sight as its basis.

   But he had not yet come to the full belief of, and reliance upon, that
   Healer recognised as Messiah. But the experience which he now has had,
   though it be an experience based upon miracle, is the parent of a faith
   which is not merely the child of wonder, nor the result of beholding an
   outward sign. And so we read:--So the father knew that it was at the
   same hour in the which Jesus said unto him, Thy son liveth. And himself
   believed and his whole house.'

   A partial faith brings experience which confirms and enlarges faith;
   and they who dimly apprehend Him, and yet humbly love Him, and
   imperfectly trust Him, will receive into their bosoms such large gifts
   of His love and gracious Spirit that their faith will be strengthened,
   and they will grow into the full stature of peaceful confidence.

   The way to increase faith is to exercise faith. And the true parent of
   perfect faith is the experience of the blessings that come from the
   crudest, rudest, narrowest, blindest, feeblest faith that a man can
   exercise. Trust Him as you can, do not be afraid of inadequate
   conceptions, or of a feeble grasp. Trust Him as you can, and He will
   give you so much more than you expected that you will trust Him more,
   and be able to say: Now I believe, because I have heard Him myself, and
   know that this is the Christ, the Saviour of the world.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE THIRD MIRACLE IN JOHN'S GOSPEL

   Jesus saith unto him, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.'--JOHN v. 8.

   This third of the miracles recorded in John's Gospel finds a place
   there, as it would appear, for two reasons: first, because it marks the
   beginning of the angry unbelief on the part of the Jewish rulers, the
   development of which it is one part of the purpose of this Gospel to
   trace; second, because it is the occasion for that great utterance of
   our Lord about His Sonship and His divine working as the Father also
   works, which occupies the whole of the rest of the chapter, and is the
   foundation of much which follows in the Gospel. It is for these
   reasons, and not for the mere sake of adding another story of a
   miraculous cure to the many which the other Evangelists have given us,
   that John narrates for us this history.

   If, then, we consider the reason for the introduction of the miracle
   into the Gospel, we may be saved from the necessity of dwelling, except
   very lightly, upon some of the preliminary details which preceded the
   actual cure. It does not matter much to us for our present purpose
   which Feast it was on which Jesus went up to Jerusalem, nor whether the
   pool was by the sheep-market or by the sheep-gate, nor whereabouts in
   Jerusalem Bethesda might happen to be. It may be of importance for us
   to notice that the mention of the angel who appears in the fourth verse
   is not a part of the original narrative. The true text only tells us of
   an intermittent pool which possessed, or was supposed to possess,
   curative energy; and round which the kindness of some forgotten
   benefactor had built five rude porches. There lay a crowd of wasted
   forms, and pale, sorrowful faces, with all varieties of pain and
   emaciation and impotence marked upon them, who yet were gathered in
   Bethesda, which being interpreted means a house of mercy.' It is the
   type of a world full of men suffering various sicknesses, but all sick;
   the type of a world that gathers with an eagerness, not far removed
   from despair, round anything that seems to promise, however vaguely, to
   help and to heal; the type of a world, blessed be God, which, amidst
   all its sad variety of woe and weariness, yet sits in the porches of a
   house of mercy,' and has in the midst a fountain opened for sin and for
   uncleanness,' whose energy is as mighty for the last comer of all the
   generations as for the first that stepped into its cleansing flood.

   This poor man, sick and impotent for eight and thirty years--many of
   which he had spent, as it would appear, day by day, wearily dragging
   his paralysed limbs to the fountain with daily diminishing hope--this
   poor man attracts the regard of Christ when He enters, and He puts to
   him the strange question, Wilt thou be made whole?' Surely there was no
   need to ask that; but no doubt the many disappointments and the long
   years of waiting and of suffering had stamped apathy upon the
   sufferer's face, and Christ saw that the first thing that was needed,
   in order that His healing power might have a point of contact in the
   man's nature, was to kindle some little flicker of hope in him once
   more.

   And so, no doubt, with a smile on His face, which converted the
   question into an offer, He says: Wilt thou be made whole?' meaning
   thereby to say, I will heal thee if thou wilt.' And there comes the
   weary answer, as if the man had said: Will I be made whole? What have I
   been lying here all these years for? I have nobody to put me into the
   pool.'

   Yes, it is a hopeful prospect to hold out to a man whose disease is
   inability to walk, that if he will walk to the water he will get cured,
   and be able to walk afterwards. Why, he could not even roll himself
   into the pond, and so there he had lain, a type of the hopeless efforts
   at self-healing which we sick men put forth, a type of the tantalising
   gospels which the world preaches to its subjects when it says to a
   paralysed man: Walk that you may be healed; keep the commandments that
   you may enter into life.'

   And so we have come at last to the main point of the narrative before
   us, and I fix upon these words, the actual words in which the cure was
   conveyed, as communicating to us some very important lessons and
   thoughts about Christ and our relation to Him.

   I. First, I see in them Christ manifesting Himself as the Giver of
   power to the powerless who trust Him.

   His words may seem at first hearing to partake of the very same almost
   cruel irony as the condition of cure which had already proved
   hopelessly impracticable. He, too, says, Walk that you may be cured';
   and He says it to a paralysed and impotent man. But the two things are
   very different, for before this cripple could attempt to drag his
   impotent limbs into an upright position, and take up the little light
   couch and sling it over his shoulders, he must have had some kind of
   trust in the person that told him to do so. A very ignorant trust, no
   doubt, it was; but all that was set before him about Jesus Christ he
   grasped and rested upon. He only knew Him as a Healer, and he trusted
   Him as such. The contents of a man's faith have nothing to do with the
   reality of his faith; and he that, having only had the healing power of
   Christ revealed to him, lays hold of that Healer, cleaves to Him with
   as genuine a faith as the man who has the whole fulness and sublimity
   of Christ's divine and human character and redeeming work laid out
   before him, and who cleaves to these. The hand that grasps is one,
   whatsoever be the thing that it grasps.

   So it is no spiritualising of this story, or reading into it a deeper
   and more religious meaning than belongs to it, to say that what passed
   in that man's heart and mind before he caught up his little bed and
   walked away with it, was essentially the same action of mind and heart
   by which a sinful man, who knows that Christ is his Redeemer, grasps
   His Cross and trusts his soul to Him. In the one case, as in the other,
   there is confidence in the person; only in the one case the person was
   only known as a Healer, and in the other the person is known as a
   Saviour. But the faith is the same whatever it apprehends.

   Christ comes and says to him, Rise, take up thy bed and walk.' There is
   a movement of confidence in the man's heart; he tries to obey, and in
   the act of obedience the power comes to him.

   Ah, brother! it is always so. All Christ's commandments are gifts. When
   He says to you, Do this!' He pledges Himself to give you power to do
   it. Whatsoever He enjoins He strengthens for. He binds Himself, by His
   commandments, and every word of His lips which says to us Thou shalt!'
   contains as its kernel a word of His which says I will.' So when He
   commands, He bestows; and we get the power to keep His commandments
   when in humble faith we make the effort to do His will. It is only when
   we try to obey for the love's sake of Him that has healed us that we
   are able to obey. And be sure of this, whensoever we attempt to do what
   we know to be the Master's will, because He has given Himself for us,
   our power will be equal to our desire, and enough for our duty. As St.
   Augustine says: Give what Thou commandest, and command what Thou wilt.'

   Rise, take up thy bed and walk,' or as in another case, Stretch forth
   thy hand.' And he stretched it forth, and his hand was restored whole
   as the other.' Christ gives power to keep His commandments to the
   impotent who try to obey, because they have been healed by Him.

   II. In the next place, we have in this miracle our Lord set forth as
   the absolute Master, because He is the Healer.

   The Pharisees and their friends had no eyes for the miracle; but if
   they found a man carrying his light couch on the Sabbath day, that was
   a thing that excited their interest, and must be seen to immediately.

   And so, paying no attention to the fact that it was a paralysed man who
   was doing this, with the true narrow instinct of the formalist, they
   lay hold only of the fact of the broken Rabbinical restrictions, and
   try to stop him with these. It is the Sabbath day! It is not lawful for
   thee to carry thy bed.'

   And they get an answer which goes a great deal deeper than the speaker
   knew, and puts the whole subject of Christian obedience on its right
   footing. He answered them, He that made me whole, the same said unto
   me, Take up thy bed and walk.' As if he had said: He gave me the power,
   had He not a right to tell me what to do with it? It was His gift that
   I could lift my bed; was I not bound to walk when and where He that had
   made me able to walk at all chose to bid me?'

   And if you generalise that it just comes to this: the only person that
   has a right to command you is the Christ who saves you. He has the
   absolute authority to do as He will with your restored spiritual
   powers, because He has bestowed them all upon you. His dominion is
   built upon His benefits. He is the King because He is the Saviour. He
   rules because He has redeemed. He begins with giving, and it is only
   afterwards that He commands; and He turns to each of us with that smile
   upon His lips, and with tenderness in His voice which will bind any
   man, who is not an ingrate, to Him for ever. If ye love Me, keep My
   commandments.'

   There is always something hard and distasteful to the individual will
   in the tone of authority assumed by any man whatsoever. We always more
   or less rebel and shrink from that; and there is only one thing that
   makes commandment sweet, and that is when it drops like honey from the
   honeycomb, from lips that we love. So does it in the case of Christ's
   commands to us. It is joy to know and to do the will of One to whom the
   whole heart turns with gratitude and affection. And Christ blesses and
   privileges us by the communication to us of His pleasure concerning us,
   that we may have the gladness of yielding to His desires, and so
   meeting the love which commands with the happy love which obeys. He
   that made me whole, the same said unto me . . . ' and what He says it
   must be joy to do.

   So, My yoke is easy and My burden is light,' not because Christ
   diminishes the requirements of law; not because the standard of
   Christian obedience is lowered beneath any other standard of conduct
   and character. It is far higher. The things which make Christian duty
   are often very painful in themselves. There is always self-sacrifice in
   Christian virtue, and self-sacrifice has always a sting in it; but the
   yoke is easy and the burden is light,' because, if I may so say, the
   yoke is padded with the softest velvet of love, and lies upon our necks
   lightly because He has laid it there. All the rigid harshness of
   precept is done away when the precept comes from Christ's lips, and His
   commandment makes the crooked things straight and the rough places
   plain'; and turns duty, distasteful duty, into joyful service. The
   blessed basis of Christian obedience, and of Christ's authority, is
   Christ's redemption.

   III. And then, still further, we have here our Lord setting Himself
   forth as the divine Son, whose working needs and knows no rest.

   We find, in the subsequent part of the chapter, that the Jews,' as they
   are called, by which is meant the antagonistic portion of the nation,
   sought to slay Christ because He had done these things on the Sabbath
   day.' But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.'
   Unquestionably the form which the healing took was intended by our Lord
   to bring into prominence the very point which these pedantic casuists
   laid hold of. He meant to draw attention to His sweeping aside of the
   Rabbinical casuistries of the law of the Sabbath. And He meant to do it
   in order that He might have the occasion of making this mighty claim,
   which is lodged in these solemn and profound words, to possess a
   Sonship, which, like the divine working, wrought, needing and knowing
   no repose.

   My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.' The rest, which the old story
   in Genesis attributed to the Creator after the Creation, was not to be
   construed as if it meant the rest of inactivity; but it was the rest of
   continuous action. God's rest and God's work are one. Throughout all
   the ages preservation is a continuous creation. The divine energy is
   streaming out for evermore, as the bush that burns unconsumed, as the
   sun that flames undiminished for ever, pouring out from the depth of
   that divine nature, and for ever sustaining a universe. So that there
   is no Sabbath, in the sense of a cessation from action, proper to the
   divine nature; because all His action is repose, and e'en in His very
   motion there is rest.' And this divine coincidence of activity and of
   repose belongs to the divine Son in His divine-human nature. With that
   arrogance which is the very audacity of blasphemy, if it be not the
   simplicity of a divine consciousness, He puts His own work side by side
   with the Father's work, as the same in principle, the same in method,
   the same in purpose, the same in its majestic coincidence of repose and
   of energy.

   My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. Therefore for Me, as for Him,
   there is no need of a Sabbath of repose.' Human activity is dissipated
   by toil, human energy is exhausted by expenditure. Man works and is
   weary; man works and is distracted. For the recovery of the serenity of
   his spirit, and for the renewal of his physical strength, repose of
   body and gathering in of mind, such as the Sabbath brought, were
   needed; but neither is needed for Him who toils unwearied in the
   heavens; and neither is needed for the divine nature of Him who labours
   in labours parallel with the Father's here upon the earth.

   Now remember that this is no abolition of the Sabbatic rest for
   Christ's followers. Rather the ground on which He here asserts His
   superiority over, and His non-dependence upon, such a repose shows, or
   at all events implies, that all mere human workers need such rest, and
   should thankfully accept it. But it is a claim on His part to a divine
   equality. It is a claim on His part to do works which are other than
   human works. It is a claim on His part to be the Lord of a divine
   institution, living above the need of it, and able to mould it at His
   will.

   And so it opens up depths, into which we cannot go now, of the
   relations of that divine Father and that divine Son; and makes us feel
   that the little incident in which He turned to a paralysed man and
   said: Rise, take up thy bed and walk,' on the Sabbath day, like some
   small floating leaf of sea-weed upon the surface, has great deep
   tendrils that go down and down into the very abyss of things, and lays
   hold upon that central truth of Christianity, the divinity of the Son
   of God, who is One with the ever-working Father.

   IV. Lastly, we have in this incident yet another lesson. We have the
   Healer who is also the Judge, warning the healed of the possibilities
   of a relapse.

   Jesus findeth him in the Temple, and said unto him, Behold, thou art
   made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.' The man's
   eight-and-thirty years of illness had apparently been brought on by
   dissipation. It was a sin of flesh, avenged in the flesh, that had
   given him that miserable life. One would have thought he had got
   warning enough, but we all know the old proverb about what happened
   when the devil was ill, and what befell his resolutions when he got
   better. And so Christ comes to him again with this solemn warning:
   There is a worse thing than eight-and-thirty years of paralysis. You
   fell once, and sore was your punishment. If you fall twice, your
   punishment will be sorer.' Why? Because the first one had done him no
   good. So here are lessons for us. There is always danger that we shall
   fall back into old sins, even if we think we have overcome them. The
   mystic influence of habit, enfeebled will, the familiar temptation, the
   imagination rebelling, the memory tempting, sometimes even, as in the
   case of a man that has been a drunkard, the physical effect of the
   odour of his temptation upon his nostrils--all these things make it
   extremely unlikely that a man who has once been under the condemnation
   of any evil shall never be tempted to fall under its sway again.

   And such a fall is not only more criminal than the former, it is more
   deadly than the former. It were better for them not to have known the
   way of righteousness, than after they have known it to turn aside.' The
   last state of that man is worse than the first.'

   My brother, there is no blacker condemnation; and if I may use a strong
   word, there is no hotter hell, than that which belongs to an apostate
   Christian. It has happened unto them according to the true proverb. The
   dog is turned to his vomit again.' Very unpolite, a very coarse
   metaphor? Yes; to express a far worse reality.

   Christian men and women! you have been made whole. Sin no more, lest a
   worse thing come unto you.' And turn to that Lord and say, Hold Thou me
   up and I shall be saved.' Then the enemies will not be able to
   recapture you, and the chains which have dropped from your wrists will
   never enclose them any more.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE LIFE-GIVER AND JUDGE

   But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. 18.
   Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill Him, because He not only had
   broken the Sabbath, but said also that God was His Father, making
   Himself equal with God. 19. Then answered Jesus and said unto them,
   Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of Himself, but
   what He seeth the Father do: for what things soever He doeth, these
   also doeth the Son likewise. 20. For the Father loveth the Son, and
   sheweth Him all things that Himself doeth: and He will shew Him greater
   works than these, that ye may marvel. 21. For as the Father raiseth up
   the dead, and quickeneth them; even so the Son quickeneth whom He will.
   22. For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto
   the Son: 23. That all men should honour the Son, even as they honour
   the Father. He that honoureth not the Son, honoureth not the Father
   which hath sent Him. 24. Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that
   heareth My word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath everlasting
   life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death
   unto life. 25. Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and
   now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they
   that hear shall live. 26. For as the Father hath life in Himself; so
   hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself; 27. And hath given
   Him authority to execute judgment also, because He is the Son of
   Man.'--JOHN v. 17-27.

   The Jews' were up in arms because Jesus had delivered a man from
   thirty-eight years of misery. They had no human sympathies for the
   sufferer, whom hope deferred had made sick and hopeless, but they
   shuddered at the breach of the Sabbath. Sacrifice' was more important
   in their view than mercy.' They did not acknowledge that the miracle
   proved Christ's Messiahship, but they were quite sure that doing it on
   the Sabbath proved His wickedness. How formalism twists men's judgments
   of the relative magnitude of form and spirit!

   Jesus' vindication of His action roused them still farther, for He put
   it on a ground which seemed to them nothing short of blasphemy: My
   Father worketh even until now, and I work.' They fastened on one point
   in that great saying, namely, that it claimed Sonship in a special
   sense, and vindicated His right to disregard the Sabbath law on that
   ground. God's rest is not inaction. Preservation is a continual
   creation.' All being subsists because God is ever working. The Son
   co-operates with the Father, and for Him, as for the Father, the
   Sabbath law does not apply. The charge of breaking the Sabbath fades
   into insignificance before the sin, in the objectors' eyes, of making
   such claims. Therefore our Lord proceeds to expand and justify them.

   He makes, first, a general statement in verses 19 and 20, in which He
   sets forth the relation involved in the very idea of Fatherhood and
   Sonship. He, as perfect Son of God, is perfectly one with the Father in
   will and act, and so knit to Him in sympathy that a self-originated
   action is impossible, not by reason of defect of power, but by reason
   of unity of being. That perfect unity is expressed negatively (can do
   nothing') and then positively (doeth likewise'). But it is not manifest
   in actions alone, but has its deep roots in the perfect love which
   flows ever from each to each, and in the Father's perfect communication
   to the Son, and the Son's perfect reception from the Father. Jesus
   claimed to stand in such a relation to the Father that He was able to
   do whatsoever the Father did, and in like manner' as the Father did it;
   that He was the unique object of the Father's love, and capable of
   receiving complete communications as to all things that Himself doeth';
   that He lived in such complete unity with the Father that His every act
   was the result of it, and that no trace of self-will had ever tinged
   His perfect spirit. What man has ever made such claims and not been
   treated as insane? He makes them, and likewise says that He is lowly of
   heart'; and the world listens, if not believing, at any rate reverent,
   as in the presence of the best man that ever lived. Strange goodness,
   to claim such divine prerogatives, unless the claim is valid!

   It is expanded in verses 21-23 into two great classes of works, which
   Jesus says that He does. Both are distinctively divine works. To give
   life and to judge the world are equally beyond human power; they are
   equally His actions. These are the greater works' which He foretells in
   verse 20, and they are greater than the miracle of healing which had
   originated the whole conversation. To give life at first, and to give
   it again to the dead, and not only to revivify, but to raise them, are
   plainly competent to no power short of the divine; and here Jesus
   calmly claims them.

   That tremendous claim is here made in the widest sense, including both
   the corporeally and the spiritually dead, who are afterwards treated of
   separately. The Son is the fountain of life in all the aspects of that
   wide-reaching word; and He quickeneth whom He will,' as He had
   spontaneously healed the impotent man. Does that assertion contradict
   the other, just before it, that He does nothing of Himself? No; for His
   will, while His, is ever harmonious with the Father's, just as His
   love, which is ever coincident with the Father's. Does that assertion
   imply His arbitrary pleasure, or make man's will a cipher? No; for His
   will is guided by righteous love, and wills to quicken those who comply
   with His conditions. But the assertion does declare that His will to
   quicken is omnipotent, and that His voice can pierce the dull, cold ear
   of death,' and bring back the soul to the empty house of this
   tabernacle, or rouse the spirit dead in trespasses.'

   The other divine prerogative of judging is inseparable from that of
   revivifying, and in regard to it Christ's claim is still higher, for He
   says that it is wholly vested in Him as Son. The idea of judgment here,
   like that of quickening, with which it is associated, is to be taken in
   its more general sense (all judgment') , and therefore as including
   both the present judgment, for which Jesus said that He was come into
   the world, and which men pass on themselves by the very fact of their
   attitude to Him and His Gospel, and also the future final judgment,
   which manifests character and determines destiny. Both these has the
   Father given into the hands of the Son.

   The purpose, so far as men are concerned, of the Son's investiture,
   with these solemn prerogatives, is that He may receive universal divine
   honour. A narrower purpose was stated in verse 20, where the persons
   seeing His works are only His then audience, and the effect sought to
   be produced is merely marvel.' But wonder is meant to lead on to
   recognition of the meaning of His power, and of the mystery of His
   person, and that, again, to rendering to Him precisely the same honour
   as is due to the Father. No more unmistakable demand for worship, no
   more emphatic assertion of divinity, can be made than lie in these
   words. To worship Christ does not intercept the honour due to God; to
   worship the Son is to worship the Father; and no man honours the Father
   who sent Him who does not honour the Son whom He has sent.

   In verses 24-27 the two related prerogatives are presented in their
   spiritual aspect, while in the later verses of the chapter the
   resurrection and quickening of the literally dead are dealt with. Mark
   the significant new term introduced in verse 24, He that believeth.'
   That spiritual resurrection from the death of sin and self is wrought
   on whom He will,' but He wills that it shall be wrought on them who
   believe. Similarly, in verse 25, it is they that hear' who shall live.'
   It must be so, for there is no other way by which life from Him, who is
   the Life, can pass into and quicken us than by our opening our hearts
   by faith for its inflow. The mysteries of the Son's divinity and of His
   imparted life are deep, but the condition of receiving that life is
   plain. If we will trust Jesus, we shall live; if not, we are dead.
   Trusting Him is trusting the Father that sent Him, and that Father
   becomes accessible to our trust when we hear' Christ's word.'

   The effects of faith are immediate, and the poor present may be
   enriched and clothed in celestial light for each of us, if we will. For
   Jesus does not point first to the mysteries of the resurrection of the
   dead, and the tremendous solemnities of the final judgment, but to what
   we may each enter upon at any moment. The believing man hath eternal
   life,' and cometh not into judgment.' That life is not reserved to be
   entered on in the blessed future, but is a present possession. True, it
   will blossom into unexampled nobleness when it is transported into its
   native country, like some exotic in our colder climates if it were
   carried back to the tropics. But it is a present possession, and heaven
   is not different in kind from the Christian life on earth, but differs
   mainly in degree and in circumstances. And he that has the life here
   and now is, by its moulding of his outward life, preserved from the
   sins which would bring him into judgment, and the merciful judgment to
   which he is still subject is that for which his truest self longs. And
   that blessed condition carries in it the pledge that, at the last great
   day, which is to others a day of wrath, a dreadful day,' he whom Christ
   has quickened by His own indwelling life shall have boldness before
   Him.'

   Obviously, in these verses the present effects of faith are in view,
   since Jesus emphatically declares that the hour now is' when they can
   be realised. Once more He states in the strongest terms, and as the
   reason for the assurance that faith secures to us life, His possession
   of the two divine prerogatives of quickening and judging. What a
   paradox it is to say that it is given' to Him to have life in Himself'!
   And when was that gift given? In the depths of eternity.

   He sits on no precarious throne, nor borrows leave to be,' and hence He
   can impart life and lose none. Inseparably connected with that given,
   and yet self-inherent, life, is the capacity for executing judgment
   which belongs to Him as a Son of man.' It has been as the Son' of the
   Father that it has been considered, in the previous verses, as
   belonging to Him; but now it is as a true man that He is fitted to
   bear, and actually is clothed with, that judicial power. No doubt He is
   Judge of all, because by His incarnation and earthly life He presents
   to all the offer of eternal life, by their attitude to which offer men
   are judged. But the connection of thought seems rather to be that
   Christ's Manhood, inextricably intertwined with His divinity, is
   equally needed with the latter to constitute Him our Judge. He knoweth
   our frame,' from the inside, as it were, and the participation in our
   nature which fits Him to be a merciful and faithful High Priest' also
   fits Him to be the Judge of mankind.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE FOURTH MIRACLE IN JOHN'S GOSPEL

   And Jesus took the loaves; and when He had given thanks, He distributed
   to the disciples, and the disciples to them that were set down; and
   likewise of the fishes as much as they would.'--JOHN vi. 11.

   This narrative of the miraculous feeding of the five thousand is
   introduced into John's Gospel with singular abruptness. We read in the
   first verse of the chapter: After these things Jesus went over the Sea
   of Galilee,' i.e. from the western to the eastern side. But the
   Evangelist does not tell us how or when He got to the western side.
   These things,' which are recorded in the previous chapter, are the
   healing of the impotent man at the Pool of Bethesda, the consequent
   outburst of Jewish hostility, and the profound and solemn discourse of
   our Lord, in which He claims filial relationship to the Father. So that
   we must insert between the chapters a journey from Jerusalem to
   Galilee, and a lapse at all events of some months--or, if the feast
   referred to in the previous chapter be, as it may be, the Passover, an
   interval of nearly a year. So little care for the mere framework of
   events has this fourth Gospel; so entirely would the Evangelist have us
   see that his reason for narrating this miracle is mainly its spiritual
   lessons and the revelation which it makes of Christ as Himself the
   Bread of Life.

   Similarly, he has no care to tell us anything about the reasons for our
   Lord's retirement with His disciples from Galilee to the eastern bank.
   These we have to learn from the other Evangelists. They give us several
   concurrent motives--the news of the death of John the Baptist; and of
   the desire of the bloody tyrant to see Jesus, which foreboded evil;
   also the return of the twelve Apostles from their trial journey, which
   involved the necessity of rest for them; and, perhaps, the approach of
   the Passover, which our Lord did not purpose to observe in Jerusalem
   because of the Jewish hostility, and which, therefore, suggested the
   withdrawal to temporary retirement.

   All these reasons concurring, He and His disciples would seek for a
   brief space of seclusion and repose. But the hope of securing such was
   vain. The people followed in crowds so eagerly, so hastily, in such
   enormous numbers, that no natural or ordinary provision for their wants
   could be thought of. Hence the occasion for the miracle before us.

   Now I think that this narrative, with which I wish to deal, falls
   mainly into two portions, both of which suggest for us some important
   lessons. There is, first, the preparations for the sign; and then there
   is the sign itself. Let us look at these two points in succession.

   I. First, then, the preparations for the sign.

   Now it is to be observed that this is the only incident before our
   Lord's last journey to Jerusalem which is recorded by all four
   Evangelists; therefore the variations between the narratives are of
   especial interest, and these variations are very considerable. We find,
   for instance, that in John's account the question as to how the bread
   was to be provided came from Christ; in the other Evangelists' accounts
   that question is discussed first amongst the Apostles privately. We
   find from John's narrative that the question was suggested even before
   the multitudes had come to Jesus. We find in the Synoptic Gospels that
   it arose at the close of a long day of teaching and of healing.

   Now it is possible that this diversity of time may be the solution of
   the diversity of the person proposing. That is to say, it is quite
   legitimate to conclude that John's account takes up the incident at an
   earlier period than the other Evangelists do, and that the full order
   of events was this; that, privately, at the beginning of the day,
   whilst the people were yet flocking to our Lord, He, to one of the
   disciples alone, suggests the question, Whence shall we buy bread that
   these may eat?' and that the answer, Two hundred pennyworth of bread is
   not sufficient that every one of them may take a little,' explains for
   us the suggestion of the same amount at a subsequent part of the day,
   by the Apostles when they asked our Lord the question, Shall we go and
   buy two hundred pennyworth of bread that these may eat?'

   Be that as it may, we may pause for a moment upon this question of our
   Lord's, Whence shall we buy bread that these may eat?'

   Now notice what a lovely glimpse we get there into the quick-rising
   sympathy of the Saviour with all forms of human necessity. He had gone
   away to snatch a brief moment of rest. The rest is denied Him; the
   hurrying crowds come pressing with their vulgar curiosity--for it was
   nothing better--after Him. No movement of impatience passes across His
   mind; no reluctance as He turns away from the vanishing prospect of a
   quiet afternoon with His friends. He looks upon them, and the first
   thought is a quick, instinctive movement of a divine and yet most human
   sympathy. The question rises in His mind of how He was to provide for
   them; they were not hungry yet; they had not thought where their bread
   was to come from. But He cared for the careless, and His heart was
   prophetic of their necessities, and quick to determine what He should
   do' to supply them. So is it ever. Before we call, He answers. Thy
   mercy, O loving Christ! needs no more than the sight of human
   necessities, or even the anticipation of them, swiftly to bestir itself
   for their satisfaction and their supply.

   But, farther, He selects for the question Philip, a man who seems to
   have been what is called--as if it were the highest praise--an
   intensely practical person'; who seems to have had little faith in
   anything that he could not get hold of by his senses, and who lived
   upon the low level of common sense.' He always lays stress upon
   seeing.' His answer to Nathanael when he said, Can any good thing come
   out of Nazareth?' was, Come and see.' A very good answer, and yet one
   that relies only on the external manifestation of Christ to the senses.
   Then, on another occasion, he breaks in upon the lofty spiritualities
   of our Lord's final discourse to His disciples, with the malapropos
   request, Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us.' And so here,
   to the man who believed in his eyesight, and did not easily apprehend
   much else, Jesus puts this question, Where is the bread to come from
   for all these people? This He said to prove him.' He hoped that the
   question might have shaped itself in the hearer's mind into a promise,
   and that he might have been able to say in answer, Thou canst supply;
   we need not buy.'

   So Christ does still. He puts problems before us, too, to settle; takes
   us, as it were, into His confidence with interrogations that try us,
   whether we can rise above the level of the material and visible, or
   whether all our conceptions of possibilities are bounded by these. And
   sometimes, even though the question at first sight seems to evoke only
   such a response as it did here, it works more deeply down below
   afterwards, and we are helped by the very difficulty to rise to a clear
   faith.

   Philip's answer is very significant. Two hundred pennyworth of bread
   are not sufficient.' He casts his eye over the multitude, he makes a
   rough, rapid calculation, one does not exactly see the data on which it
   was based; and he comes to the conclusion, Two hundred pennyworth' (in
   our English money some L. 7 or L. 8 worth) would give them each a
   morsel. And no doubt he thought himself very practical. He was a man of
   figures; he believed in what could be put into tables and statistics.
   Yes; and like a great many other people of his sort, he left out one
   small element in his calculation, and that was Jesus Christ, and so his
   answer went creeping along the low levels, dragging itself like a
   half-wounded snake, when it might have risen on the wings of faith into
   the empyrean, and soared and sung.

   So learn that when we have to deal with Christ's working--and when have
   we not to deal with Christ's working?--perhaps probabilities that can
   be tabulated are not altogether the best bases upon which to rest our
   calculations. Learn that the audacity of a faith that expects great
   things, though there be nothing visible upon which to build, is wiser
   and more prudent than the creeping common-sense that adheres to facts
   which are shadows, and forgets that the chief fact is that we have an
   Almighty Helper and Friend at our sides.

   Still further, among these preliminaries, let us point to the
   exhibition of the inadequate resources which Christ, according to the
   fuller narrative in the other Evangelists, desired to know. There is a
   little lad here with five barley loaves'--one per thousand--and two
   small fishes'--insufficient in quantity and very, very common in
   quality, for barley bread was the food of the poorest. But what are
   they among so many?' And Christ says, Bring them to Me.'

   Christ's preparation for making our poor resources adequate for
   anything is to drive home into our hearts the consciousness of their
   insufficiency. We need, first of all, to be brought to this, All that I
   have is this wretched little stock; and what is that measured against
   the work that I have to do, and the claims upon me?' Only when we are
   brought to that can His great power pour itself into us and fill us
   with rejoicing and overcoming strength. The old mystics used to say,
   and they said truly: You must be emptied of yourself before you can be
   filled by God.' And the first thing for any man to learn, in
   preparation for receiving a mightier power than his own into his
   opening heart, is to know that all his own strength is utter and
   absolute weakness. What are they among so many?' When we have once gone
   right down into the depths of felt impotence, and when our work has
   risen before us, as if it were far too great for our poor strengths
   which are weaknesses, then we are brought, and only then, into the
   position in which we may begin to hope that power equal to our desire
   will be poured into our souls.

   And so the last of the preparations that I will touch upon is that
   majestic preparation for blessing by obedience. And Jesus said, Make
   the men sit down.' And there they sat themselves, as Mark puts it in
   his picturesque way, like so many garden plots--the rectangular oblongs
   in a garden in which pot-herbs are grown--on the green grass, below the
   blue sky, by the side of the quiet lake. Cannot you fancy how some of
   them seated themselves with a scoff, and some with a quiet smile of
   incredulity; and some half sheepishly and reluctantly; and some in mute
   expectancy; and some in foolish wonder; and yet all of them with a
   partial obedience? And says John in the true translation: So the men
   sat down, therefore Jesus took the loaves.' Sit you down where He bids
   you, and your mouths will not be long empty. Do the things He tells
   you, and you will get the food that you need. Our business is to obey
   and to wait, and His business is, when we are seated, to open His hand
   and let the mercy drop. So much for the preparations for this great
   miracle.

   II. Now, in the next place, a word as to the sign itself.

   I take two lessons, and two only, out of it. I see in it, first, a
   revelation of Christ, as continually through all the ages sustaining
   men's physical life. And I see in it, second, a symbol of Christ as
   Himself the Bread of Life.

   As to the first, there is here, I believe, a revelation of the law of
   the universe, of Christ as being through all the ages the Sustainer of
   the physical life of men. What was done then once, with the suppression
   of certain links in the chain, is done always, with the introduction of
   those links. The miraculous moment in the narrative is not described to
   us. We do not know where or when there came in the supernatural power
   which multiplied the loaves--probably as they passed from the hand of
   the Master. But be that as it may, it was Christ's will that made the
   provision which fed all these five thousand. And I believe that the
   teaching of Scripture is in accordance with the deepest philosophy,
   that the one cause of all physical phenomena is the will of a present
   God; howsoever that may usually conform to the ordinary method of
   working which people generalise and call laws. The reason why anything
   is, and the reason why all things change, is the energy there and then
   of the indwelling God who is in all His works, and who is the only Will
   and Power in the physical world.

   And I believe, further, that Scripture teaches us that that continuous
   will, which is the cause of all phenomena and the underlying
   subsistence on which all things repose, is all managed and mediated by
   Him who from of old was named the Word; in whom was life, and without
   whom was not anything made that was made.' Our Christ is Creator, our
   Christ is Sustainer, our Christ moves the stars and feeds the sparrows.
   He was before all things, and in Him all things consist.' He opens His
   hand--and there is the print of a nail in it--and satisfies the desire
   of every living thing.'

   So learn how to think of second causes, and see in this story a
   transient manifestation, in unusual form, of an eternal and permanent
   fact. Jesus took the loaves and distributed to them that were set down.

   And so, secondly, the miracle is a sign--a symbol of Him as the true
   Bread and Food of the world. That is the explanation and commentary
   which He Himself appends to it in the subsequent part of the chapter,
   in the great discourse which is founded upon this miracle.

   I am the Bread of Life.' There is a triple statement by our Lord upon
   this subject in the remaining portion of the chapter. He says, I am the
   Bread of Life.' My personality is that which not only sustains life
   when it is given, but gives life to them that feed upon it. But more
   than that, the bread which I will give,' pointing to some future
   giving' beyond the present moment, and therefore something more than
   His life and example, is My flesh, which'--in some as yet unexplained
   way--I give for the life of the world.' And that there may be no
   misunderstanding, there is a third, deeper, more mysterious statement
   still: My flesh is meat indeed, and My blood is drink indeed.'
   Repulsive and paradoxical, but in its very offensiveness and paradox,
   proclaiming that it covers a mighty truth, and the truth, brother, is
   this, the one Food that gives life to will, affections, conscience,
   understanding, to the whole spirit of a man, is that great Sacrifice of
   the Incarnate Lord who gave upon the Cross His flesh, and on the Cross
   shed His blood, for the life of the world that was dead in trespasses
   and sins.' Christ, our Passover, is sacrificed for us, and we feed on
   the sacrifice. Let your conscience, your heart, your desires, your
   anticipations, your understanding, your will, your whole being feed on
   Him. He will be cleansing, He will be love, He will be fruition, He
   will be hope, He will be truth, He will be righteousness, He will be
   all. Feed upon Him by that faith which is the true eating of the true
   Bread, and your souls shall live.

   And notice finally here, the result of this miracle as transferred to
   the region of symbol. They did all eat and were filled'; men, women,
   children, both sexes, all ages, all classes, found the food that they
   needed in the bread that came from Christ's hands. If any man wants
   dainties that will tickle the palates of Epicureans, let him go
   somewhere else. But if he wants bread, to keep the life in and to stay
   his hunger, let him go to this Christ who is human nature's daily
   food.'

   The world has scoffed for nineteen centuries at the barley bread that
   the Gospel provides; coarse by the side of its confectionery, but it is
   enough to give life to all who eat it. It goes straight to the primal
   necessities of human nature. It does not coddle a class, or pander to
   unwholesome, diseased, or fastidious appetites. It is the food of the
   world, and not of a section. All men can relish it, all men need it. It
   is offered to them all.

   And more than that; notice the inexhaustible abundance. They did all
   eat, and were filled.' And then they took up--not of the fragments,' as
   our Bible gives it, conveying the idea of the crumbs that littered the
   grass after the repast was over, but of the broken pieces'--the
   portions that came from Christ's hands--twelve baskets full, an
   immensely greater quantity than they had to start with. The gift doth
   stretch itself as tis received.' Other goods and other possessions
   perish with the using, but this increases with use. The more one eats,
   the more there is for him to eat. And all the world may live upon it
   for ever, and there will be more at the end than there was at the
   beginning.

   Brethren, why do ye spend your money for that which is not bread'?
   There is no answer worthy of a rational soul, no answer that will stand
   either the light of conscience or the clearer light of the Day of
   Judgment. I come to you now, and although my poor words may be but like
   the barley bread and the two fishes--nothing amongst all this gathered
   audience--I come with Christ in my hands, and I say to you, Eat, and
   your souls shall live.' He will spread a table for you in the
   wilderness, and take you to sit at last at His table in His Kingdom.
     __________________________________________________________________

FRAGMENTS' OR BROKEN PIECES'

   When they were filled, He said unto His disciples, Gather up the
   fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.'--JOHN vi. 12.

   The Revised Version correctly makes a very slight, but a very
   significant change in the words of this verse. Instead of fragments' it
   reads broken pieces.' The change seems very small, but the effect of it
   is considerable. It helps our picture of the scene by correcting a very
   common misapprehension as to what it was which the Apostles are bid to
   gather up. The general notion, I suppose, is that the fragments' are
   the crumbs that fell from each man's hands, as he ate, and the picture
   before the imagination of the ordinary reader is that of the Apostles'
   carefully collecting the debris of the meal from the grass where it had
   dropped. But the true notion is that the broken pieces which remain
   over' are the unused portions into which our Lord's miracle-working
   hand had broken the bread, and the true picture is that of the Apostles
   carefully putting away in store for future use the abundant provision
   which their Lord had made, beyond the needs of the hungry thousands.
   And that conception of the command teaches far more beautiful and
   deeper lessons than the other.

   For if the common translation and notion be correct, all that is taught
   us, or at least what is principally taught us, is the duty of thrift
   and careful economy; whereas the other shows more clearly that what is
   taught us is that Jesus Christ always gets ready for His people
   something over and above the exact limits of their bare need at the
   moment, that He prepares for His poor and hungry dependants in royal
   fashion, leaving ever a wide margin of difference between what would be
   just enough to keep the life in them, and His liberal housekeeping.
   Further, we are taught a lesson of wise husbandry and economy in the
   use of that overplus of grace which Christ ministers, and are
   instructed that the laws of prudent thrift have as honoured a place in
   the management of spiritual as of temporal wealth. Gather up,' says our
   Lord, the pieces which I broke, the large provision which I made for
   possible wants. My gifts are in excess of the requirements of the
   moment. Take care of them till you need them.' That is a worthier
   interpretation of His command than one which merely sees in it an
   exhortation to thrifty taking care of the crumbs that fell from the
   lips of the hungry eaters.

   Looking at this command, then, with this slight alteration of
   rendering, and consequent widening of scope, we may briefly try to
   gather up the lessons which it obviously suggests.

   I. We have that thought, to which I have already referred, as more
   strikingly brought out by the slight alteration of translation, which,
   by the use of broken pieces,' suggests the connection with Christ's
   breaking the loaves and fishes. We are taught to think of the large
   surplus in Christ's gifts over and above our need. Our Lord has Himself
   given us a commentary upon this miracle. All Christ's miracles are
   parables, for all teach us, on the level of natural and outward things,
   lessons that are true in regard to the spiritual world; but this one is
   especially symbolical, as indeed are all these recorded in John's
   Gospel. And here we have Christ, on the day after the miracle,
   commenting upon it in His long and profound discourse upon the Bread of
   Life, which plainly intimates that He meant His office of feeding the
   hungry crowds, with bread supernaturally increased by the touch of His
   hand, to be but a picture and a guide which might lead to the
   apprehension of the higher view of Himself as the bread of God which
   came down from heaven,' feeding and giving life to the world' by His
   broken body and shed blood.

   So that we are not inventing a fanciful interpretation of an incident
   not meant to have any meaning deeper than shows on the surface, when we
   say that the abundance far beyond what the eaters could make use of at
   the moment really represented the large surplus of inexhaustible
   resources and unused grace which is treasured for us all in Christ
   Jesus. Whom He feeds He feasts. His gifts answer our need, and
   over-answer it, for He is able to do exceeding abundantly above that
   which we ask or think,' and neither our conceptions, nor our petitions,
   nor our present powers of receiving, are the real limits of the
   illimitable grace that is laid up for us in Christ, and which,
   potentially, we have each of us in our hands whenever we lay our hands
   on Him.

   Oh, dear friends! what you and I have ever had and felt of Christ's
   power, sweetness, preciousness, and love is as nothing compared with
   the infinite depths of all those which lie in Him. The sea fills the
   little creeks along its shore, but it rolls in unfathomed depths,
   boundless to the horizon away out there in the mid-Atlantic. And all
   the present experience of all Christian people, of what Christ is, is
   like the experience of the first settlers in some great undiscovered
   continent; who timidly plant a little fringe of population round its
   edge and grow their scanty crops there, whilst the great prairies of
   miles and miles, with all their wealth and fertility, are lying
   untrodden and unknown in the heart of the untraversed continent. The
   most powerful telescope leaves nebulae unresolved, which, though they
   seem but a dim dust of light, are all ablaze with mighty suns. The
   goodness' which He has wrought before the sons of men for them that
   fear' Him is, as the Psalmist adoringly exclaims, wondrously great,'
   but still greater is that which the same verse of the Psalm
   celebrates--the goodness which He has laid up for them that fear Him.'
   The gold which is actually coined and passing from hand to hand, is but
   a fraction, a mere scale, as it were, off the surface of the great
   uncoined mass of bullion that lies stored in the vaults there. Christ
   is a great deal more than any man, or than all men, have yet found Him
   to be. Gather up the broken pieces'; and see that nothing of that
   infinite preciousness of His be lost by us.

   II. Then there is another very simple lesson which I draw. This command
   suggests for us Christ's thrift (if I may use the word) in the
   employment of His miraculous power.

   Surely they might have said: If thou canst multiply five loaves into
   all this abundance, why should we be trudging about, each with a basket
   on his back full of bread, when we have with us He whose word can make
   it for us at any moment?' Yes, but a law which characterises all the
   miraculous, in both the Old and the New Testament, and which broadly
   distinguishes Christ's miracles from all the false miracles of false
   religions is this, that the miraculous is pared down to the smallest
   possible amount, that not one hairsbreadth beyond the necessity shall
   be done by miracle; that whatever men can do they shall do; that their
   work shall stop as late, and begin again as soon as possible. Thus,
   though Christ was going to raise Lazarus, men's hands had to roll away
   the stone; and when Christ had raised Lazarus, men's hands had to loose
   the napkins from his face. And though Christ was able to say to the
   daughter of Jairus, Talitha cumi!' (damsel, arise!) His next word was:
   Give her something to eat.' Where the miraculous was needed it was
   used, and not a hairsbreadth beyond absolute necessity did it extend.

   And so here Christ multiplies the bread, and yet each of the Apostles
   has to take a basket, probably some kind of woven wicker-work article
   which they would carry for holding their little necessaries in their
   peregrinations; each Apostle has to take his basket, and perhaps
   emptying it of some of his humble apparel, to fill it with these bits
   of bread; for Christ was not going to work miracles where men's thrift
   and prudence could be employed.

   Nor does He do so now. We live by faith, and our dependence on Him can
   never be too absolute. Only laziness sometimes dresses itself in the
   garb and speaks with the tongue of faith, and pretends to be truthful
   when it is only slothful. Why criest thou unto Me?' said God to Moses,
   speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward.' True faith
   sets us to work. It is not to be perverted into idle and false
   depending upon Him to work for us, when by the use of our own ten
   fingers and our own brains, guided and strengthened by His working in
   us, we can do the work that is set before us.

   III. Still further, there is another lesson here. Not only does the
   injunction show us Christ's thrift in the employment of the
   supernatural, but it teaches us our duty of thrift and care in the use
   of the spiritual grace bestowed upon us.

   These men had given to them this miraculously made bread; but they had
   to exercise ordinary thrift in the preservation of the supernatural
   gift. Christ has been given to you by the most stupendous miracle that
   ever was or can be wrought, and if you are Christian people, you have
   the Spirit of Christ given to you, to dwell in your hearts, to make you
   wise and fair, gentle and strong, and altogether Christlike. But you
   have to take care of these gifts. You have to exercise the common
   virtues of economy and thrift in your use of the divine gifts as in
   your use of the common things of daily life. You have to use wisely and
   not waste the Bread of God that came down from heaven, or that Bread of
   God will not feed you. You have to provide the basket in which to carry
   the unexhausted residue of the divine gift, or you may stand hungry in
   the very midst of plenty, and whilst within arm's length of you there
   is bread enough and to spare to feed the whole world.

   The lesson of my text, which is most eminently brought out if we adopt
   the translation which I have referred to at the beginning of these
   remarks, is, then, just this: Christian men, be watchful stewards of
   that great gift of a living Christ, the food of your souls, that has
   been by miracle bestowed upon you. Such gathering together for future
   need of the unused residue of grace may be accomplished by three ways.
   First, there must be a diligent use of the grace given. See that you
   use to the very full, in the measure of your present power of absorbing
   and your present need, the gift bestowed upon you. Be sure that you
   take in as much of Christ as you can contain before you begin to think
   of what to do with the overplus. If we are not careful to take what we
   can, and to use what we need, of Christ, there is little chance of our
   being faithful stewards of the surplus. The water in a mill-stream runs
   over the trough in great abundance when the wheel is not working, and
   one reason why so many Christians seem to have so much more given to
   them in Christ than they need is because they are doing no work to use
   up the gift.

   A second essential to such stewardship is the careful guarding of the
   grace given from whatever would injure it. Let not worldliness,
   business, cares of the world, the sorrows of life, its joys, duties,
   anxieties or pleasures--let not these so come into your hearts that
   they will elbow Christ out of your hearts, and dull your appetite for
   the true Bread that came down from heaven.

   And lastly, not only by use and by careful guarding, but also by
   earnest desire for larger gifts of the Christ who is large beyond all
   measure, shall we receive more and more of His sweetness and His
   preciousness into our hearts, and of His beauty and glory into our
   transfigured characters. The basket that we carry, this recipient heart
   of ours, is elastic. It can stretch to hold any amount that you like to
   put into it. The desire for more of Christ's grace will stretch its
   capacity, and as its capacity increases the inflowing gift greatens,
   and a larger Christ fills the larger room of my poor heart.

   So the lesson is taught us of our prudence in the care and use of the
   grace bestowed on us, and we are bidden to cherish a happy confidence
   in the inexhaustible resources of Christ, and the continual gift in the
   future of even larger measures of grace, which are all ours already,
   given to us at the first reception of Him into our hearts, and only
   needing our faithfulness to be growingly ours in experience as they are
   ours from the first in germ.

   IV. Finally, a solemn warning is implied in this command, and its
   reason that nothing be lost.'

   Then there is a possibility of losing the gift that is freely given to
   us. We may waste the bread, and so, sometime or other when we are
   hungry, awake to the consciousness that it has dropped out of our slack
   hands. The abundance of Christ's grace may, so far as you are profited
   or enriched by it, be like the unclaimed millions of money which nobody
   asks for and that is of use to no living soul. You may be paupers while
   all God's riches in glory are at your disposal, and starving while
   baskets full of bread broken for us by Christ lie unused at our sides.
   Some of us have never tasted the sweetness or been fed by the
   nutritiousness of that Bread of God which came down from heaven. And
   more marvellous still, there may be some of us, who having come to
   Christ hungry and been fed by Him, have ceased to care for the pure
   nourishment and taste for the manna, and are turning again with gross
   appetite to the husks in the swine's trough. Negligent Christians!
   worldly Christians! you who care more for money and other dainties and
   delights which perish with the using-- backsliding Christians, who once
   hungered and thirsted for more of Christ, and now have no longing for
   Him--awake to the danger in which you stand of letting all your
   spiritual wealth slip through your fingers; behold the treasures, yet
   unreached, within your grasp, and seek to garner and realise them.
   Gather up the broken pieces which remain over, lest everything be lost.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE FIFTH MIRACLE IN JOHN'S GOSPEL

   So when they had rowed about five-and-twenty or thirty furlongs, they
   see Jesus walking on the sea, and drawing nigh unto the ship: and they
   were afraid. 20. But He said unto them, It is I; be not afraid.'--JOHN
   vi. 19, 20.

   There are none of our Lord's parables recorded in this Gospel, but all
   the miracles which it narrates are parables. Moral and religious truth
   is communicated by the outward event, as in the parable it is
   communicated by the story. The mere visible fact becomes more than
   semi-transparent. The analogy between the spiritual and the natural
   world which men instinctively apprehend, of which the poet and the
   orator and the religious teacher have always made abundant use, and
   which it has sometimes been attempted, unsuccessfully as I think, to
   elevate to the rank of a scientific truth, underlies the whole series
   of these miracles. It is the principal if not the only key to the
   meaning of this one before us.

   The symbolism which regards life under the guise of a voyage, and its
   troubles and difficulties under the metaphor of storm and tempest, is
   especially natural to nations that take kindly to the water, like us
   Englishmen. I do not know that there is any instance, either in the Old
   or in the New Testament, of the use of that to us very familiar
   metaphor; but the emblem of the sea as the symbol of trouble, unrest,
   rebellious power, is very familiar to the writers of the Old Testament.
   And the picture of the divine path as in the waters, and of the divine
   prerogative as being to tread upon the heights of the sea,' as Job has
   it, is by no means unknown. So the natural symbolism, and the Old
   Testament use of the expressions, blend together, as I think, in
   suggesting the one point of view from which this miracle is to be
   regarded.

   It is found in two of the other Evangelists, and the condensed account
   of it which we have in this Gospel, by its omission of Peter's walking
   on the water, and of some other smaller but graphic details that the
   other Evangelists give us, serves to sharpen the symbolical meaning of
   the whole story, and to bring that as its great purpose and
   signification into prominence.

   We shall, I think, then, best gain the lessons intended to be drawn if
   we simply follow the points of the narrative in their order as they
   stand here.

   I. We have here, first of all, then, the struggling toilers.

   The other Evangelists tell us that after the feeding of the five
   thousand our Lord constrained' His disciples to get into the ship, and
   to pass over to the other side. The language implies unwillingness, to
   some extent, on their part, and the exercise of authority upon His. Our
   Evangelist, who does not mention the constraint, supplies us with the
   reason for it. The preceding miracle had worked up the excitement of
   the mob to a very dangerous point. Crowds are always the same, and this
   crowd thought, as any other crowd anywhere and in any age would have
   done, that the prophet that could make bread at will was the kind of
   prophet whom they wanted. So they determined to take Him by force, and
   make Him a king; and Christ, seeing the danger, and not desiring that
   His Kingdom should be furthered by such unclean hands and gross
   motives, determined to withdraw Himself into the loneliness of the
   bordering hills. It was wise to divide the little group; it would
   distract attention; it might lead some of the people, as we know it did
   lead them, to follow the boat when they found it was gone. It would
   save the Apostles from being affected by the coarse, smoky enthusiasm
   of the crowd. It would save them from revealing the place of His
   retirement. It might enable Him to steal away more securely unobserved;
   so they are sent across to the other side of the lake, some five or six
   miles. An hour or two might have done it, but for some unknown reason
   they seem to have lingered. Perhaps they had no special call for haste.
   The Paschal moon, nearly full, would be shining down upon the waters;
   their hearts and minds would be busy with the miracle which they had
   just seen. And so they may have drifted along, not caring much when
   they reached their destination. But suddenly one of the gusts of wind
   which are frequently found upon mountain lakes, especially towards
   nightfall, rose and soon became a gale with which they could not
   battle. Our Evangelist does not tell us how long it lasted, but we get
   a note of time from St. Mark, who says it was about the fourth watch of
   the night'; that is between the hours of three and six in the morning
   of the subsequent day. So that for some seven or eight hours at least
   they had been tugging at the useless oars, or sitting shivering, wet
   and weary, in the boat.

   Is it not the history of the Church in a nutshell? Is it not the symbol
   of life for us all? The solemn law under which we live demands
   persistent effort, and imposes continual antagonism upon us; there is
   no reason why we should regard that as evil, or think ourselves hardly
   used, because we are not fair-weather sailors. The end of life is to
   make men; the meaning of all events is to mould character. Anything
   that makes me stronger is a blessing, anything that develops my morale
   is the highest good that can come to me. If therefore antagonism mould
   in me

   The wrestling thews that throw the world,'

   and give me good, strong muscles, and put tan and colour into my cheek,
   I need not mind the cold and the wet, nor care for the whistling of the
   wind in my face, nor the dash of the spray over the bows. Summer
   sailing in fair weather, amidst land-locked bays, in blue seas, and
   under calm skies, may be all very well for triflers, but

   Blown seas and storming showers'

   are better if the purpose of the voyage be to brace us and call out our
   powers.

   And so be thankful if, when the boat is crossing the mouth of some glen
   that opens upon the lake, a sudden gust smites the sheets and sends you
   to the helm, and takes all your effort to keep you from sinking. Do not
   murmur, or think that God's Providence is strange, because many and
   many a time when it is dark, and Jesus is not yet come to us,' the
   storm of wind comes down upon the lake and threatens to drive us from
   our course. Let us rather recognise Him as the Lord who, in love and
   kindness, sends all the different kinds of weather which, according to
   the old proverb, make up the full-summed year.

   And then notice how, in this first picture of our text, the symbolism
   so naturally lends itself to spiritual meanings, not only in regard to
   the tempest that caught the unthinking voyagers, but also in regard to
   other points; such as the darkness amidst which they had to fight the
   tempest, and the absence of the Master. Once before, they had been
   caught in a similar storm on the lake, but it was daylight then, and
   Jesus was with them, and that made all the difference. This time it was
   night, and they looked up in vain to the green Eastern hills, and
   wondered where in their folds He was lurking, so far from their help.
   Mark gives us one sweet touch when he tells us that Christ on the
   hillside there saw them toiling in rowing, but they did not see Him. No
   doubt they felt themselves deserted, and sent many a wistful glance of
   longing towards the shore where He was. Hard thoughts of Him may have
   been in some of their minds. Master, carest Thou not?' would be
   springing to some of their lips with more apparent reason than in the
   other storm on the lake. But His calm and loving gaze looked down
   pitying on all their fear and toil. The darkness did not hide from Him,
   nor His own security on the steadfast land make Him forget, nor his
   communion with the Father so absorb Him as to exclude thoughts of them.

   It is a parable and a prophecy of the perpetual relation between the
   absent Lord and the toiling Church. He is on the mountain while we are
   on the sea. The stable eternity of the Heavens holds Him; we are tossed
   on the restless mutability of time, over which we toil at His command.
   He is there interceding for us. Whilst He prays He beholds, and He
   beholds that He may help us by His prayer. The solitary crew were not
   so solitary as they thought. That little dancing speck on the waters,
   which held so much blind love and so much fear and trouble, was in His
   sight, as on the calm mountain-top He communed with God. No wonder that
   weary hearts and lonely ones, groping amidst the darkness, and fighting
   with the tempests and the sorrows of lift, have ever found in our story
   a symbol that comes to them with a prophecy of hope and an assurance of
   help, and have rejoiced to know that they on the sea are beheld of the
   Christ in the sky, and that the darkness hideth not from' His loving
   eye.

   II. And now turn to the next stage of the story before us. We have the
   approaching Christ.

   When they had rowed about five-and-twenty or thirty furlongs,' and so
   were just about the middle of the lake, they see Jesus walking on the
   sea and drawing nigh unto the ship.' They were about half-way across
   the lake. We do not know at what hour in the fourth watch the Master
   came. But probably it was towards daybreak. Toiling had endured for a
   night. It would be in accordance with the symbolism that joy and help
   should come with the morning.

   If we look for a moment at the miraculous fact, apart from the
   symbolism, we have a revelation here of Christ as the Lord of the
   material universe, a kingdom wider in its range and profounder in its
   authority than that which that shouting crowd had sought to force upon
   Him. His will consolidated the yielding wave, or sustained His material
   body on the tossing surges. Whether we suppose the miracle as wrought
   on the one or the other, makes no difference to its value as a
   manifestation of the glory of Christ, and of His power over the
   physical order of things. In the latter case there would, perhaps, be a
   hint of a power residing in His material frame, of which we possibly
   have other phases, as in the Transfiguration, which may be a prophecy
   of what lordship over nature is possible to a sinless manhood. However
   that may be, we have here a wonderful picture which is true for all
   ages of the mighty Christ, to whose gentle footfall the unquiet surges
   are as a marble pavement; and who draws near in the purposes of His
   love, unhindered by antagonism, and using even opposing forces as the
   path for His triumphant progress. Two lessons may be drawn from this.
   One is that in His marvellous providence Christ uses all the tumults
   and unrest, the opposition and tempests which surround the ship that
   bears His followers, as the means of achieving His purposes. We stand
   before a mystery to which we have no key when we think of these two
   certain facts; first, the Omnipotent redeeming will of God in Christ;
   and, second, the human antagonism which is able to rear itself against
   that. And we stand in the presence of another mystery, most blessed,
   and yet which we cannot unthread, when we think, as we most assuredly
   may, that in some mysterious fashion He works His purposes by the very
   antagonism to His purposes, making even head-winds fill the sails, and
   planting His foot on the white crests of the angry and changeful
   billows. How often in the world's history has this scene repeated
   itself, and by a divine irony the enemies have become the helpers of
   Christ's cause, and what they plotted for destruction has turned out
   rather to the furtherance of the Gospel! He maketh the wrath of man to
   praise Him, and with the residue thereof He girdeth Himself.'

   Another lesson for our individual lives is this, that Christ, in His
   sweetness and His gentle sustaining help, comes near to us all across
   the sea of sorrow and trouble. A more tender, a more gracious sense of
   His nearness to us is ever granted to us in the time of our darkness
   and our grief than is possible to us in the sunny hours of joy. It is
   always the stormy sea that Christ comes across, to draw near to us; and
   they who have never experienced the tempest have yet to learn the
   inmost sweetness of His presence. When it is night, and it is dark, at
   the hour which is the keystone of night's black arch, Christ comes to
   us, striding across the stormy waters. Sorrow brings Him near to us. Do
   you see that sorrow does not drive you away from Him!

   III. Then, still further, we note in the story before us the terror and
   the recognition.

   St. John does not tell us why they were afraid. There is no need to
   tell us. They see, possibly in the chill uncertain light of the grey
   dawn breaking over the Eastern hills, a Thing coming to them across the
   water there. They had fought gallantly with the storm, but this
   questionable shape freezes their heart's blood, and a cry, that is
   audible above even the howling of the wind and the dash of the waves,
   gives sign of the superstitious terror that crept round the hearts of
   those commonplace, rude men.

   I do not dwell upon the fact that the average man, if he fancies that
   anything from out of the Unseen is near him, shrinks in fear. I do not
   ask you whether that is not a sign and indication of the deep
   conviction that lies in men's souls, of a discord between themselves
   and the unseen world; but I ask you if we do not often mistake the
   coming Master, and tremble before Him when we ought to be glad?

   We are often so absorbed with our work, so busy tugging at the oar, so
   anxiously watching the set of current, so engaged in keeping the helm
   right, that we have no time and no eyes to look across the ocean and
   see who it is that is coming to us through all the hurly-burly. Our
   tears fill our eyes, and weave a veil between us and the Master. And
   when we do see that there is Something there, we are often afraid of
   it, and shrink from it. And sometimes when a gentle whisper of
   consolation, or some light air, as it were, of consciousness of His
   presence, breathes through our souls, we think that it is only a
   phantasm of our own making, and that the coming Christ is nothing more
   than the play of our thoughts and imaginations.

   Oh, brethren, let no absorption in cares and duties, let no unchildlike
   murmurings, let no selfish abandonment to sorrow, blind you to the Lord
   who always comes near troubled hearts, if they will only look and see!
   Let no reluctance to entertain religious ideas, no fear of contact with
   the Unseen, no shrinking from the thought of Christ as a Kill-joy keep
   you from seeing Him as He draws near to you in your troubles. And let
   no sly, mocking Mephistopheles of doubt, nor any poisonous air, blowing
   off the foul and stagnant marshes of present materialism, make you
   fancy that the living Reality, treading on the flood there, is a dream
   or a fancy or the projection of your own imagination on to the void of
   space. He is real, whatever may be phenomenal and surface. The storm is
   not so real as the Christ, the waves not so substantial as He who
   stands upon them. They will pass and quieten, He will abide for ever.
   Lift up your hearts and be glad, because the Lord comes to you across
   the waters, and hearken to His voice: It is I! Be not afraid.'

   The encouragement not to fear follows the proclamation, It is I!' What
   a thrill of glad confidence must have poured itself into their hearts,
   when once they rose to the height of that wondrous fact!

   Well roars the storm to those who hear A deeper voice across the
   storm.'

   There is no fear in the consciousness of His presence. It is His old
   word: Be not afraid!' And He breathes it whithersoever He comes; for
   His coming is the banishment of danger and the exorcism of dread. So
   that if only you and I, in the midst of all storm and terror, can say
   It is the Lord,' then we may catch up the grand triumphant chorus of
   the old psalm, and say: Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled,
   and the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea, yet I will not
   fear.' The Lord is with us; the everlasting Christ is our Helper, our
   Refuge, and our Strength.

   IV. So, lastly, we have here in this story the end of the tempest and
   of the voyage.

   Our Evangelist does not record, as the others do, that the storm ceased
   upon Christ's being welcomed into the little boat. The other
   Evangelists do not record, as he does, the completion of the voyage.
   Immediately the ship was at the land whither they went.' The two things
   are cause and effect. I do not suppose, as many do, that a subordinate
   miracle is to be seen in that last clause of our text, or that the
   immediately' is to be taken as if it meant that without one moment's
   delay, or interval, the voyage was completed; but only, which I think
   is all that is needful, that the falling of the tempest and the calming
   of the waters which followed upon the Master's entrance into the vessel
   made the remainder of the voyage comparatively brief and swift.

   It is not always true, it is very seldom true, that when Christ comes
   on board opposition ends, and the haven is reached. But it is always
   true that when Christ comes on board a new spirit enters into the men
   who have Him for their companion, and are conscious that they have. It
   makes their work easy, and makes them more than conquerors' over what
   yet remains. With what a different spirit the weary men would bend
   their backs to the oars once more when they had the Master on board,
   and with what a different spirit you and I will set ourselves to our
   work if we are sure of His presence. The worst of trouble is gone when
   Christ shares it with us. There is a wonderful charm to stay His rough
   wind in the assurance that in all our affliction He is afflicted. If we
   feel that we are following in His footsteps, we feel that He stands
   between us and the blast, a refuge from the storm and a covert from the
   tempest. And if still, as no doubt will be the case, we have our share
   of trouble and storm and sorrow and difficulty, yet the worst of the
   gale will be passed, and though a long swell may still heave, the
   terror and the danger will have gone with the night, and hope and
   courage and gladness revive as the morning's sun breaks over the still
   unquiet waves, and shows us our Master with us and the white walls of
   the port glinting in the level beams.

   Friends, life is a voyage, anyhow, with plenty of storm and danger and
   difficulty and weariness and exposure and anxiety and dread and sorrow,
   for every soul of man. But if you will take Christ on board, it will be
   a very different thing from what it will be if you cross the wan waters
   alone. Without Him you will make shipwreck of yourselves; with Him your
   voyage may seem perilous and be tempestuous, but He will make the storm
   a calm,' and will bring you to the haven of your desire.
     __________________________________________________________________

HOW TO WORK THE WORK OF GOD

   Then said they unto Him, What shall we do, that we might work the works
   of God? 29. Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the work of God,
   that ye, believe on Him whom He hath sent.'--JOHN vi. 28, 29.

   The feeding of the five thousand was the most popular' of Christ's
   miracles. The Evangelist tells us, with something between a smile and a
   sigh, that when the people saw it, they said, This is of a truth that
   Prophet that should come into the world,' and they were so delighted
   with Him and with it, that they wanted to get up an insurrection on the
   spot, and make a King of Him. I wonder if there are any of that sort of
   people left. If two men were to come into Manchester to-morrow morning,
   and one of them were to offer material good, and the other wisdom and
   peace of heart, which of them, do you think, would have the larger
   following? We need not cast a stone at the unblushing, frank admiration
   that these men had for a Prophet who could feed them, for that is
   exactly the sort of prophet that a great number of us would like best
   if they spoke out.

   So Jesus Christ had to escape from the inconvenient enthusiasm of these
   mistaken admirers of His; and they followed Him in their eagerness, but
   were met with words which lift them into another region and damp their
   zeal. He tries to turn away their thoughts from the miracle to a far
   loftier gift. He contrasts the trouble which they willingly took in
   order to get a meal with their indifference as to obtaining the true
   bread from heaven, and He bids them work for it just as they had shown
   themselves ready to work for the other.

   They put to Him this question of my text, so strangely blending as it
   does right and wrong, You have bid us work; tell us how to work? What
   must we do that we may work the works of God?' Christ answers, in words
   that illuminate their confusions and clear the whole matter, This is
   the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent.'

   I. Faith, then, is a work.

   You know that the commonplace of evangelical teaching opposes faith to
   works; and the opposition is perfectly correct, if it be rightly
   understood. But I have a strong impression that a great deal of our
   preaching goes clean over the heads of our hearers, because we take for
   granted, and they fancy that they understand, the meaning of terms
   because the terms themselves are so familiar. And I believe that many
   people go to churches and chapels all their lives long, and hear this
   doctrine dinned into them, that they are to be saved by faith, and not
   by works, and never approach a definite understanding of what it means.

   So let me just for a moment try to clear up the terms of this
   apparently paradoxical statement that faith is a work. What do we mean
   by faith? What do you mean by saying that you have faith in your
   friend, in your wife, in your husband, in your guide? You simply mean,
   and we mean, that you trust the person, grasping him by the act of
   trust. On trust the whole fabric of human society depends, as well as
   in another aspect of the same expression does the whole fabric of
   Manchester commerce. Faith, confidence, the leaning of myself on one
   discerned to be true, trusty, strong, sufficient for the purpose in
   hand, whatever it may be--that, and nothing more mysterious, nothing
   further away from daily life and the common emotions which knit us to
   one another, is, as I take it, what the New Testament means when it
   insists upon faith.

   Ah, we all exercise it. You put it forth in certain low levels and
   directions. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her,' is the
   short summary of the happy lives of many, I have no doubt, of my
   present hearers. Have you none of that confidence to spare for God? Is
   it all meant to be poured out upon weak, fallible, changeful creatures
   like ourselves, and none of it to rise to the One in whom absolute
   confidence may eternally be fixed?

   But then, of course, as we may see by the exercise of the same emotion
   in regard to one Another, the under side (as I have been accustomed to
   say to you) of this confidence in God or Christ is diffidence of
   myself. There is no real exercise of confidence which does not involve,
   as an essential part of itself, the going out from myself in order that
   I may lay all the weight and the responsibility of the matter in hand
   upon Him in whom I trust. And so Christian faith is compounded of these
   two elements, or rather, it has these two sides which correspond to one
   another. The same figure is convex or concave according as you look at
   it from one side or another. If you look at faith from one side, it
   rises towards God; if from the other, it hollows itself out into a
   great emptiness. And so the under side of faith is distrust; and he
   that puts his confidence in God thereby goes out of himself, and
   declares that in himself there is nothing to rest upon.

   Now that two-sided confidence and diffidence, trust and distrust, which
   are one, is truly a work. It is not an easy one either; it is the
   exercise of our own inmost nature. It is an effort of will. It has to
   be done by coercing ourselves. It has to be maintained in the face of
   many temptations and difficulties. The contrast between faith and work
   is between an inward act and a crowd of outward performances. But the
   faith which knits me to God is my act, and I am responsible for it.

   But yet it is not a work, just because it is a ceasing from my own
   works, and going out from myself that He may enter in. Only remember,
   when we say, Not by works of righteousness, but by the faith of
   Christ,' we are but proclaiming that the inward man must exercise that
   act of self-abnegation and confession of its own impotence, and ceasing
   from all reliance on anything which it does, whereby, and whereby
   alone, it can be knit to God. Labour not for the meat that perisheth,
   but for that meat which endureth unto eternal life . . . . This is the
   work of God, that ye believe.' You are responsible for doing that, or
   for not doing it.

   II. Secondly, faith, and not a multitude of separate acts, is what
   pleases God.

   Mark the difference between the form of the question and that of the
   answer. The people say, What are we to do that we may work the works of
   God?' Christ answers in the singular: This is the work.' They thought
   of a great variety of observances and deeds. He gathers them all up
   into one. They thought of a pile, and that the higher it rose the more
   likely they were to be accepted. He unified the requirement, and He
   brought it all down to this one act, in which all other acts are
   included, and on which alone the whole weight of a man's salvation is
   to rest. What shall we do that we might work the works of God?' is a
   question asked in all sorts of ways, by the hearts of men all round
   about us; and what a babble of answers comes! The priest says, Rites
   and ceremonies.' The thinker says, Culture, education.' The moralist
   says, Do this, that, and the other thing,' and enumerates a whole
   series of separate acts. Jesus Christ says, One thing is needful . . .
   . This is the work of God.' He brushes away the sacerdotal answer and
   the answer of the mere moralist, and He says, No! Not do; but trust.'
   In so far as that is act, it is the only act that you need.

   That is evidently reasonable. The man is more than his work; motive is
   more important than action; character is deeper than conduct. God is
   pleased, not by what men do, but by what men are. We must be first, and
   then we shall do. And it is obviously reasonable, because we can find
   analogies to the requirement in all other relations of life. What would
   you care for a child that scrupulously obeyed, and did not love or
   trust? What would a prince think of a subject who was ostentatious in
   acts of loyalty, and all the while was plotting and nurturing treason
   in his heart?

   If doing separate acts of righteousness be the way to work the works of
   God, then no man has ever done them. For it is a plain fact that every
   man falls below his own conscience--which conscience is less scrupulous
   than the divine law. The worst of us knows a great deal more than the
   best of us does; and our lives, universally, are, at the best, lives of
   partial effort after unreached attainments of obedience and of virtue.

   But, even supposing that we could perform, far more completely than we
   do, the requirements of our own consciences, and conform to the evident
   duties of our position and relations, do you think that without faith
   we should be therein working the works of God? Suppose a man were able
   fully to realise his own ideal of goodness, without any confidence in
   God underlying all his acts; do you think that these would be acts that
   would please God? It seems to me that, however lovely and worthy of
   admiration, looked at with human eyes only, many lives are, which have
   nobly and resolutely fought against evil, and struggled after good, if
   they have lacked the crowning grace of doing this for God's sake, they
   lack, I was going to say, almost everything; I will not say that, but I
   will say that they lack that which makes them acceptable, well-pleasing
   to Him. The poorest, the most imperfect realisation of our duty and
   ideal of conduct which has in it a love towards God and a faith in Him
   that would fain do better if it could, is a nobler thing, I venture to
   say, in the eyes of Heaven--which are the truth-seeing eyes--than the
   noblest achievements of an untrusting soul. It does not seem to me that
   to say so is bigotry or narrowness or anything else but the plain
   deduction from this, that a man's relation to God is the deepest thing
   about him, and that if that be right, other things will come right, and
   if that be wrong nothing is as right as it might be.

   Here we have Jesus Christ laying the foundation for the doctrine which
   is often said to be Pauline, as if that meant something else than
   coming from Jesus Christ. We often hear people say, Oh, your
   evangelical teaching of justification by faith, and all that, comes out
   of Paul's Epistles, not out of Christ's teaching, nor out of John's
   Gospel.' Well, there is a difference, which it is blindness not to
   recognise, between the seeds of teaching in our Lord's words, and the
   flowers and fruit of these seeds, which we get in the more systematised
   and developed teaching of the Epistles. I frankly admit that, and I
   should expect it, with my belief as to who Christ is, and who Paul is.
   But in that saying, This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him
   whom He hath sent,' is the germ of everything that Paul has taught us
   about the works of the law being of no avail, and faith being alone and
   unfailing in its power of uniting men to God, and bringing them into
   the possession of eternal life. The saying stands in John's Gospel, and
   so Paul and John alike received, though in different fashions, and
   wrought out on different lines of subsequent teaching, the germinal
   impulse from these words of the Master. Let us hear no more about
   salvation by faith being a Pauline addition to Christ's Gospel, for the
   lips of Christ Himself have declared this is the work of God, that ye
   believe on Him whom He hath sent.'

   III. Thirdly, this faith is the productive parent of all separate works
   of God.

   The teaching that I have been trying to enforce has, I know, been so
   presented as to make a pillow for indolence, and to be closely allied
   to immorality. It has been so presented, but it has not been so
   presented half as often as its enemies would have us believe. For I
   know of but very few, and those by no means the most prominent and
   powerful of the preachers of the great doctrine of salvation by faith,
   who have not added, as its greatest teacher did: Let ours also be
   careful to maintain good works for necessary uses.' But the true
   teaching is not that trust is a substitute for work, but that it is the
   foundation of work. The Gospel is, first of all, Trust; then, set
   yourselves to do the works of faith. It works by love, it is the
   opening of the heart to the entrance of the life of Christ, and, of
   course, when that life comes in, it will act in the man in a manner
   appropriate to its origin and source, and he that by faith has been
   joined to Jesus Christ, and has opened his heart to receive into that
   heart the life of Christ, will, as a matter of course, bring forth, in
   the measure of his faith, the fruits of righteousness.

   We are surely not despising fruits and flowers when we insist upon the
   root from which they shall come. A man may take separate acts of
   partial goodness, as you see children in the springtime sticking
   daisies on the spikes of a thorn-twig picked from the hedges. But these
   will die. The basis of all righteousness is faith, and the
   manifestation of faith is practical righteousness. Show Me thy faith by
   thy works' is Christ's teaching quite as much as it is the teaching of
   His sturdy servant James. And so, dear friends, we are going the
   shortest way to enrich lives with all the beauties of possible human
   perfection when we say, Begin at the beginning. The longest way round
   is the shortest way home; trust Him with all your hearts first, and
   that will effloresce into "whatsoever things are lovely and whatever
   things are of good report."' In the beautiful metaphor of the Apostle
   Peter, in his second Epistle, Faith is the damsel who leads in the
   chorus of consequent graces; and we are exhorted to add to our faith
   virtue,' and all the others that unfold themselves in harmonious
   sequence from that one central source.

   If I had time I should be glad to turn for a moment to the light which
   such considerations cast upon subjects that are largely occupying the
   attention of the Christian Church to-day. I should like to insist that,
   before you talk much about applied Christianity, you should be very
   sure that in men there is a Christianity to apply. I venture to profess
   my own humble belief that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred,
   Christian ministers and churches will do no more for the social,
   political, and intellectual and moral advancement of men and the
   elevation of the people by sticking to their own work and preaching
   this Gospel--This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He
   hath sent.'

   IV. Lastly, this faith secures the bread of life.

   The bread of life is the starting-point of the whole conversation. In
   the widest possible sense it is whatsoever truly stills the hunger of
   the immortal soul. In a deeper sense it is the person of Jesus Christ
   Himself, for He not only says that He will give, but that He is the
   Bread of Life. And, in the deepest sense of all, it is His flesh broken
   for us in His sacrifice on the Cross. That bread is a gift. So the
   paradox results which stands in our text--work for the bread which God
   will give. If it be a gift, that fact determines what sort of work must
   be done in order to possess it. If it be a gift, then the only work is
   to accept it. If it be a gift, then we are out of the region of quid
   pro quo; and have not to bring, as Chinese do, great strings of copper
   cash that, all added up together, do not amount to a shilling, in order
   to buy what God will bestow upon us. If it be a gift, then to trust the
   Giver and to accept the gift is the only condition that is possible.

   It is not a condition that God has invented and arbitrarily imposed.
   The necessity of it is lodged deep in the very nature of the case. Air
   cannot get to the lungs of a mouse in an air-pump. Light cannot come
   into a room where all the shutters are up and the keyhole stopped. If a
   man chooses to perch himself on some little stool of his own, with
   glass legs to it, and to take away his hand from the conductor, no
   electricity will come to him. If I choose to lock my lips, Jesus Christ
   does not prise open my clenched teeth to put the bread of life into my
   unwilling mouth. If we ask, we get; if we take, we get.

   And so the paradox comes, that we work for a gift, with a work which is
   not work because it is a departure from myself. It is the same blessed
   paradox which the prophet spoke when he said, Buy . . . without money
   and without price.' Oh! what a burden of hopeless effort and weary
   toil--like that of the man that had to roll the stone up the hill,
   which ever slipped back again--is lifted from our shoulders by such a
   word as this that I have been poorly trying to speak about now! Thou
   art careful and troubled about many things,' poor soul! trying to be
   good; trying to fight yourself, and the world, and the devil. Try the
   other plan, and listen to Him saying, Give up self-imposed effort in
   thine own strength. Take, eat, this is My body, which is broken for
   you.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE MANNA

   I am that bread of life. 49. Your fathers did eat manna in the
   wilderness, and are dead. 50. This is the bread which cometh down from
   heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die.'--JOHN vi. 48-50.

   This is of a truth that Prophet,' said the Jews, when Christ had fed
   the five thousand on the five barley loaves and the two small fishes.
   That was the kind of Teacher for them; they were quite unaffected by
   the wisdom of His words and the beauty of His deeds, but a miracle that
   found food precisely met their wants, and so there was excited an
   impure enthusiasm, very unwelcome to Jesus. Therefore He withdrew
   Himself from it, and when the people followed Him, all full of
   expectation, to get some more loaves and see some more miracles, He met
   them with a douche of cold water that cooled their enthusiasm and flung
   them back into a critical, questioning mood. They pointed to the
   miracle of the manna, and hinted that, if He expected them to accept
   Him, He must do as Moses had done, or something like it. Probably there
   was a Jewish tradition in existence then to the effect that the Messiah
   was to repeat the miracle of the manna. But, at all events, Christ lays
   hold of the reference that they put into His hands, and He said in
   effect, Manna? Yes; I give, and am, the true Manna.'

   So this is the third of the instances in this Gospel in which our Lord
   pointed to Old Testament incidents and institutions as symbolising
   Himself. In the first of them, when He likened Himself to the ladder
   that Jacob saw, He claimed to be the Medium of communication between
   heaven and earth. In the second of them, when He likened Himself to the
   brazen serpent lifted in the camp, He claimed to be the Healer of a
   sin-stricken and poisoned world. And now, with an allusion both to the
   miracle and to the Jewish demand for the repetition of the manna sign,
   He claims to be the true Food for a starving world. So there are three
   things in my text: Christ's claim, His requirements, and His promise;
   the bread, the eating, the issues.

   I. Here is a claim of Christ's.

   As I have already said, in the whole wonderful conversation of which I
   have selected a portion for my text, there is a double reference to the
   miracle of the loaves and of the manna. What our Lord means to assert
   for Himself is that which is common to both of these--viz. that He
   supplies the great primal wants of humanity, the hunger of the heart.
   There may be another reference also, which I just notice without
   dwelling upon it. Barley loaves were the coarsest and least valuable
   form of bread. They were not only of little worth, but altogether
   inadequate to feeding the five thousand. The palates, unaccustomed to
   the stinging savours of the garlic and the leeks of Egypt, loathed the
   light bread. And so Jesus Christ comes into the world in lowly form,
   like the barley loaf or the light bread from which men whose tastes
   have been vitiated by the piquant savours of more earthly nourishment
   turn away as insipid. And yet He in His lowliness, He in His
   savourlessness, is that which meets the deepest wants of humanity, and
   is every man's fare because He will be any man's satisfaction.

   But I wish to bring before your notice the wonderful way in which our
   Lord, in this great dissertation concerning Himself as the Bread of
   Life, gradually unfolds the depths of His meaning and of His offer. He
   began with saying that He, the Son of Man, will give to men the bread
   that endures to everlasting life.' And then when that saying is but
   dimly understood, and yet awakes some strange new desires and appetites
   in the hearers, and they come to Him and ask, Lord, evermore give us
   this bread,' He answers them with opening another finger of His hand,
   as it were, and showing them a little more of the treasure that lies in
   His palm. For He says, I am that Bread of Life.' That is an advance on
   the previous saying. He gives bread, and any man that was conscious of
   possessing some great truth or some great blessing which, believed and
   accepted, would refresh and nourish humanity, might have said the same
   thing. But now we pass into the penumbra of a greater mystery: I am
   that Bread of Life.' You cannot separate what Christ gives from what
   Christ is. You can take the truths that another man proclaims,
   altogether irrespective of him and his personality. That only disturbs,
   and the sooner it is got rid of, the firmer and the purer our
   possession of the message for which he is only the medium. You can take
   Plato's teaching and do as you like with Plato. But you cannot take
   Christ's teaching and do as you like with Christ. His personality is
   the centre of His gift to the world. I am that Bread of Life.' That He
   should give it is much; that He should be it is far more.

   And notice how, when He has thus drawn us a little further into the
   magic circle of the light, He not only asserts the inseparableness of
   His gift from His Person, but also asserts, with a reference, no doubt,
   to the manna, I am the Bread that came down from heaven.' The listeners
   immediately laid hold of that one point, and neglected for the moment
   all the rest, and they fixed with a true instinct--although it was for
   the purpose of contradicting it--on this central point, that came down
   from heaven.' They said one to the other, How can this man say that He
   came down from heaven? Is not this Jesus the Son of Joseph, whose
   father and mother we know?' So, brethren, as the manna that descended
   from above in the dew of the night was to the bread that was baked in a
   baker's oven, so is the Christ to the manhood that has its origin in
   the natural processes of birth. The Incarnation of the Son of God,
   becoming Son of Man for us and for our salvation, is involved in this
   great claim. You do not get to the heart of Christ's message unless you
   have accepted this as the truth concerning Him, that in the beginning
   was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,' and
   that at a definite point in the long process of the ages, the Word
   became flesh, and dwelt amongst us.' He will never be the Bread of
   Life' unless He is the Bread that came down from heaven.' For humanity
   needs that the blue heavens that bend remote above should come down;
   and we cannot be lifted out of the horrible pit and the miry clay'
   unless a Hand from above be reached down into the depths of our
   degradation, and lift us from our lowness. Heaven must come to earth,
   if earth is to rise to heaven. The ladder must be let down from above,
   if ever from the lower levels men are to ascend thither where at the
   summit the face of God can be seen.

   But that is not all. Our Lord, if I may recur to a former figure, went
   on to open another finger of His hand, and to show still more of the
   gift. For He not only said, the Son of Man gives the bread,' and I am
   the Bread that came down from heaven,' but He went on to say, in a
   subsequent stage of the conversation, the Bread that I will give is My
   flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.' Now, notice that
   will give.' Then, though the Word was made flesh, and the manna came
   down from heaven, the especial gift of His flesh for the life of the
   world was, at the time of His speaking, a future thing. And what He
   meant is still more clearly brought out, when we read other words which
   are the very climax of this conversation, when He declares that the
   condition of our having life in ourselves is our eating the flesh and
   drinking the blood of the Son of Man.' The figure is made repulsive on
   purpose, in order that it may provoke us to penetrate to its meaning.
   It was even more repulsive to the Jew, with his religious horror of
   touching or tasting anything in which the blood was. And yet our Lord
   not only speaks of Himself as the Bread, but of His flesh and blood as
   being the Food of the world. The separation of the two clearly
   indicates a violent death, and I, for my part, have no manner of doubt
   that, in these great words in which our Lord lays bare the deepest
   foundations of His claim to be the Food of humanity, there is couched,
   in the veiled language which was necessary at the then stage of His
   mission, a distinct reference to His death, as being the Sacrifice on
   which a hunger-stricken world may feed and be satisfied.

   So here we have, in three steps, the great central truth of the Gospel
   set forth in symbolical aspect: the Son that gives, the Son that is,
   the Bread of the world, and the death whereby His flesh and blood are
   separated and become the nourishment of all sin-stricken souls. I do
   not say one word to enforce these claims, but I beseech you deal fairly
   with these Gospel narratives, and do not go on picking out of them bits
   of Christ's actions or words, which commend themselves to you, and
   ignoring all the rest. There is no more reason to believe that Jesus
   Christ ever said, As ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so
   to them likewise,' or any other part of that Sermon on the Mount which
   some people take as their Christianity, than there is to believe that
   He said, The bread which I give is My flesh, which I will give for the
   life of the world.' Believe it or not, it is not dealing with the
   Scripture records as you deal with other historical records if, for
   subjective reasons, you brush aside all that department of our Lord's
   teaching. And if you do accept it, what becomes of His sweet
   reasonableness'? What becomes of His meekness and lowliness of heart? I
   was going to say what becomes of His sanity, that He should stand up, a
   youngish man from Nazareth, in the synagogue of Capernaum, and should
   say, I, heaven-descended, and slain by men, am the Bread of Life to the
   whole world'?

   I was going to make another observation, which I must just pass with
   the slightest notice, and that is that, taking this point of view and
   giving full weight to these three stages of our Lord's progressive
   revelation of Himself, we have the answer to the question, What is the
   connection between these discourses and the ordinance of the Lord's
   Supper? Our modern sacramentarian friends will have it that Jesus
   Christ is speaking of the Communion in this chapter. I take it, and I
   venture to think it the reasonable explanation, that He is not speaking
   about the Communion, but that this discourse and that rite are dealing
   with the same truths--the one in articulate words, the other in
   equivalent symbols. And so we have not to read into the text any
   allusion to the rite, but to see in the text and in the rite the
   proclamation of the same thing--viz. that the flesh and the blood of
   the Sacrifice for sins is the food on which a sinful and cleansed world
   may feed.

   II. So, secondly, let me ask you to note our Lord's requirement here.

   He carries on the metaphor. This is the Bread which cometh down from
   heaven, that a man may eat thereof and not die.' The eating necessarily
   follows from the symbol of the bread, as the designation of the way by
   which we all, with our hungry hearts, may feed upon this Bread of God.
   I need not remind you that in many a place, and in this whole context,
   we find the explanation of the symbol very plainly. In another part of
   this conversation we read, under another metaphor which comes to the
   same thing, He that cometh unto Me shall never hunger, and he that
   believeth on Me shall never thirst. So the eating and the coming are
   diverse symbols for the one thing, the believing. When a man eats he
   appropriates to himself, and incorporates into his very being, the food
   of which he partakes. And when a man trusts Christ he appropriates to
   himself, and incorporates into his inmost being, the very life of Jesus
   Christ. You say, That is mysticism'; but it is the New Testament
   teaching, that when I trust Christ I get more than His gifts--I get
   Himself; that when my faith goes out to Him it not only rests me on
   Him, but it brings Him into me, and that food of the spirit becomes the
   life, as we shall see, of my spirit.

   That condition is indispensable. It is useless to have food on your
   table or your plate or in your hand, it does not nourish you there: you
   must eat it, and then you gain sustenance from it. Many a hungry man
   has died at the door of a granary. Some of us are starving, though
   beside us there is the Bread of God that came down from heaven.'
   Brethren, you must eat, and I venture to put the question to you--not
   Do you believe that Jesus Christ is the world's Saviour? not Do you
   believe in an Incarnation? not Do you believe in an Atonement? but Have
   you claimed your portion in the Bread? Have you taken it into your own
   lips? Crede et manducasti, said Augustine, believe'--or, rather,
   trust--and thou hast eaten.' Have you?

   Further, let me remind you that under this eating is included not only
   some initial act of faith, but a continuous course of partaking. The
   dinner you ate this day last year is of no use for to-day's hunger. The
   act of faith done long ago will not bring the Bread to nourish you now.
   You must repeat the meal. And very strikingly and beautifully in the
   last part of this conversation our Lord varies the word for eating, and
   substitutes--as if He were speaking to those who had fulfilled the
   previous condition--another one which implies the ruminant action of
   certain animals. And that is what Christian men have to do, to feed
   over and over and over again on the Bread of God which came down from
   heaven.' Christ, and especially in and through His death for us, can
   nourish and sustain our wills, giving them the pattern of what they
   should desire, and the motive for which they should desire it. Christ,
   and especially through His death, can feed our consciences, and take
   away from them all the painful sense of guilt, while He sharpens them
   to a far keener sensitiveness to evil. Christ, and especially through
   His death, can feed our understandings, and unveil therein the deepest
   truths concerning God and man, concerning man's destiny and God's
   mercy. Christ, and especially in His death, can feed our affections,
   and minister to love and desire and submission and hope their celestial
   nourishment. He is the Bread of God,' and we have but to eat of that
   which is laid before us.

   III. So, lastly, we have here the issues.

   Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead.' This Bread
   secures that if a man eat thereof he shall not die.' The bread that
   perishes feeds a life that perishes; but this Bread not only sustains
   but creates a life that cannot perish, and, taken into the spirits of
   men that are dead in trespasses and sins,' imparts to them a life that
   has no affinity to evil, and therefore no dread of extinction.

   If a man eats thereof he shall not die,' Christ annihilates for us the
   mere accident of physical death. That is only a momentary jolt on the
   course. That may all be crammed into a parenthesis. He shall not die,'
   but live the true life which comes from the possession of union with
   Him who is the Life. The bread which we eat sustains life; the Bread
   which He gives originates it. The bread which we eat is assimilated to
   our bodily frame, the Bread which He gives assimilates our spiritual
   nature to His. And so it comes to be the only food that stills a hungry
   heart, the only food that satisfies and yet never cloys, which, eating,
   we are filled, and being filled are made capable of more, and, being
   capable of more, receive more. In blessed and eternal alternation,
   fruition and desire, satisfaction and appetite, go on.

   Why do ye spend money for that which is not bread?' You cannot answer
   the question with any reasonable answer. Oh, dear friends! I beseech
   you, listen to that Lord who is saying to each of us, Take, eat, this
   is My body, which is broken for you.'
     __________________________________________________________________

ONE SAYING WITH TWO MEANINGS

   Then said Jesus unto them, Yet a little while am I with you, and then I
   go unto Him that sent Me. 34. Ye shall seek Me, and shall not find Me:
   and where I am, thither ye cannot come.'--JOHN vii. 33, 34.

   Little children, yet a little while I am with you. Ye shall seek Me;
   and as I said unto the Jews, Whither I go, ye cannot come; so now I say
   to you.'--JOHN xiii. 33.

   No greater contrast can be conceived than that between these two groups
   to whom such singularly similar words were addressed. The one consists
   of the officers, tools of the Pharisees and of the priests, who had
   been sent to seize Christ, and would fain have carried out their
   masters' commission, but were restrained by a strange awe, inexplicable
   even to themselves. The other consists of the little company of His
   faithful, though slow, scholars, who made a great many mistakes, and
   sometimes all but tired out even His patience, and yet were forgiven
   much because they loved much. Hatred animated one group, loving sorrow
   the other.

   Christ speaks to them both in nearly the same words, but with what a
   different tone, meaning, and application! To the officers the saying is
   an exhibition of His triumphant confidence that their malice is
   impotent and their arms paralysed; that when He wills He will go, not
   be dragged by them or any man, but go to a safe asylum, where foes can
   neither find nor follow. The officers do not understand what He means.
   They think that, bad Jew as they have always believed Him to be, He may
   very possibly consummate His apostasy by going over to the Gentiles
   altogether; but, at any rate, they feel that He is to escape their
   hands.

   The disciples understand little more as to whither He goes, as they
   themselves confess a moment after; but they gather from His words His
   loving pity, and though the upper side of the saying seems to be
   menacing and full of separation, there is an under side that suggests
   the possibility of a reunion for them.

   The words are nearly the same in both cases, but they are not
   absolutely identical. There are significant omissions and additions in
   the second form of them. Little children' is the tenderest of all the
   names that ever came from Christ's lips to His disciples, and never was
   heard on His lips except on this one occasion, for parting words ought
   to be very loving words. A little while I am with you,' but He does not
   say, And then I go to Him that sent Me.' Ye shall seek Me,' but He does
   not say, And shall not find Me.' As I said unto the Jews, whither I go
   ye cannot come, so now I say to you,' that little word now' makes the
   announcement a truth for the present only. His disciples shall not seek
   Him in vain, but when they seek they shall find. And though for a
   moment they be parted from Him, it is with the prospect and the
   confidence of reunion. Let us, then, look at the two main thoughts
   here. First, the two seekings,' the seeking which is vain, and the
   seeking which is never vain; and the two cannots,' the inability of His
   enemies for evermore to come where He is, and the inability of His
   friends, for a little season, to come where He is.

   I. The two seekings.

   As I have observed, there is a very significant omission in one of the
   forms of the words. The enemies are told that they will never find Him,
   but no such dark words are spoken to the friends. So, then, hostile
   seeking of the Christ is in vain, and loving seeking of Him by His
   friends, though they understand Him but very poorly, and therefore seek
   Him that they may know Him better, is always answered and
   over-answered.

   Let me deal just for a moment or two with each of these. In their
   simplest use the words of my first text merely mean this: You cannot
   touch Me, I am passing into a safe asylum where your hands can never
   reach Me.'

   We may generalise that for a moment, though it does not lie directly in
   our path, and preach the old blessed truth that no man with hostile
   intent seeking for Christ in His person, in His Gospel, or in His
   followers and friends, can ever find Him. All the antagonism that has
   stormed against Him and His cause and words, and His followers and
   lovers, has been impotent and vain. The pursuers are like dogs chasing
   a bird, sniffing along the ground after their prey, which all the while
   sits out of their reach on a bough, and carols to the sky. As in the
   days of His flesh, His foes could not touch His person till He chose,
   and vainly sought Him when it pleased Him to hide from them, so ever
   since, in regard to His cause, and in regard to all hearts that love
   Him, no weapon that is formed against them shall prosper. They shall be
   wrapped, when need be, in a cloud of protecting darkness, and stand
   safe within its shelter. Take good cheer, all you that are trying to do
   anything, however little, however secular it may appear to be, for the
   good and well-being of your fellows! All such service is a prolongation
   of Christ's work, and an effluence from His, if there be any good in it
   at all; and it is immortal and safe, as is His. Ye shall seek Me and
   shall not find Me.'

   But then, besides that, there is another thought. It is not merely
   hostile seeking of Him that is hopeless vain. When the dark days came
   over Israel, under the growing pressure of the Roman yoke, and amidst
   the agonies of that last siege, and the unutterable sufferings which
   all but annihilated the nation, do you not think that there were many
   of these people who said to themselves: Ah! if we had only that Jesus
   of Nazareth back with us for a day or two; if we had only listened to
   Him!' Do you not think that before Israel dissolved in blood there were
   many of those who had stood hostile or alienated, who desired to see
   one of the days of the Son of Man,' and did not see it? They sought
   Him, not in anger any more; they sought Him, not in penitence, or else
   they would have found Him; but they sought Him simply in distress, and
   wishing that they could have back again what they had cared so little
   for when they had it.

   And are there no people listening to me now, to whom these words
   apply?--


     He that will not, when he may,

     When he will it shall be--Nay!'

   Although it is (blessed be His name) always true that a seeking heart
   finds Him, and whensoever there is the faintest trace of penitent
   desire to get hold of Christ's hand it does grasp ours, it is also true
   that things neglected once cannot be brought back; that the sowing time
   allowed to pass can never return; and that they who have turned, as
   some of you have turned, dear friends, all your lives, a deaf ear to
   the Christ that asks you to love Him and trust Him, may one day wish
   that it had been otherwise, and go to look for Him and not find Him.

   There is another kind of seeking that is vain, an intellectual seeking
   without the preparation of the heart. There are, no doubt, some people
   here to-day that would say, We have been seeking the truth about
   religion all our lives, and we have not got to it yet.' Well, I do not
   want to judge either your motives or your methods, but I know this,
   that there is many a man who goes on the quest for religious certainty,
   and looks at, if not for Jesus Christ, and is not really capable of
   discerning Him when he sees Him, because his eye is not single, or
   because his heart is full of worldliness or indifference, or because he
   begins with a foregone conclusion, and looks for facts to establish
   that; or because he will not cast down and put away evil things that
   rise up between him and his Master.

   My brother! if you go to look for Jesus Christ with a heart full of the
   world, if you go to look for Him while you wish to hold on by all the
   habitudes and earthlinesses of your past, you will never find Him. The
   sensualist seeks for Him, the covetous man seeks for Him, the
   passionate, ill-tempered man seeks for Him; the woman plunged in
   frivolities, or steeped to the eyebrows in domestic cares,--these may
   in some feeble fashion go to look for Him and they will not find Him,
   because they have sought for Him with hearts overcharged with other
   things and filled with the affairs of this life, its trifles and its
   sins.

   I turn for a moment to the seeking that is not vain. Ye shall seek Me'
   is not on Christ's lips to any heart that loves Him, however
   imperfectly, a sentence of separation or an appointment of a sorrowful
   lot, but it is a blessed law, the law of the Christian life.

   That life is all one great seeking after Christ. Love seeks the absent
   when removed from our sight. If we care anything about Him at all, our
   hearts will turn to Him as naturally as, when the winter begins to
   pinch, the migrating birds seek the sunny south, impelled by an
   instinct that they do not themselves understand.

   The same law which sends loving thoughts out across the globe to seek
   for husband, child, or friend when absent, sets the really Christian
   heart seeking for the Christ, whom, having not seen, it loves, as
   surely as the ivy tendril feels out for a support. As surely as the
   roots of a mountain-ash growing on the top of a boulder feel down the
   side of the rock till they reach the soil; as surely as the stork
   follows the warmth to the sunny Mediterranean, so surely, if your heart
   loves Christ, will the very heart and motive of your action be the
   search for Him.

   And if you do not seek Him, brother, as surely as He is parted from our
   sense you will lose Him, and He will be parted from you wholly, for
   there is no way by which a person who is not before our eyes may be
   kept near us except only by diligent effort on our part to keep thought
   and love and will all in contact with Him; thought meditating, love
   going out towards Him, will submitting. Unless there be this effort,
   you will lose your Master as surely as a little child in a crowd will
   lose his nurse and his guide, if his hand slips from out the protecting
   hand. The dark shadow of the earth on which you stand will slowly steal
   over His silvery brightness, as when the moon is eclipsed, and you will
   not know how you have lost Him, but only be sadly aware that your
   heaven is darkened. Ye shall seek Me,' is the condition of all happy
   communion between Christ and us.

   And that seeking, dear brother, in the threefold form in which I have
   spoken of it--effort to keep Him in our thoughts, in our love, and over
   our will--is neither a seeking which starts from a sense that we do not
   possess Him, nor one which ends in disappointment. But we seek for Him
   because we already have Him in a measure, and we seek Him that we may
   possess Him more abundantly, and anything is possible rather than that
   such a search shall be vain. Men may go to created wells, and find no
   water, and return ashamed, and with their vessels empty, but every one
   who seeks for that Fountain of salvation shall draw from it with joy.
   It is as impossible that a heart which desires Jesus Christ shall not
   have Him, as it is that lungs dilated shall not fill with air, or as it
   is that an empty vessel put out in a rainfall shall not be replenished.
   He does not hide Himself, but He desires to be found. May I say that as
   a mother will sometimes pretend to her child to hide, that the child's
   delight may be the greater in searching and in finding, so Christ has
   gone away from our sight in order, for one reason, that He may
   stimulate our desires to feel after Him! If we seek Him hid in God, we
   shall find Him for the joy of our hearts.

   A great thinker once said that he would rather have the search after
   truth than the possession of truth. It was a rash word, but it pointed
   to the fact that there is a search which is only one shade less blessed
   than the possession. And if that be so in regard to any pure and high
   truth, it is still more so about Christ Himself. To seek for Him is
   joy; to find Him is joy. What can be a happier life than the life of
   constant pursuit after an infinitely precious object, which is ever
   being sought and ever being found; sought with a profound consciousness
   of its preciousness, found with a widening appreciation and capacity
   for its enjoyment? Ye shall seek Me' is a word not of evil but of good
   cheer; for buried in the depth of the commandment to search is the
   promise that we shall find.

   II, Secondly, let us look briefly at these two cannots.'

   Whither I go, ye cannot come,' says He to His enemies, with no
   limitation, with no condition. The cannot' is absolute and permanent,
   so long as they retain their enmity. To His friends, on the other hand,
   He says, So now I say to you,' the law for to-day, the law for this
   side the flood, but not the law for the beyond, as He explains more
   fully in the subsequent words: Thou canst not follow Me now, but thou
   shalt follow Me afterwards.'

   So, then, Christ is somewhere. When He passed from life it was not into
   a state only, but into a place; and He took with Him a material body,
   howsoever changed. He is somewhere, and there friend and enemy alike
   cannot enter, so long as they are compassed with the earthly house of
   this tabernacle.' But the incapacity is deeper than that. No sinful man
   can pass thither. Where has He gone? The preceding words give us the
   answer. God shall glorify Him in Himself.' The prospect of that
   assumption into the inmost glory of the divine nature directly led our
   Lord to think of the change it would bring about in the relation of His
   humble friends to Him. While for Himself He triumphs in the prospect,
   He cannot but turn a thought to their lonesomeness, and hence come the
   words of our text. He has passed into the bosom and blaze of divinity.
   Can I walk there, can I pass into that tremendous fiery furnace? Who
   shall dwell with the everlasting burnings?' Ye cannot follow Me now.'
   No man can go thither except Christ goes thither.

   There are deep mysteries lying in that word of our Lords,--I go to
   prepare a place for you.' We know not what manner of activity on His
   part that definitely means. It seems as if somehow or other the
   presence in Heaven of our Brother in His glorified humanity was
   necessary in order that the golden pavement should be trodden by our
   feet, and that our poor, feeble manhood should live and not be
   shrivelled up in the blaze of that central brightness.

   We know not how He prepares the place, but heaven, whatever it be, is
   no place for a man unless the Man, Christ Jesus, be there. He is the
   Revealer of God, not only for earth, but for heaven; not only for time,
   but for eternity. No man cometh unto the Father but by Me,' is true
   everywhere and always, there as here. So I suppose that, but for His
   presence, heaven itself would be dark, and its King invisible, and if a
   man could enter there he would either be blasted with unbearable
   flashes of brightness or grope at its noonday as the blind, because his
   eye was not adapted to such beams. Be that as it may, the Forerunner is
   for us entered.' He has gone before, because He knows the great City,
   His own calm home, His habitation from eternity.' He has gone before to
   make ready a lodging for us, in whose land He has dwelt so long, and He
   will meet us, who would else be bewildered like some dweller in a
   desert if brought to the capital, when we reach the gates, and guide
   our unaccustomed steps to the mansion prepared for us.

   But the power to enter there, even when He is there, depends on our
   union with Christ by faith. When we are joined to Him, the absolute
   cannot,' based upon flesh, and still more upon sin, which is a radical
   and permanent impossibility, is changed into a relative and temporary
   incapacity. If we have faith in Christ, and are thereby drawing a
   kindred life from Him, our nature will be in process of being changed
   into that which is capable of bearing the brilliance of the felicities
   of heaven. But just as these friends of Christ, though they loved Him
   very truly, and understood Him a little, were a long way from being
   ready to follow Him, and needed the schooling of the Cross, and Olivet,
   and Pentecost, as well as the discipline of life and toil, before they
   were fully ripe for the harvest, so we, for the most part, have to pass
   through analogous training before we are prepared for the place which
   Christ has prepared for us. Certainly, so soon as a heart has trusted
   Christ, it is capable of entering where He is, and the real reason why
   the disciples could not come where He went was that they did not yet
   clearly know Him as the divine Sacrifice for theirs and the world's
   sins, and, however much they believed in Him as Messiah, had not yet,
   nor could have, the knowledge on which they could found their trust in
   Him as their Saviour.

   But, while that is true, it is also true that each advance in the grace
   and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour will bring with it capacity to
   advance further into the heart of the far-off land, and to see more of
   the King in His beauty. So, as long as His friends were wrapped in such
   dark clouds of misconception and error, as long as their Christian
   characters were so imperfect and incomplete as they were at the time of
   my text being spoken, they could not go thither and follow Him. But it
   was a diminishing impossibility, and day by day they approximated more
   and more to His likeness, because they understood Him more, and trusted
   Him more, and loved Him more, and grew towards Him, and, therefore, day
   by day became more and more able to enter into that Kingdom.

   Are you growing in power so to do? Is the only thing which unfits you
   for heaven the fact that you have a mortal body? In other respects are
   you fit to go into that heaven, and walk in its brightness and not be
   consumed? The answer to the question is found in another one--Are you
   joined to Jesus Christ by simple faith? The incapacity is absolute and
   eternal if the enmity is eternal.

   State and place are determined yonder by character, and character is
   determined by faith. Take a bottle of some solution in which
   heterogeneous substances have all been melted up together, and let it
   stand on a shelf and gradually settle down, and its contents will
   settle in regular layers, the heaviest at the bottom and the lightest
   at the top, and stratify themselves according to gravity. And that is
   how the other world is arranged--stratified. When all the confusions of
   this present are at an end, and all the moisture is driven off, men and
   women will be left in layers, like drawing to like. As Peter said about
   Judas with equal wisdom and reticence, He went to his own place.' That
   is where we shall all go, to the place we are fit for.

   God does not slam the door of heaven in anybody's face; it stands wide
   open. But there is a mystic barrier, unseen, but most real, more
   repellent than cherub and flaming sword, which makes it impossible for
   any foot to cross that threshold except the foot of the man whose heart
   and nature have been made Christlike, and fitted for heaven by simple
   faith in Him.

   Love Him and trust Him, and then your life on earth will be a blessed
   seeking and a blessed finding of Him whom to seek is joyous effort,
   whom to find is an Elysium of rest. You will walk here not parted from
   Him, but with your thoughts and your love, which are your truest self,
   going up where He is, until you drop the muddy vesture of decay' which
   unfits you whilst you wear it for the presence-chamber of the King, and
   so you will enter in and be for ever with the Lord.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE ROCK AND THE WATER

   In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried,
   saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto Me, and drink. 38. He that
   believeth on Me, as the Scripture hath said, out of his belly shall
   flow rivers of living water.'--JOHN vii. 37, 38.

   The occasion and date of this great saying are carefully given by the
   Evangelist, because they throw much light on its significance and
   importance. It was on the last day, that great day of the Feast,' that
   Jesus stood and cried.' The Feast was that of Tabernacles, which was
   instituted in order to keep in mind the incidents of the desert
   wandering. On the anniversary of this day the Jews still do as they
   used to, and in many a foul ghetto and frowsy back street of European
   cities, you will find them sitting beneath the booths of green
   branches, commemorating the Exodus and its wonders. Part of that
   ceremonial was that on each morning of the seven, and possibly on the
   eighth, the last day of the Feast,' a procession of white-robed priests
   wound down the rocky footpath from the Temple to Siloam, and there in a
   golden vase drew water from the spring, chanting, as they ascended and
   re-entered the Temple gates where they poured out the water as a
   libation, the words of the prophet, with joy shall ye draw water out of
   the wells of salvation.'

   Picture the scene to yourselves--the white-robed priests toiling up the
   pathway, the crowd in the court, the sparkling water poured out with
   choral song. And then, as the priests stood with their empty vases,
   there was a little stir in the crowd, and a Man who had been standing
   watching, lifted up a loud voice and cried, If any man thirst, let him
   come unto Me, and drink.' Strange words to say, anywhere and anywhen,
   daring words to say there in the Temple court! For there and then they
   could mean nothing less than Christ's laying His hand on that old
   miracle, which was pointed to by the rite, when the rock yielded the
   water, and asserting that all which it did and typified was repeated,
   fulfilled, and transcended in Himself, and that not for a handful of
   nomads in the wilderness, but for all the world, in all its
   generations.

   So here is one more instance to add to those to which I have directed
   your attention on former occasions, in which, in this Gospel, we find
   Christ claiming to be the fulfilment of incidents and events in that
   ancient covenant, Jacob's ladder, the brazen serpent, the manna, and
   now the rock that yielded the water. He says of them all that they are
   the shadow, and the substance is in Him.

   I. So then, we have to look, first, at Christ's view of humanity as set
   forth here.

   You remember the story of how the people in the wilderness, distressed
   by that most imperative of all physical cravings, thirst, turned upon
   Moses and Aaron and said, Why have ye brought us here to die in the
   wilderness, where there are neither vines nor pomegranates,' but a land
   of thirst and death? Just as Christ, in the former instances to which
   we have already referred, selected and pointed to the poisoned and
   serpent-stricken camp as an emblem of humanity, and just as He pointed
   to the hunger of the men that were starving there, as an emblem, go
   here He says: That is the world--a congregation of thirsty men raging
   in their pangs, and not knowing where to find solace or slaking for
   their thirst.' I do not need to go over all the dominant desires that
   surge up in men's souls, the mind craving for knowledge, the heart
   calling out for love, the whole nature feeling blindly and often
   desperately after something external to itself, which it can grasp, and
   in which it can feel satisfied. You know them; we all know them. Like
   some plant growing in a cellar, and with feeble and blanched tendrils
   feeling towards the light which is so far away, every man carries about
   within himself a whole host of longing desires, which need to find
   something round which they may twine, and in which they can be at rest.

   The misery of man is great upon him,' because, having these desires, he
   misreads so many of them, and stifles, ignores, atrophies to so large
   an extent the noblest of them. I know of no sadder tragedy than the way
   in which we misinterpret the meaning of these inarticulate cries that
   rise from the depths of our hearts, and misunderstand what it is that
   we are groping after, when we put out empty, and, alas! too often
   unclean, hands, to lay hold on our true good.

   Brethren, you do not know what you want, many of you, and there is
   something pathetic in the endless effort to fill up the heart by a
   multitude of diverse and small things, when all the while the deepest
   meaning of aspirations, yearnings, longings, unrest, discontent is, My
   soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.' Nothing less than
   infinitude will satisfy the smallest heart of the humblest and least
   developed man. Nothing less than to have all our treasures in one
   accessible, changeless Infinity will ever give rest to a human soul.
   You have tried a multiplicity of trifles. It takes a great many bags of
   coppers to make up L. 1000, and they are cumbrous to carry. Would it
   not be better to part with a multitude of goodly pearls, if need be, in
   order to have all your wealth, and the satisfaction of all your
   desires, in the One Pearl of great price'? It is God for whom men are
   thirsting, and, alas! so many of us know it not. As the old prophet
   says, in words that never lose their pathetic power, they have hewn out
   for themselves cisterns'--one is not enough--they need many. They are
   only cisterns, which hold what is put into them, and they are broken
   cisterns,' which cannot hold it. Yet we turn to these with a strange
   infatuation, which even the experience that teaches fools does not
   teach us to be folly. We turn to these; and we turn from the Fountain;
   the one, the springing, the sufficient, the unfailing, the exuberant
   Fountain of living waters. Some of you have cisterns on the tops of
   your houses, with a coating of green scum and soot on them, and do you
   like that foul draught better than the bright blessing that comes out
   of the heart of the rock, flashing and pure?

   But not only are these desires misread, but the noblest of them are
   stifled. I have said that the condition of humanity is that of thirst.
   Christ speaks in my text as if that thirst was by no means universal,
   and, alas! it is not, If any man thirst'; there are some of us that do
   not, for we are all so constituted that, unless by continual
   self-discipline, and self-suppression, and self-evolution, the lower
   desires will overgrow the loftier ones, and kill them, as weeds will
   some precious crop. And some of you are so much taken up with
   gratifying the lowest necessities and longings of your nature, that you
   leave the highest all uncared for, and the effect of that is that the
   unsatisfied longing avenges itself, for your neglect of it, by infusing
   unrest and dissatisfaction into what else would satisfy the lowest. He
   that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver, nor he that
   loveth abundance with increase,' but he that loves God will be
   satisfied with less than silver, and will continue satisfied when
   decrease comes. If you would suck the last drop of sweetness out of the
   luscious purple grapes that grow on earth, you must have the appetite
   after the best things, recognised, and ministered to, and satisfied.
   And when we are satisfied with God, we shall have learnt in whatsoever
   state we are, therewith to be self-sufficing.' But, as I say, the
   highest desires are neglected, and the lowest are cockered and
   pampered, and so the taste is depraved. Many of you have no wish for
   God, and no desire after high and noble things, and are perfectly
   contented to browse on the low levels, or to feed on the husks that the
   swine do eat,' whilst all the while the loftiest of your powers is
   starving within. Brethren, before we can come to the Rock that yields
   the water, there must be the sense of need. Do you know what it is that
   you want? Have you any desire after righteousness and purity and
   nobleness, and the vision of God flaming in upon the pettinesses and
   commonplaces of this life which is sound and fury, signifying nothing,'
   and is trivial in all its pretended greatness, unless you have learned
   that you need God most of all, and will never be at rest till you have
   Him?

   II. Secondly, note here Christ's consciousness of Himself.

   Is there anything in human utterances more majestic and wonderful than
   this saying of my text, If any man thirst, let him come to Me'? There
   He claims to be separate altogether from those whose thirst He would
   satisfy. There He claims to be able to meet every aspiration, every
   spiritual want, every true desire in this complex nature of ours. There
   He claims to be able to do this for one, and therefore for all. There
   He claims to be able to do it for all the generations of mankind, right
   away down to the end. Who is He who thus plants Himself in the front of
   the race, knows their deep thirsts, takes account of the impotence of
   anything created to satisfy them, assumes the divine prerogative, and
   says, I come to satisfy every desire in every soul, to the end of
   time'? Yes, and from that day when He stood in the Temple and cried
   these words, down to this day, there have been, and there are, millions
   who can say, We have drawn water from this fountain of salvation, and
   it has never failed us.' Christ's audacious presentation of Himself to
   the world as adequate to fill all its needs, and slake all its thirst,
   has been verified by nineteen centuries of experience, and there are
   many men and women all over the world to-day who would be ready to set
   to their seals that Christ is true, and that He, indeed, is
   all-sufficient for the soul.

   Brethren, I do not wish to dwell upon this aspect of our Lord's
   character in more than a sentence, but I beseech you to ask yourselves
   what is the impression that is left of the character of a man who says
   such things, unless He was something more than one of our race? Jesus
   Christ, it is as clear as day, in these words makes a claim which only
   divinity can warrant Him in making, or can fulfil when it is made. And
   I would urge you to consider what the alternative is, if you do not
   believe that Jesus Christ here sets Himself forth as the Incarnate Word
   of God, sufficient for all humanity. I am meek and lowly in heart'--and
   His lowliness of heart is proved in a strange fashion, if He stands up
   before the race and says, If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and
   drink.'

   III. Note, further, Christ's invitation.

   Let him come . . . and drink'--two expressions for one thing. That
   invitation sounds all through Scripture, and, perhaps, there was
   lingering in our Lord's mind, besides the reference to the rock that
   yielded the water, some echo of the words of the second Isaiah: Ho!
   every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.' Nay!' said Christ,
   not to the waters, but to Me.' And then we hear from His own lips the
   same invitation addressed to the woman of Samaria, with the difference
   that to her, an alien, He pointed only to the natural water in the well
   that had been Jacob's, whereas, to these people, the descendants of the
   chosen race, He pointed to the miracle in the desert, and claimed to
   fulfil that. And on the very last page of Scripture, as it is now
   arranged, there stands the echo again of this saying of my text, Let
   him that is athirst come'--there must be the sense of need, as I was
   saying, before there is the coming--and whosoever will, let him take of
   the water of life freely.'

   Now, dear friends, beneath these two metaphorical expressions there
   lies one simple condition. I put it into three words, which, for the
   sake of being easily remembered, I cast into an alliterative form:
   approach Christ, appropriate Christ, adhere to Christ.

   Approach Christ. You come by faith, you come by love, you come by
   communion. And you can come if you will, though He is now on the
   throne.

   Appropriate Christ. It is vain that the water should be gushing from
   the rock there, unless you make it your own by drinking. It must pass
   your lips. It must become your personal possession. You must enclose a
   piece of the common, and make it your very own. He loved us, and gave
   Himself for us'; well and good, but strike out the us' and put in me.'
   He loved me and gave Himself for me.' The river may be flowing right
   past your door, yet your lips may be cracked with thirst, even whilst
   you hear the tinkle of its music amongst the sedges and the pebbles.
   Appropriate Christ. Come . . . and drink.'

   Adhere to Christ. You were thirsty yesterday: you drank. That will not
   slake to-day's thirst, nor prevent its recurrence. And you must keep on
   drinking if you are to keep from perishing of thirst. Day by day, drop
   by drop, draught by draught, you must drink. According to the ancient
   Jewish legend, which Paul in one of his letters refers to, about this
   very miracle, you must have the Rock following you all through your
   desert pilgrimage, and you must drink daily and hourly, by continual
   faith, love, and communion.

   IV. We have here not only these points, but a fourth. Christ's promise.

   He that believeth on Me, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living
   water.' That is one case of the universal law that a man who trusts
   Christ becomes like the Christ whom he trusts. Derivatively and by
   impartation, no doubt, but still the man who has gone to that Rock, to
   the springing fountain as it pushes forth, receives into himself an
   inward life by the communication of Christ's divine Spirit, so that he
   has in him a fountain springing up into life everlasting.' The Book of
   Proverbs says, The good man shall be satisfied from himself,' but the
   good man is only satisfied from himself when he can say, I live, yet
   not I, but Christ liveth in me,' and from that better self he will be
   satisfied.

   So we may have a well in the courtyard, and may be able to bear in
   ourselves the fountain of water, and where the divine life of Christ by
   His Spirit has through faith been implanted within us, it will come out
   from us. There is a question for you Christian people--do any rivers of
   living water flow out of you? If they do not, it is to be doubted
   whether you have drunk of the fountain. There are many professing
   Christians who are like the foul little rivers that pass under the
   pavements in Manchester, all impure, and covered over so that nobody
   sees them. Out of him shall flow rivers of living water'--that is
   Christ's way of communicating the blessing of eternal life to the
   world--by the medium of those who have already received it. Christian
   men and women, if your faith has brought the life into you, see to it
   that approaching Christ, and appropriating Christ, and adhering to
   Christ, you are becoming assimilated to Christ, and in your daily life,
   God's grace fructifying through you to all, are become as rivers of
   water in a dry place, and the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD

   . . . I am the light of the world: he that followeth Me shall not walk
   in darkness, but shall have the light of life.'--JOHN viii. 12.

   Jesus Christ was His own great theme. Whatever be the explanation of
   the fact, there stands the fact that, if we know anything at all about
   His habitual tone of teaching, we know that it was full of Himself. We
   know, too, that what He said about Himself was very unlike the language
   becoming a wise and humble religious teacher. Both the prominence given
   to His own personality, and the tremendous claims He advances for
   Himself, are hard to reconcile with any conception of His nature and
   work except one,--that there we see God manifest in the flesh. Are such
   words as these fit to be spoken by any man conscious of his own
   limitations and imperfections of life and knowledge? Would they not be
   fatal to any one's pretensions to be a teacher of religion or morality?
   They assert that the Speaker is the Source of illumination for the
   world; the only Source; the Source for all. They assert that following'
   Him, whether in belief or in deed, is the sure deliverance from all
   darkness, either of error or of sin; and implants in every follower a
   light which is life. And the world, instead of turning away from such
   monstrous assumptions, and drowning them in scornful laughter, or
   rebelling against them, has listened, and largely believed, and has not
   felt them to mar the beauty of meekness, which, by a strange anomaly,
   this Man says that He has.

   Words parallel to these are frequent on our Lord's lips. In each
   instance they have some special appropriateness of application, as is
   probably the case here. The suggestion has been reasonably made, that
   there is an allusion in them to part of the ceremonial connected with
   the Feast of Tabernacles, at which we find our Lord present in the
   previous chapter. Commentators tell us that on the first evening of the
   Feast, two huge golden lamps, which stood one on each side of the altar
   of burnt offering in the Temple court, were lighted as the night began
   to fall, and poured out a brilliant flood over Temple and city and deep
   gorge; while far into the midnight, troops of rejoicing worshippers
   clustered about them with dance and song. The possibility of this
   reference is strengthened by the note of place which our Evangelist
   gives. These things spake Jesus in the treasury, as He taught in the
   Temple,' for the treasury' stood in the same court, and doubtless the
   golden lamps were full in sight of the listening groups. It is also
   strengthened by the unmistakable allusion in the previous chapter to
   another portion of the ceremonial of the Feast, where our Lord puts
   forth another of His great self-revelations and demands, in singular
   parallelism with that of our text, in the words, If any man thirst, let
   him come unto Me and drink.' That refers to the custom during the Feast
   of drawing water from the fountain of Siloam, which was poured out on
   the altar, while the gathered multitude chanted the old strain of
   Isaiah's prophecy: With joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of
   salvation.' It is to be remembered, too, in estimating the probability
   of our text belonging to these Temple-sayings at the Feast, that the
   section which separates it from them, and contains the story about the
   woman taken in adultery, is judged by the best critics to be out of
   place here, and is not found in the most valuable manuscripts. If,
   then, we suppose this allusion to be fairly probable, I think it gives
   a special direction and meaning to these grand words, which it may be
   worth while to think of briefly.

   The first thing to notice is--the intention of the ceremonial to which
   our Lord here points as a symbol of Himself. What was the meaning of
   these great lights that went flashing through the warm autumn nights of
   the festival? All the parts of that Feast were intended to recall some
   feature of the forty years' wanderings in the wilderness; the lights by
   the altar were memorials of the pillar of cloud by day and of fire by
   night. When, then, Jesus says, I am the Light of the world,' He would
   declare Himself as being in reality, and to every soul of man to the
   end of time, what that cloud with its heart of fire was in outward
   seeming to one generation of desert wanderers.

   Now, the main thing which it was to these, was the visible vehicle of
   the divine presence. The Lord went before them in a pillar of a cloud.'
   The Lord looked through the pillar.' The Lord came down in the cloud
   and spake with him.' The cloud covered the Tabernacle, and the glory of
   the Lord appeared.' Such is the way in which it is ever spoken of, as
   being the manifestation to Israel in sensible form of the presence
   among them of God their King. The glory of the Lord' has a very
   specific meaning in the Old Testament. It usually signifies that
   brightness, the flaming heart of the cloudy pillar, which for the most
   part, as it would appear, veiled by the cloud, gathered radiance as the
   world grew darker at set of sun, and sometimes, at great crises in the
   history, as at the Red Sea, or on Sinai, or in loving communion with
   the law-giver, or in swift judgment against the rebels, rent the veil
   and flamed on men's eyes. I need not remind you how this same pillar of
   cloud and fire, which at once manifested and hid God, was thereby no
   unworthy symbol of Him who remains, after all revelation, unrevealed.
   Whatsoever sets forth, must also shroud, the infinite glory. Concerning
   all by which He makes Himself known to eye, or mind, or heart, it must
   be said, And there was the hiding of His power.' The fire is ever
   folded in the cloud. Nay, at bottom, the light which is full of glory
   is therefore inaccessible, and the thick darkness in which He dwells is
   but the glorious privacy' of perfect light.

   That guiding pillar, which moved before the moving people--a cloud to
   shelter from the scorching heat, a fire to cheer in the blackness of
   night--spread itself above the sanctuary of the wilderness; and the
   glory of the Lord filled the Tabernacle.' When the moving Tabernacle
   gave place to the fixed Temple, again the cloud filled the house of the
   Lord'; and there--dwelling between the cherubim, the types of the whole
   order of creatural life, and above the mercy-seat, that spoke of
   pardon, and the ark that held the law, and behind the veil, in the
   thick darkness of the holy of holies, where no feet trod, save once a
   year one white-robed priest, in the garb of a penitent, and bearing the
   blood that made atonement--shone the light of the glory of God, the
   visible majesty of the present Deity.

   But long centuries had passed since that light had departed. The glory'
   had ceased from the house that now stood on Zion, and the light from
   between the cherubim. Shall we not, then, see a deep meaning and
   reference to that awful blank, when Jesus standing there in the courts
   of that Temple, whose inmost shrine was, in a most sad sense, empty,
   pointed to the quenched lamps that commemorated a departed Shechinah,
   and said, I am the Light of the world'?

   He is the Light of the world, because in Him is the glory of God. His
   words are madness, and something very like blasphemy, unless they are
   vindicated by the visible indwelling in Him of the present God. The
   cloud of the humanity, the veil, that is to say, His flesh,' enfolds
   and tempers; and through its transparent folds reveals, even while it
   swathes, the Godhead. Like some fleecy vapour flitting across the sun,
   and irradiated by its light, it enables our weak eyes to see light, and
   not darkness, in the else intolerable blaze. Yes! Thou art the Light of
   the world, because in Thee dwelleth the fulness of the Godhead bodily.'
   Thy servant hath taught us the meaning of Thy words, when he said: 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.'

   Then, subordinate to this principal thought, is the other on which I
   may touch for a moment--that Christ, like that pillar of cloud and
   fire, guides us in our pilgrimage. You may remember how emphatically
   the Book of Numbers (chap. ix.) dwells upon the absolute control of all
   the marches and halts by the movements of the cloud. When it was taken
   up, they journeyed; when it settled down, they encamped. As long as it
   lay spread above the Tabernacle, there they stayed. Impatient eyes
   might look, and impatient spirits chafe--no matter. The camp might be
   pitched in a desolate place, away from wells and palm-trees, away from
   shade, among fiery serpents, and open to fierce foes--no matter. As
   long as the pillar was motionless, no man stirred. Weary slow days
   might pass in this compulsory inactivity; but whether it were two days,
   or a month, or a year, that the cloud tarried upon the Tabernacle, the
   children of Israel journeyed not.' And whenever It lifted itself
   up,--no matter how short had been the halt, how weary and footsore the
   people, how pleasant the resting-place--up with the tent-pegs
   immediately, and away. If the signal were given at midnight, when all
   but the watchers slept, or at midday, it was all the same. There was
   the true Commander of their march. It was not Moses, nor Jethro, with
   his quick Arab eye and knowledge of the ground, that guided them; but
   that stately, solemn pillar, that floated before them. How they must
   have watched for the gathering up of its folds as they lay softly
   stretched along the Tabernacle roof; and for its sinking down, and
   spreading itself out, like a misty hand of blessing, as it sailed in
   the van!

   I am the Light of the world.' We have in Him a better guide through
   worse perplexities than theirs. By His Spirit within us, by that
   all-sufficient and perfect example of His life, by the word of His
   Gospel, and by the manifold indications of His providence, Jesus Christ
   is our Guide. If ever we go astray, it is not His fault, but ours. How
   gentle and loving that guidance is, none who have not yielded to it can
   tell. How wise and sure, none but those who have followed it know. He
   does not say Go,' but Come.' When He puts forth His sheep, He goes
   before them. In all rough places His quick hand is put out to save us.
   In danger He lashes us to Himself, as Alpine guides do when there is
   perilous ice to get across. As one of the psalms puts it, with
   wonderful beauty: I will guide thee with Mine eye'--a glance, not a
   blow--a look of directing love, that at once heartens to duty and tells
   duty. We must be very near Him to catch that look, and very much in
   sympathy with Him to understand it; and when we do, we must be swift to
   obey. Our eyes must be ever toward the Lord, or we shall often be
   marching on, unwitting that the pillar has spread itself for rest, or
   idly dawdling in our tents long after the cloud has gathered itself up
   for the march. Do not let impatience lead you to hasty interpretation
   of His plans before they are fairly evolved. Many men by self-will, by
   rashness, by precipitate hurry in drawing conclusions about what they
   ought to do, have ruined their lives. Take care, in the old-fashioned
   phrase, of running before you are sent.' There should always be a good
   clear space between the guiding ark and you, about two thousand cubits
   by measure,' that there may be no mistakes about the road. It is
   neither reverent nor wise to be treading on the heels of our Guide in
   our eager confidence that we know where He wants us to go.

   Do not let the warmth by the camp-fire, or the pleasantness of the
   shady place where your tent is pitched, keep you there when the cloud
   lifts. Be ready for change, be ready for continuance, because you are
   in fellowship with your Leader and Commander; and let Him say, Go, and
   you go; Do this, and you gladly do it, until the hour when He will
   whisper, Come; and, as you come, the river will part, and the journey
   will be over, and the fiery, cloudy pillar,' that guided you all your
   journey through,' will spread itself out an abiding glory, in that
   higher home where the Lamb is the light thereof.'

   All true following of Christ begins with faith, or we might almost say
   that following is faith, for we find our Lord substituting the former
   expression for the latter in another passage of this Gospel parallel
   with the present. I am come a Light into the world, that whosoever
   believeth on Me should not walk in darkness.' The two ideas are not
   equivalent, but faith is the condition of following; and following is
   the outcome and test, because it is the operation, of faith. None but
   they who trust Him will follow Him. He who does not follow, does not
   trust. To follow Christ, means to long and strive after His
   companionship; as the Psalmist says, My soul followeth hard after
   Thee.' It means the submission of the will, the effort of the whole
   nature, the daily conflict to reproduce His example, the resolute
   adoption of His command as my law, His providence as my will, His
   fellowship as my joy. And the root and beginning of all such following
   is in coming to Him, conscious of mine own darkness, and trustful in
   His great light. We must rely on a Guide before we accept His
   directions; and it is absurd to pretend that we trust Him, if we do not
   go as He bids us. So Follow thou Me' is, in a very real sense, the sum
   of all Christian duty.

   That thought opens out very wide fields, into which we must not even
   glance now; but I cannot help pausing here to repeat the remark already
   made, as to the gigantic and incomprehensible self-confidence that
   speaks here. Followeth Me'; then Jesus Christ calmly proposes Himself
   as the aim and goal for every soul of man; sets up His own doings as an
   all-sufficient rule for us all, with all our varieties of temper,
   character, culture, and work, and quietly assumes to have a right of
   precedence before, and of absolute command over, the whole world. They
   are all to keep behind Him, He thinks, be they saints or sages, kings
   or beggars; and the liker they are to Himself, He thinks, the nearer
   they will be to perfectness and life. He puts Himself at the head of
   the mystic march of the generations, and, like the mysterious Angel
   that Joshua saw in the plain by Jericho, makes the lofty claim: Nay,
   but as Captain of the Lord's host am I come up.' Do we admit His claim
   because we know His Name? Do we yield Him full trust because we have
   learned that He is the Light of men since He is the Word of God? Do we
   follow Him with loyal obedience, longing love, and lowly imitation,
   since He has been and is to us the Saviour of our souls?

   In the measure in which we do, the great promises of this wonderful
   saying will be verified and understood by us--He that followeth Me
   shall not walk in darkness.' That saying has, as one may say, a lower
   and a higher fulfilment. In the lower, it refers to practical life and
   its perplexities. Nobody who has not tried it would believe how many
   difficulties are cleared out of a man's road by the simple act of
   trying to follow Christ. No doubt there will still remain obscurities
   enough as to what we ought to do, to call for the best exercise of
   patient wisdom; but an enormous proportion of them vanish like mist
   when the sun breaks through, when once we honestly set ourselves to
   find out whither the pillared Light is guiding. It is a reluctant will,
   and intrusive likings and dislikings, that obscure the way for us, much
   oftener than real obscurity in the way itself. It is seldom impossible
   to discern the divine will, when we only wish to know it that we may do
   it. And if ever it is impossible for us, surely that impossibility is
   like the cloud resting on the Tabernacle--a sign that for the present
   His will is that we should be still, and wait, and watch.

   But there is a higher meaning in the words than even this promise of
   practical direction. In the profound symbolism of Scripture, especially
   of this Gospel, darkness' is the name for the whole condition of the
   soul averted from God. So our Lord here is declaring that to follow Him
   is the true deliverance from that midnight of the soul. There are a
   darkness of ignorance, a darkness of impurity, a darkness of sorrow;
   and in that threefold gloom, thickening to a darkness of death, are
   they enwrapt who follow not the Light. That is the grim, tragical side
   of this saying, too sad, too awful for our lips to speak much of, and
   best left in the solemn impressiveness of that one word. But the
   hopeful, blessed side of it is, that the feeblest beginnings of trust
   in Jesus Christ, and the first tottering steps that try to tread in
   His, bring us into the light. It does not need that we have reached our
   goal, it is enough that our faces are turned to it, and our hearts
   desire to attain it, then we may be sure that the dominion of the
   darkness over us is broken. To follow, though it be afar off, and with
   unequal steps, fills our path with increasing brightness, and even
   though evil and ignorance and sorrow may thrust their blackness in upon
   our day, they are melting in the growing glory, and already we may give
   thanks unto the Father who hath made us meet to be partakers of the
   inheritance of the saints in light, who hath delivered us from the
   power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of His dear
   Son.'

   But we have not merely the promise that we shall be led by the light
   and brought into the light. A yet deeper and grander gift is offered
   here: He shall have the light of life.' I suppose that means, not, as
   it is often carelessly taken to mean, a light which illuminates the
   life, but, like the similar phrases of this Gospel, bread of life,'
   water of life,'--light which is life. In Him was life, and the life was
   the light of men.' These two are one in their source, which is Jesus,
   the Word of God. Of Him we have to say, With Thee is the fountain of
   life, in Thy light shall we see light.' They are one in their deepest
   nature; the life is the light, and the light the life. And this one
   gift is bestowed upon every soul that follows Christ. Not only will our
   outward lives be illumined or guided from without, but our inward being
   will be filled with the brightness. Ye were sometimes darkness, now are
   ye light in the Lord.'

   That pillar of fire remained apart and without. But this true and
   better Guide of our souls enters in and dwells in us, in all the
   fulness of His triple gift of life, and light, and love. Within us He
   will chiefly prove Himself the Guide of our spirits, and will not
   merely cast His beams on the path of our feet, but will fill and flood
   us with His own brightness. All light of knowledge, of goodness, of
   gladness will be ours, if Christ be ours; and ours He surely will be if
   we follow Him. Let us take heed, lest turning away from Him we follow
   the will-o'-the-wisps of our own fancies, or the dancing lights, born
   of putrescence, that flicker above the swamps, for they will lead us
   into doleful lands where evil things haunt, and into outer darkness.
   Let us take heed how we use that light of God; for Christ, like His
   symbol of old, has a double aspect according to the eye which looks. It
   came between the camp of the Egyptians and the camp of Israel, and it
   was a cloud and darkness to them, but it gave light by night to these.'
   He is either a Stone of stumbling or a sure Foundation, a savour of
   life or of death, and which He is depends on ourselves. Trusted, loved,
   followed, He is light. Neglected, turned from, He is darkness. Though
   He be the Light of the world, it is only the man who follows Him to
   whom He can give the light of life. Therefore, man's awful prerogative
   of perverting the best into the worst forced Him, who came to be the
   light of men, to that sad and solemn utterance: For judgment I am come
   into this world, that they which see not might see, and that they which
   see might be made blind.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THREE ASPECTS OF FAITH

   Many believed on Him. Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on
   Him . . . .'--JOHN viii. 30, 31.

   The Revised Version accurately represents the original by varying the
   expression in these two clauses, retaining believed on Him' in the
   former, and substituting the simple believed Him' in the latter. The
   variation in two contiguous clauses can scarcely be accidental in so
   careful a writer as the Apostle John. And the reason and meaning of it
   are obvious enough on the face of the narrative. His purpose is to
   distinguish between more and less perfect acceptance of Jesus Christ.
   The more perfect is the former, they believed on Him'; the less perfect
   is the latter, the simple acceptance of His word on His claim of
   Messiahship, which is stigmatised as shallow, and proved to be
   transient by the context.

   They were Jews' which believed, and they continued to be so whilst they
   were believing. Now, the word Jew' in this Gospel always connotes
   antagonism to Jesus Christ; and as for these persons, how slight and
   unreliable their adhesion to the Lord is, comes out in the course of
   the next few verses; and by the end of the chapter they are taking up
   stones to stone Him. So John would show us that there is a kind of
   acceptance which may be real, and may be the basis of something much
   better hereafter, but which, if it does not grow, rots and disappears;
   and he would draw a broad line of distinction between that and the
   other mental act, far deeper, more wholesome, more lasting and vital,
   which he designates as believing on Him.' I take these words, then, for
   consideration, not so much to deal with other thoughts suggested by
   them, as because they afford me a starting-point for the consideration
   of the various phases of the act of believing, its blessings and its
   nature, and its relation to its objects, which are expressed in the New
   Testament by the various grammatical connections and constructions of
   this word.

   Now, the facts with which I wish to deal may be very briefly stated.
   There are three ways in which the New Testament represents the act of
   believing, and its relation to its Object, Christ. These three are,
   first, the simple one which appears in the text as believed Him.' Then
   there is a second, which appears in two forms, slightly different, but
   which, for our purpose, may be treated as substantially the
   same--believing on Him.' And then there is a third, which, literally
   and accurately translated is, believing unto' or into Him.' That phrase
   is John's favourite one, and rather unfortunately, though perhaps
   necessarily, it has been generally rendered by our translators by the
   less forcible believing in,' which gives the idea of repose in, but
   does not give the idea of motion towards. These three, then, I think,
   do set forth, if we will ponder them, very large lessons as to the
   essence of this act of believing, as to the Object upon which it
   fastens, and as to the blessings which flow from it, which it will be
   worth our while to consider now. I may cast the whole into the shape of
   three exhortations: believe Him, believe on Him, believe unto Him.

   I. First, then, believe Christ.

   We accept a man's words when we trust the man. Even if belief, or
   faith, is represented in the New Testament, as it very rarely is, as
   having for its object the words of revelation, behind that acceptance
   of the words lies confidence in the person speaking. And the beginning
   of all true Christian faith has in it, not merely the intellectual
   acceptance of certain propositions as true, but a confidence in the
   veracity of Him by whom they are made known to us--even Jesus Christ
   our Lord.

   I do not need to insist upon that at any length here--it would take me
   away from my present purpose; but what I do wish to emphasise is, that
   from the very starting-point, the smallest germ of the most rudimentary
   and imperfect faith which knits a soul to Jesus Christ has Him for its
   Object, and is thus distinguished from the mere acceptance of truths
   which, on other grounds than the authority of the speaker, may
   legitimately commend themselves to a man.

   Then believe Him. Now, that breaks up into two thoughts, which are all
   that I intend to deduce from it now, although many more might be
   suggested. The one is this, that the least and the lowest that Jesus
   Christ asks from us is the entire and unhesitating acceptance of His
   utterances as final, conclusive, and absolutely true. Whatever more
   Jesus Christ may be, He is, by His life and words, the Communicator of
   divine and certain truth. He is a Teacher, though He is a great deal
   more. And whatever more Christian faith may be--and it is a great deal
   more--it requires, at least, the frank and full recognition of the
   authority of every word that comes from His lips. A Christianity
   without a creed is a dream. Bones without flesh are very dry, no doubt;
   but what about flesh without bones? An inert, shapeless mass. You will
   never have a vigorous and true Christian life if it is to be moulded
   according to the fantastic dream of these latter days, which tells us
   that we may take Jesus as the Guide of our conduct and need not mind
   about what He says to us. Believe Me' is His requirement. The words of
   His mouth, and the revelations which He has made in the sweetness of
   His life, and in all the graciousness of His dealings, are the very
   unveiling to man of absolute and final and certain truth.

   But then, on the other hand, let us remember that, while all this is
   most clear and distinct in the teaching of Scripture, it carries us but
   a very short way. We find, in the instance from which we take our
   starting-point in this sermon, the broad distinction drawn, and
   practically illustrated in the conduct of the persons concerned,
   between the simple acceptance of what Christ says, and a true faith
   that clings to Him for evermore. And the same kind of disparagement of
   the lower process of merely accepting His word is found more than once
   in connection with the same phrases. We find, for instance, the two
   which are connected in our texts used in a previous conversation
   between our Lord and His antagonists. When He says to them, This is the
   work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent,' they reply,
   dragging down His claim to a lower level, What sign showest Thou, that
   we may see, and believe Thee?' He demanded belief on Himself; they
   answer, We are ready to believe you, on condition that we see something
   that may make the rendering of our belief a logical necessity for us.'

   Let us lay to heart the rudimentary and incomplete character of a faith
   which simply accepts the teaching of Jesus Christ, and does no more.
   The notion that orthodoxy is Christianity, that a man who does not
   contradict the teaching of the New Testament is thereby a Christian, is
   a very old and very perilous and very widespread one. There are many of
   us who have no better claim to be called Christians than this, that we
   never denied anything that Jesus Christ said, though we are not
   sufficiently interested in it, I was going to say, even to deny it.
   This rudimentary faith, which contents itself with the acceptance of
   the truth revealed, hardens into mere formalism, or liquefies into mere
   careless indifference as to the very truth that it professes to
   believe. There is nothing more impotent than creeds which lie dormant
   in our brains, and have no influence upon our lives. I wonder how many
   readers of this sermon, who fancy themselves good Christians, do with
   their creed as the Japanese used to do with their Emperor--keep him in
   a palace behind bamboo screens, and never let him do anything, whilst
   all the reality of power was possessed by another man, who did not
   profess to be a king at all. Do you think you are Christians because
   you would sign thirty-nine or three hundred and ninety articles of
   Christianity, if they were offered to you, while there is not one of
   them that influences either your thinking or your conduct? Do not let
   us have these sluggish kings,' with a mayor of the place to do the real
   government, but set on the throne of your hearts the principles of your
   religion, and see to it that all your convictions be translated into
   practice, and all your practice be informed by your convictions.

   This belief in a set of dogmas, on the authority of Jesus Christ, about
   which dogmas we do not care a rush, and which make no difference upon
   our lives, is the faith about which James has so many hard things to
   say; and he ventures upon a parallel that I should not like to venture
   on unless I were made bold by his example: Thou believest, O vain man!
   thou doest well: the devils also believe, and'--better than you, in
   that their belief does something for them, they believe--and tremble!'
   But what shall we say about a man who professes himself a disciple, and
   neither trembles, nor thrills, nor hopes, nor dreads, nor desires, nor
   does any single thing because of his creed? Believe Jesus, but do not
   stop there.

   II. Believe on Christ.

   Now, as I have remarked already, and as many of you know, there is a
   slightly different, twofold form of this phrase in Scripture. I need
   not trouble you with the minute distinction between the one and the
   other. Both forms coincide in the important point on which I wish to
   touch. That representation of believing on Christ carries us away at
   once from the mere act of acceptance of His word on His authority to
   the far more manifestly voluntary, moral, and personal act of reliance
   upon Him. The metaphor is expanded in various ways in Scripture, and
   instead of offering any thoughts of my own about it, I would simply ask
   attention to three of the forms in which it is set forth in the Old and
   in the New Testaments.

   The first of them, and the one which we may regard as governing the
   others, is that found in the words of Isaiah, Behold, I lay in Zion a
   stone, a sure Foundation'; and, as the Apostle Peter comments, He that
   believeth on Him shall not be confounded.' There the thoughts presented
   are the superposition of the building upon its Foundation, the rest of
   the soul, and the rearing of the life on the basis of Jesus Christ.

   How much that metaphor says to us about Him as the Foundation, in all
   the aspects in which we can apply that term! He is the Basis of our
   hope, the Guarantee of our security, the Foundation-stone of our
   beliefs, the very Ground on which our whole life reposes, the Source of
   our tranquillity, the Pledge of our peace. All that I think, feel,
   desire, wish, and do, ought to be rested upon that dear Lord, and
   builded on Him by simple faith. By patient persistence of effort
   rearing up the fabric of my life firmly upon Him, and grafting every
   stone of it--if I might so use the metaphor--into the bedding-stone,
   which is Christ, I shall be strong, peaceful, and pure.

   The storm comes, the waters rise, the winds howl, the hail and the rain
   sweep away the refuge of lies,' and the dwellers in these frail and
   foundationless houses are hurrying in wild confusion from one peak to
   another, before the steadily rising tide. But he that builds on that
   Foundation shall not make haste,' as Isaiah has it; shall not need to
   hurry to shift his quarters before the flood overtake him; shall look
   out serene upon all the hurtling fury of the wild storm, and the rise
   of the sullen waters. So, reliance on Christ, and the honest making of
   Him the Basis, not of our hopes only, but of our thinkings and of our
   doings, and of our whole being, is the secret of security, and the
   pledge of peace.

   Then there is another form of the same phrase, believing on,' in which
   is suggested not so much the figure of building upon a foundation, as
   of some feeble man resting upon a strong stay, or clinging to an
   outstretched and mighty arm. The same metaphor is implied in the word
   reliance.' We lean upon Christ when, forsaking all other props, and
   realising His sufficiency and sweetness, we rest the whole weight of
   our weariness and all the impotence of our weakness upon His strong and
   unwearied arm, and so are saved. All other stays are like that one to
   which the prophet compares the King of Egypt--the papyrus reed in the
   Nile stream, on which, if a man leans, it will break into splinters
   which will go into his flesh, and make a poisoned wound. But if we lean
   on Christ, we lean on a brazen wall and an iron pillar, and anything is
   possible sooner than that that stay shall give.

   There is still another form of the metaphor, in which neither building
   upon a foundation, nor leaning upon a support which is thought of as
   below what rests upon it, are suggested, but rather the hanging upon
   something firm and secure which is above what hangs from it. The same
   picture is suggested by our word dependence.' As a nail fastened in a
   sure place,' said one of the prophets, on Him shall hang all the glory
   of His Father's house.'


     Hangs my helpless soul on Thee.'

   The rope lowered over the cliffs supports the adventurous bird-nester
   in safety above the murmuring sea. They who clasp Christ's hand
   outstretched from above, may swing over the deepest, most vacuous
   abyss, and fear no fall.

   So, brother, build on Christ, rely on Him, depend on Him, and it shall
   not be in vain. But if you will not build on the sure Foundation, do
   not wonder if the rotten one gives way. If you will not lean on the
   strong Stay, complain not when the weak one crumbles to dust beneath
   your weight. And if you choose to swing over the profound depth at the
   end of a piece of pack-thread, instead of holding on by an adamantine
   chain wrapped round God's throne, you must be prepared for its breaking
   and your being smashed to pieces below.

   III. The last exhortation that comes out of this comparative study of
   these phrases is--Believe into Christ.

   That is a very pregnant and remarkable expression, and it can scarcely,
   as you see, be rendered into our language without a certain harshness;
   but still it is worth while to face the harshness for the sake of
   getting the double signification that is involved in it. For when we
   speak of believing unto or into Him, we suggest two things, both of
   which, apparently, were in the minds of the writers of the New
   Testament. One is motion towards, and the other is repose in, that dear
   Lord.

   So, then, true Christian faith is the flight of the soul towards
   Christ. Therein is one of the special blessednesses of the Christian
   life, that it has for its object and aim absolutely infinite and
   unattainable completeness and glory, so that unwearied freshness,
   inexhaustible buoyancy, endless progress, are the dower of every spirit
   that truly trusts in Christ. All other aims and objects are limited,
   transient, and will be left behind. Every other landmark will sink
   beneath the horizon, where so many of our landmarks have sunk already,
   and where they will all disappear when the last moment comes. But we
   may have, and if we are Christian people we shall have, bright before
   us, sufficiently certain of being reached to make our efforts hopeful
   and confident, sufficiently certain of never being reached to make our
   efforts blessed with endless aspirations, the great light and love of
   that dear Lord, to yearn after whom is better than to possess all
   besides, and following hard after whom, even in the very motion there
   is rest, and in the search there is finding. Religion is the flight of
   the soul, the aspiration of the whole man after the unattainable
   Attainable--that I may know Him, and be found in Him.'

   Oh, how such thoughts ought to shame us who call ourselves Christians!
   Growth, progress, getting nearer to Christ, yearning ever with a great
   desire after Him!--do not the words seem irony when applied to most of
   us? Think of the average type of sluggish contentment with present
   attainments that marks Christian people--tortoises in their crawling
   rather than eagles in their flight. And let us take our portion of
   shame, and remember that the faith which believes Him, and that which
   believes on Him, both need to be crowned and perfected by that which
   believes towards Him, of which the motto is, Forgetting the things that
   are behind, I reach forward to the things that are before.'

   But there is another side to this last phase of faith. That true
   believing towards or unto Christ is the rest of the soul in Him. By
   faith that deep and most real union of the believing soul with Jesus
   Christ is effected which may be fitly described as our entrance into
   and abode in Him. The believer is as if incorporated into Him in whom
   he believes. Indeed, the Apostle ventures to use a more startling
   expression than incorporation when he says that he that is joined to
   the Lord is one Spirit.' If by faith we press towards, by faith we
   shall be in, Christ. Faith is at once motion and rest, search and
   finding, desire and fruition. The felicity of this last form of the
   phrase is its expression of both these ideas, which are united in fact
   as in word. A rare construction of the verb to believe, with the simple
   preposition in, coincides with this part of the meaning of believing
   unto or into, and need not be separately considered.

   With this understanding of its meaning, we see how natural is John's
   preference for this construction. For surely, if he has anything to
   tell us, it is that the true Christian life is a life enclosed, as it
   were, in Jesus Christ. Nor need I remind you how Paul, though he starts
   from a different point of view, yet coincides with John in this
   teaching. For, to him, to be in Christ' is the sum of all blessedness,
   righteousness, peace, and power. As in an atmosphere, we may dwell in
   Him. He may be the strong Habitation to which we may continually
   resort. One of the Old Testament words for trusting means taking
   refuge, and such a thought is naturally suggested by this New Testament
   form of expression. I flee unto Thee to hide me.' In that Fortress we
   dwell secure.

   To be in Jesus, wedded to Him by the conjunction of will and desire,
   wedded to Him in the oneness of a believing spirit and in the obedience
   of a life, to be thus in Christ is the crown and climax of faith, and
   the condition of all perfection. To be in Christ is life; to be out of
   Him is death. In Him we have redemption; in Him we have wisdom, truth,
   peace, righteousness, hope, confidence. To be in Him is to be in
   heaven. We enter by faith. Faith is not the acceptance merely of His
   Word, but is the reliance of the soul on Him, the flight of the soul
   towards Him, the dwelling of the soul in Him. Come, My people, into thy
   chambers, and shut thy doors about thee . . . until the indignation be
   overpast.'
     __________________________________________________________________

NEVER IN BONDAGE'

   We . . . were never in bondage to any man: how gayest Thou, Ye shall be
   made free!'--JOHN viii. 33.

   Never in bondage to any man'? Then what about Egypt, Babylon, Persia,
   Syria? Was there not a Roman garrison looking down from the castle into
   the very Temple courts where this boastful falsehood was uttered? It
   required some hardihood to say, Never in bondage to any man,' in the
   face of such a history, and such a present. But was it not just an
   instance of the strange power which we all have and exercise, of
   ignoring disagreeable facts, and by ingenious manipulation taking the
   wrinkles out of the photograph? The Jews were perhaps not
   misunderstanding Jesus Christ quite so much as these words may suggest.
   If He had been promising, as they chose to assume, political and
   external liberty, I fancy they would have risen to the bait a little
   more eagerly than they did to His words.

   But be that as it may, this strange answer of theirs suggests that
   power of ignoring what we do not want to see, not only in the way in
   which I have suggested, but also in another. For if they had any
   inkling of what Jesus meant by slavery and freedom, they, by such words
   as these, put away from themselves the thought that they were, in any
   deep and inward sense, bondsmen, and that a message of liberty had any
   application to them. Ah, dear friends! there was a great deal of human
   nature in these men, who thus put up a screen between them and the
   penetrating words of our Lord. Were they not doing just what many of
   us--all of us to some extent--do: ignoring the facts of their own
   necessities, of their own spiritual condition, denying the plain
   lessons of experience? Like them, are not we too often refusing to look
   in the face the fact that we all, apart from Him, are really in
   bondage? Because we do not realise the slavery, are we not indifferent
   to the offer of freedom? We were never in bondage'; consequently we
   add, How sayest Thou, Ye shall be made free?' So then, my text brings
   us to think of three things: our bondage, our ignorance of our bondage,
   our consequent indifference to Christ's offer of liberty. Let me say a
   word or two about each of these.

   First as to--

   I. Our bondage.

   Christ follows the vain boast in the text, with the calm, grave,
   profound explanation of what He meant: Whoso committeth sin is the
   slave of sin.' That is true in two ways. By the act of sinning a man
   shows that he is the slave of an alien power that has captured him; and
   in the act of sinning, he rivets the chains and increases the tyranny.
   He is a slave, or he would not obey sin. He is more a slave because he
   has again obeyed it. Now, do not let us run away with the idea that
   when Jesus speaks of sin and its bondage, He is thinking only, or
   mainly, of gross outrages and contradictions of the plain law of
   morality and decency, that He is thinking only of external acts which
   all men brand as being wrong, or of those which law qualifies as
   crimes. We have to go far deeper than that, and into a far more inward
   region of life than that, before we come to apprehend the inwardness
   and the depth of the Christian conception of what sin is. We have to
   bring our whole life close up against God, and then to judge its deeds
   thereby. Therefore, though I know I am speaking to a mass of
   respectable, law-abiding people, very few of you having any knowledge
   of the grosser and uglier forms of transgression, and I dare say none
   of you having any experience of what it is to sin against human law,
   though I do not charge you--God forbid!--with vices, and still less
   with crimes, I bring to each man's conscience a far more searching word
   than either of these two, when I say, We all have sinned and come short
   of the glory of God.' This declaration of the universality and reality
   of the bondage of sin is only the turning into plain words of a fact
   which is of universal experience, though it may be of a very much less
   universal consciousness. We may not be aware of the fact, because, as I
   have to show you, we do not direct our attention to it. But there it
   is; and the truth is that every man, however noble his aspirations
   sometimes, however pure and high his convictions, and however honest in
   the main may be his attempts to do what is right, when he deals
   honestly with himself, becomes more or less conscious of just that
   experience which a great expert in soul analysis and self-examination
   made: I find a law'--an influence working upon my heart with the
   inevitableness and certainty of law--that when I would do good, evil is
   present with me.'

   We all know that, whether we regard it as we ought or no. We all say
   Amen to that, when it is forced upon our attention. There is something
   in us that thwarts aspiration towards good, and inclines to evil.


     What will but felt the fleshly screen?'

   And it is not only a screen. It not only prevents us from rising as
   high as we would, but it sinks us so low as to do deeds that something
   within us recoils from and brands as evil. Jesus teaches us that he who
   commits sin is the slave of sin; that is to say, that an alien power
   has captured and is coercing the wrongdoer. That teaching does not
   destroy responsibility, but it kindles hope. A foreign foe, who has
   invaded the land, may be driven out of the land, and all his prisoners
   set free, if a stronger than he comes against him. Christianity is
   called gloomy and stern, because it preaches the corruption of man's
   heart. Is it not a gospel to draw a distinction between the evil that a
   man does, and the self that a man may be? Is it not better, more
   hopeful, more of a true evangel, to say to a man, Sin dwelleth in you,'
   than to say, What is called sin is only the necessary action of human
   nature'? To believe that their present condition is not slavery makes
   men hopeless of ever gaining freedom, and the true gospel of the
   emancipation of humanity rests on the Christian doctrine of the bondage
   of sin.

   Let me remind you that freedom consists not in the absence of external
   constraints, but in the animal in us being governed by the will, for
   when the flesh is free the man is a slave. And it means that the will
   should be governed by the conscience; and it means that the conscience
   should be governed by God. These are the stages. Men are built in three
   stories, so to speak. Down at the bottom, and to be kept there, are
   inclinations, passions, lust, desires, all which are but blind aimings
   after their appropriate satisfaction, without any question as to
   whether the satisfaction is right or wrong; and above that a dominant
   will which is meant to control, and above that a conscience. That is
   the public men are more and more abasing themselves to the degradation
   of ministering to the supposed wishes instead of cutting dead against
   the grain of the wishes, if necessary, in order to meet the true wants,
   of the people. Wherever some one strong man stands up to oppose the
   wild current of popular desires, he may make up his mind that the
   charge of being a bad citizen, unpatriotic, a lover of the enemies of
   the people,' will be flung at him. You Christian men and women have to
   face the same calumnies as your Master had. The rotten eggs flung at
   the objects of popular execration--if I might use a somewhat violent
   figure--turn to roses in their flight. The praises of good men and the
   scoffs of loose-living and godless ones are equally valuable
   certificates of character. The Church which does not earn the same sort
   of opprobrium which attended its Master has probably failed of its
   duty. It is good to be called gloomy' and sour-visaged' by those whose
   only notion of pleasure is effervescent immorality; and it is good to
   be called intolerant by the crowd that desires us to be tolerant of
   vice. So, my friends, I want you to understand that you, too, have to
   tread in the Master's steps. The imitation of Jesus' does not consist
   merely in the sanctities and secrecies of communion, and the blessings
   of a meek and quiet heart, but includes standing where He stood, in
   avowed and active opposition to widespread evils, and, if need be, in
   the protesting opposition to popular error. And if you are called
   nicknames, never mind! Remember what the Master said, They shall bring
   you before kings and magistrates'--the tribunal of the many-headed is a
   more formidable judgment-bench than that of any king--and it shall turn
   to a testimony for you.'

   II. Now, secondly, this name is the witness to what I venture to call,
   for want of a better term, the originality of Jesus Christ.

   It bears witness to the dim feeling which onlookers had that in Him was
   a new phenomenon, not to be accounted for by birth and descent, by
   training and education, or by the whole of what people nowadays call
   environment. He did not come out of these circumstances. This is not a
   regulation pattern type of Jew. He is a Samaritan.' That is to say, He
   is unlike the people among whom He dwells; and betrays that other
   influences than those which shaped them have gone to the making of Him.

   That is one of the most marked, outstanding, and important features in
   the teaching and in the character of Jesus Christ, that it is
   absolutely independent of, and incapable of being accounted for by,
   anything that He derived from the circumstances in which He lived. He
   was a Jew, and yet He was not a Jew. He was not a Samaritan, and yet He
   was a Samaritan. He was not a Greek, and yet He was one. He was not a
   Roman, nor an Englishman, nor a Hindoo, nor an Asiatic, nor an African;
   and yet He had all the characteristics of these races within Himself,
   and held them all in the ample sweep of His perfect Manhood.

   If we turn to His teaching we find that, whilst no doubt to some extent
   it is influenced in its forms by the necessities of its adaptation to
   the first listeners, there is a certain element in it far beyond
   anything that came from Rabbis, or even from prophets and psalmists.
   Modern Christian scholarship has busied itself very much in these days
   with studying Jewish literature, so far as it is available, in order to
   ascertain how far it formed the teaching, or mind, of Jesus the
   Carpenter of Nazareth. There is a likeness, but the likeness only
   serves to make the unlikeness more conspicuous. And I, for my part,
   venture to assert that, whilst the form of our Lord's teaching may
   largely be traced to the influences under which He was brought up, and
   whilst the substance of some parts of it may have been anticipated by
   earlier Rabbis of His nation, the crowd that listened to Him on the
   mountain top had laid their fingers upon the more important fact when
   they wondered at His teaching,' and found the characteristic difference
   between it, and that of the men to whom they had listened, in the note
   of authority with which He spoke. Jesus never argues, He asserts; He
   claims; and in lieu of all arguments He gives you His own Verily!
   verily! I say unto you.'

   Thus not only in its form, but in its substance, in its lofty morality,
   in its spiritual religion, in its revelation of the Father and the
   Fatherhood for all men, Christ's teaching as teaching stands absolutely
   alone.

   If we turn to His character, the one thing that strikes us is that
   about it there is nothing of the limitations of time or race which
   stamp all other men. He is not good after the fashion of His age, or of
   any other age; He is simply embodied and perfect Goodness. This Tree
   has shot up high above the fences that enclose the grove in which it
   grows, and its leaf lasts for ever.

   Run over, in your mind, other great names of heroes, saints, thinkers,
   poets; they all bear the stamp of their age and circumstances, and the
   type of goodness or the manner of thought which belonged to these.
   Jesus Christ alone stands before men absolutely free from any of the
   limitations which are essential in the case of every human excellence
   and teacher. And so He comes to us with a strange freshness, with a
   strange closeness; and nineteen centuries have not made Him fit less
   accurately to our needs than He did to those of the generation amidst
   which He condescended to live. Thickening mists of oblivion wrap all
   other great names as they recede into the past; and about the loftiest
   of them we have to say, This man, having served his generation, fell on
   sleep, and saw corruption.' But Jesus Christ lasts, because there is
   nothing local or temporary about His teaching or His character.

   Now this peculiar originality, as I venture to call it, of Christ's
   character is a very strong argument for the truthful accuracy of the
   picture drawn of Him in these four Gospels. Where did these four men
   get their Christ? Was it from imagination? Was it from myth? Was it
   from the accidental confluence of a multitude of traditions? There is
   an old story about a painter who, in despair of producing a certain
   effect of storm upon the sea, at last flung his wet sponge at the
   canvas, and to his astonishment found that it had done the very thing
   he wanted. But wet sponges cannot draw likenesses; and to allege that
   these four men drew such a picture, in such compass, without anybody
   sitting for it, seems to me about the most desperate hypothesis that
   ever was invented. If there were no Christ, or if the Christ that was,
   was not like what the Gospels paint Him as being, then the authors of
   these little booklets are consummate geniuses, and their works stand at
   the very top of the imaginative literature of the world. It is more
   difficult to account for the Gospels, if they are not histories, than
   it is to account for the Christ whom they tell us of if they are.

   And then, further, there is only one key to the mystery of this
   originality. Christ is perfect man, high above limitations, and owing
   nothing to environment, because He is the Son of God. I would as soon
   believe that grass roots, which for years, in some meadow, had brought
   forth, season after season, nothing but humble green blades, shot up
   suddenly into a palm tree, as I would believe that simple natural
   descent brought all at once into the middle of the dull succession of
   commonplace and sinful men this radiant and unique Figure. Account for
   Christ, all you unbelievers! The question of to-day, round which all
   the battle is being fought, is the person of Jesus Christ. If He be
   what the Gospels tell us that He is, there is nothing left for the
   unbeliever worth a struggle. What think ye of Christ? Whose Son is He?'
   The Jews said, Thou art a Samaritan!' We say, Thou art the Christ; the
   Son of the living God!'

   III. Lastly, the name bears witness to Christ's universality.

   I presume that, in addition to what seemed His hostility to what was
   taken to be true Judaism, another set of facts underlay the name--viz.
   those which indicated His kindly relations with the people whom it was
   every good Jew's pleasant duty to hate with all his heart. The story of
   the Samaritan woman in John's Gospel, the parable of the good
   Samaritan, the incident of the grateful leper, who was a Samaritan, the
   refusal to allow the eager Apostles to bring down fire from heaven to
   consume inhospitable churls in a Samaritan village, were but
   outstanding specimens of what must have been a characteristic of His
   whole career not unknown to His enemies. So they argued, If you love
   our enemies you must hate us; and you must be one of them,' thereby
   distorting, but yet presenting, what is the great glory of Christ's
   Gospel, and of Christ Himself, that He belongs to the world; and that
   His salvation, the sweep of His love, and the power of His Cross, are
   meant for all mankind.

   That universality largely arises from the absence of the limitations of
   which I have already spoken sufficiently. Because He belongs to no one
   period as regards His character, He is available for all periods as
   regards His efficacy. Because His teaching is not dyed in the hues of
   any school or of any age or of any cast of thought, it suits for all
   mankind. This water comes clear from the eternal rock, and has no taint
   of any soil through which it has flowed. Therefore the thirsty lips of
   a world may be glued to it, and drink and be satisfied. His one
   sacrifice avails for the whole world.

   But let me remind you that universality means also individuality, and
   that Jesus Christ is the Christ for all men because He is each man's
   Christ. The tree of life stands in the middle of the garden that all
   may have equal access to it. Is this universal Christ yours; thine?
   That is the question. Make Him so by putting out your hand and claiming
   your share in Him, by casting your soul upon Him, by trusting your all
   to Him, by listening to His word, by obeying His commands, by drinking
   in the fulness of His blessing. You can do so if you will. If you do
   not, the universal Christ is nothing to you. Make Him thine, and be
   sure that the sweep of His love and the efficacy of His sacrifice
   embrace and include thee. He is the universal Christ; therefore He is
   the only Christ; neither is there salvation in any other.' Through Him
   all men, each man, thou, must be saved. Without Him all men, every man,
   thou, can not be saved. Take Him for yours, and you will find that each
   who possesses Him, possesses Him altogether, and none hinders the other
   in his full enjoyment of the bread of God which came down from heaven.'
     __________________________________________________________________

ONE METAPHOR AND TWO MEANINGS

   I must work the works of Him that sent Me, while it is day: the night
   cometh when no man can work.'--JOHN ix. 4.

   The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off
   the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.'--ROMANS
   xiii. 12.

   The contrast between these two sayings will strike you at once. Using
   the same metaphors, they apply them in exactly opposite directions. In
   the one, life is the day, and the state beyond death the night; in the
   other, life is the night, and the state beyond death the day.
   Remarkable as the contrast is, it comes to be still more so if we
   remember the respective speakers. For each of them says what we should
   rather have expected the other to say. It would have been natural for
   Paul to have given utterance to the stimulus to diligence caused by the
   consciousness that the time of work was brief; and it would have been
   as natural for Jesus, who, as we believe, came from God, from the place
   of the eternal supernal glory, to have said that life here was night as
   compared with the illumination that He had known. But it is the divine
   Master who gives utterance to the common human consciousness of a brief
   life ending in inactivity, and it is the servant who takes the higher
   point of view.

   So strange did the words of my first text seem as coming from our
   Lord's lips, that the sense of incongruity seems to have been the
   occasion of the remarkable variation of reading which the Revised
   Version has adopted when it says We must work the works of Him that
   sent Me.' But that thought seems to me to be perfectly irrelevant to
   our Lord's purpose in this context, where He is vindicating His own
   action, and not laying down the duty of His servants. He is giving here
   one of these glimpses, that we so rarely get, into His own inmost
   heart. And so we have to take the sharp contrast between the Master's
   thought and the servant's thought, and to combine them, if we would
   think rightly about the present and the future, and do rightly in the
   present.

   I. Let me ask you to look at the Master's thought about the present and
   the future.

   As I have already said, our Lord gives utterance here to the very
   common, in fact, universal human consciousness. The contrast between
   the intense little spot of light and the great ring of darkness round
   about it; between the warm precincts of the cheerful day' and the cold
   solitudes of the inactive night has been the commonplace and
   stock-in-trade of moralists and thoughtful men from the beginning; has
   given pathos to poetry, solemnity to our days; and has been the ally of
   base as well as of noble things. For to say to a man, there are twelve
   hours in the day of life, and then comes darkness, the blackness that
   swallows up all activity,' may either be made into a support of all
   lofty and noble thoughts, or, by the baser sort, may be, and has been,
   made into a philosophy of the Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we
   die' kind; Gather ye roses while ye may'; A short life and a merry
   one.' The thought stimulates to diligence, but it does nothing to
   direct the diligence. It makes men work furiously, but it never will
   prevent them from working basely. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do
   it with thy might,' is a conclusion from the consideration that there
   is neither wisdom nor knowledge nor device in the grave whither we go,'
   but what the hand should find to do must be settled from altogether
   different considerations.

   Our Lord here takes the common human point of view, and says, Life is
   the time for activity, and it must be the more diligent because it is
   ringed by the darkness of the night.' What precisely does our Lord
   intend by His use of that metaphor of the night? No figures, we know,
   run upon all-fours. The point of comparison may be simply in some one
   feature common to the two things compared, and so all sorts of mischief
   may be done by trying to extend the analogy to other features. Now,
   there are a great many points in which day and night may respectively
   be taken as analogues of Life and Death and the state beyond death.
   There is a night of weeping'; there is a night of ignorance.' But our
   Lord Himself tells us what is the one point of comparison which alone
   is in His mind, when He says, The night cometh, when no man can work.'
   It is simply the night as a season of compulsory inactivity that
   suggests the comparison in our text. And so we have here the
   presentation of that dear Lord as influenced by the common human
   motive, and feeling that there was work to be done which must be
   crowded into a definite space, because when that space was past, there
   would be no more opportunity for the work to be done.

   Look at how, in the words of my first text, we have, as I said, a
   glimpse into His inmost heart. He lets us see that all His life was
   under the solemn compulsion of that great must which was so often upon
   His lips, that He felt that He was here to do the Father's will, and
   that that obligation lay upon Him with a pressure which He neither
   could, nor would if He could, have got rid of.

   There are two kinds of musts' in our lives. There is the unwelcome
   necessity which grips us with iron and sharpened fangs; the needs-be
   which crushes down hopes and dreams and inclinations, and forces the
   slave to his reluctant task. And there is the must' which has passed
   into the will, into the heart, and has moulded the inmost desire to
   conformity with the obligation which no more stands over against us as
   a taskmaster with whip and chain, but has passed within us and is there
   an inspiration and a joy. He that can say, as Jesus Christ in His
   humanity could, and did say: My meat'--the refreshment of my nature,
   the necessary sustenance of my being--is to do the will of my Father';
   that man, and that man alone, feels no pressure that is pain from the
   incumbency of the necessity that blessedly rules His life. When I will'
   and I choose' coincide, like two of Euclid's triangles atop of one
   another, line for line and angle for angle, then comes liberty into the
   life. He that can say, not with a knitted brow and an unwilling ducking
   of his head to the yoke, I must do it,' but can say, Thy law is within
   my heart,' that is the Christlike, the free, the happy man.

   Further, our Lord here, in His thoughts of the present and the future,
   lets us see what He thought that the work of God in the world was. The
   disciples looked at the blind man sitting by the wayside, and what he
   suggested to them was a curious, half theological, half metaphysical
   question, in which Rabbinical subtlety delighted. Who did sin, this man
   or his parents?' They only thought of talking over the theological
   problem involved in the fact that, before he had done anything in this
   world to account for the calamity, he was born blind. Jesus Christ
   looked at the man, and He did not think about theological cobwebs. What
   was suggested to Him was to fight against the evil and abolish it. It
   is sometimes necessary to discuss the origin of an evil thing, of a
   sorrow or a sin, in order to understand how to deal with and get rid of
   it. But unless that is the case, our first business is not to say, How
   comes this about?' but our business is to take steps to make it cease
   to come about. Cure the man first and then argue to your heart's
   content about what made him blind, but cure him first. And so Jesus
   Christ taught us that the meaning of the day of life was that we should
   set ourselves to abolish the works of the devil, and that the work of
   God was that we should fight against sin and sorrow, and in so far as
   it was in our power, abolish these, in all the variety of their forms,
   in all the vigour of their abundant growth. Sorrow and sin are God's
   call to every one of His sons and daughters to set themselves to cast
   them out of His fair creation; and the day' is the opportunity for
   doing that.

   Our Lord here, as I have already suggested, shows us very touchingly
   and beautifully, how entirely He bore our human nature, and had entered
   into our conditions, in that He, too, felt that common human emotion,
   and was spurred to unhasting and yet unresting diligence by the thought
   of the coming of the night. I suppose that although we have few
   chronological data in this Gospel of John, the hour of our Lord's death
   was really very near at that time. He had just escaped from a
   formidable attempt upon His life. They took up stones to stone Him, but
   He, passing through the midst of them, went His way,' is the statement
   which immediately precedes the account of His meeting with this blind
   man. And so under the pressure, perhaps, of that immediate experience
   which revealed the depths of hatred that was ready for anything against
   Him, He gives utterance to this expression: If it be the case that the
   time is at hand, then the more need that, Sabbath day as it is, I
   should pause here.' Though the multitude were armed with stones to
   stone Him, He stopped in His flight because there was a poor blind man
   there whom He felt that He needed to cure. Beautiful it is, and drawing
   Him very near to us,--and it should draw us very near to Him--that thus
   He shared in that essentially human consciousness of the limitation of
   the power to work, by the ring of blackness that encircled the little
   spot of illuminated light.

   But some will say, How is it possible that such a consciousness as this
   should really have been in the mind of Jesus Christ?' Did He not know
   that His death was not to be the end of His work? Did He not know, and
   say over and over again, in varying forms, that when He passed from
   earth, it was not into inactivity? Is it not the very characteristic of
   His mission that it is different from that of all other helpers and
   benefactors and teachers of the world, in that His death stands in the
   very middle of His work, and that on the one side of it there is
   activity, and on the other side of it there is still, and in some sense
   loftier and greater, activity?' Yes; all that is perfectly true, and I
   do not for a moment believe that our Lord was forgetting that the life
   on the earth was but the first volume of His biography, and of the
   records of His deeds, and that He contemplated them, as He contemplated
   always, the life beyond, as working in and on and over and through His
   servants, even unto the end of the world.

   But you have only to remember the difference between the earthly and
   the heavenly life of the Lord fully to understand the point of view
   that He takes here. The one is the basis of the other; the one is the
   seedtime, the other is the harvest. The one has only the limited years
   of the earthly life, in which it can be done; the other has the endless
   years of Eternity, through which it is to be continued. And if any part
   of that earthly life of the Lord had been void of its duty, and of its
   discharge of the Father's will, not even He, amidst the blaze of the
   heavenly glory, could have thereafter filled up the tiny gap. All the
   earthly years were needed to be filled with service, up to the great
   service and sacrifice of the Cross, in order that upon them might be
   reared the second stage and phase of His heavenly life. With regard to
   the one, He said on the Cross, It is finished.' But when He died He
   passed not into the night of inactivity, but into the day of greater
   service. And that higher and heavenly form of His work continues, and
   not until the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our God
   and of His Christ,' and the whole benefit and effect of His earthly
   life are imparted to the whole race of man, will it be said, It is
   done,' and the angels of heaven proclaim the completion of His work for
   man. But seeing that that work has its twofold forms, Jesus, like us,
   had to be conscious of the limitations of life, and of the night that
   followed the day.

   II. And now turn, in the second place, to the servant's thought.

   As I have already pointed out, it is the precise reversal of the other.
   What to Christ is day' to Paul is night.' What to Christ is night' to
   Paul is day.' Now the first point that I would make is this, that the
   future would never have been day' to Paul if Jesus had not gone down
   into the darkness of the night.' I have said that there was only one
   point of comparison in our Lord's mind between night and death. But we
   may venture to extend the figure a little, and to say that the Light
   went into the valley of the shadow of Death,' and lit it up from end to
   end. The Life went into the palace of Death, and breathed life into all
   there. There is a great picture by one of the old monkish masters, on
   the walls of a Florentine convent, which represents the descent of
   Jesus to that dim region of the dead. Around Him there is a halo of
   light that shines into the gloomy corridor, up which the thronging
   patriarchs and saints of the Old Dispensation are coming, with
   outstretched hands of eager welcome and acceptance, to receive the
   blessing. Ah! it is true, the people that walked in darkness have seen
   a great Light; and to them that dwelt in the region of the shadow of
   death, unto them hath the Light shined.' Christ the Light has gone down
   into the darkness, and what to Him was night He has made for us day.
   Just as Scripture all but confines the name of death to Christ's
   experience upon the Cross, and by virtue of that experience softens it
   down for the rest of us into the blessed image of sleep, so the Master
   has turned the night of death into the dawning of the day.

   Further, to the servant the brightness of that future day dimmed all
   earth's garish glories into darkness. It was because Paul saw the
   Beyond flaming with such lustre that the nearer distance to him seemed
   to have sunk into gloom. Just as a man or other object between you and
   the western sky when the sun is there will be all dark, so earth with
   heaven behind it becomes a mere shadowy outline. The day that is beyond
   outshines all the lustres and radiances of earth, and turns them into
   darkness. You go into a room out of blazing tropical sunshine, and it
   is all gloom and obscurity. He whose eyes are fixed on the day that is
   to come will find that here he walks as one in the night.

   And the brightness of that day, as well as the darkness of the present
   night, directed the servant as to what he should be diligent in. Since
   it is true that the day is at hand,' let us put on the armour of light,
   and dress ourselves in garb fitting for it. Since it is true that the
   night is far spent' let us put off the works of darkness.

   III. And so that brings me to the last point, and that is the
   combination of the Master's and the servant's thought, and the effect
   that it should produce upon us.

   It is not enough either for our hearts or our minds that we should say
   the night cometh when no man can work.' Life is day, but it is night
   also. Death is night but it is dawning as well. We cannot understand
   either the present or the future unless we link them together. That
   death which is the cessation of activity in one aspect, is, for
   Christ's servants, as truly as for Christ, the beginning of an activity
   in a higher and nobler form. I do not believe in a heaven of rest,
   meaning by that, inaction; I still less believe in a death which puts
   an end to the activity of the human spirit. I believe that this world
   is our school, our apprenticeship, the place where we learn our trade
   and exercise our faculties, where we paint the picture, as it were,
   which we offer when we desire to be admitted to the great guild of
   artists, and according to the result of which, in the eye of the Judge,
   is our place hereafter. What the Germans call proof pieces'--that is
   the meaning of life. And though the night cometh when no man can work,'
   the day cometh when the characters we have made ourselves here, the
   habits we have cultivated and indulged in, the capacities we have
   exercised, and the set and drift of all our activity upon earth, will
   determine the work that we get to do there.

   So then, stereoscoping these two thoughts, we get the solid image that
   results from them both. And it teaches us not only diligence, and thus
   supplies stimulus, but it determines the direction of our diligence,
   and thus supplies guidance. We ought to be misers of our time and
   opportunities. Jesus Christ said, I must work the work of Him that sent
   Me while it is day; the night cometh.' How much more ought you and I to
   say so? And some of us ought very specially to say it, and to feel it,
   because the hour when we shall have to lay down our tools is getting
   very near, and the shadows are lengthening. If you had been in the
   fields in these summer evenings during the last few days, you would
   have seen the haymakers at work with more and more diligence as the
   evening drew on darker and darker. Dear friends, some of us are at the
   eleventh hour. Let us fill it with diligent work. The night cometh.

   But my texts not only stimulate to diligence, but they direct the
   diligence. If it be that there is a day beyond, and that Christ's folk
   are the children of the day,' then let us not sleep as do others, but
   let us watch and be sober.' We have to cast ourselves on Him as our
   Saviour, to love Him as our Lord and Friend, to take Him as our Pattern
   and our Guide, our Help, our Light, and our Life. And then we shall
   neither be deceived by life's garish splendours nor oppressed by its
   gloom and its sorrow; we shall neither shrink from that last moment, as
   a night of inaction, nor be too eager to cast off the burden of our
   present work, but we shall cheerfully toil at what will prepare us for
   the day,' and the bell at night that rings us out of mill and factory
   will not be unwelcome, for it will ring us in to higher work and nobler
   service. The transition will be like one of those summer nights in the
   Arctic circle, when the sun does not dip. Through a little thin film of
   less light we shall pass into the perfect day, where the Lord God
   Almighty and the Lamb are the light thereof,' and there shall be no
   more night.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE SIXTH MIRACLE IN JOHN'S GOSPEL--THE BLIND MADE TO SEE, AND THE SEEING MADE
BLIND

   When Jesus had thus spoken, He spat on the ground, and made clay of the
   spittle, and He anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay, 7.
   And said unto him, Go, wash in the Pool of Siloam, (which is by
   interpretation, Sent). He went his way, therefore, and washed, and came
   seeing.'--JOHN ix. 6, 7.

   The proportionate length at which this miracle and its accompanying
   effects are recorded, indicates very clearly the Evangelist's idea of
   their relative importance. Two verses are given to the story of the
   miracle; all the rest of the chapter to its preface and its issues. It
   was a great thing to heal a man that was blind from his birth, but the
   story of the gradual illumination of his spirit until it came to the
   full light of the perception of Christ as the Son of God, was far more
   to the Evangelist, and ought to be far more to us than giving the
   outward eye power to discern the outward light.

   The narrative has a prologue and an epilogue, and the true point of
   view from which to look at it is found in the solemn words with which
   our Lord closes the incident. For judgment am I come into this world,
   that they which see not might see, and that they which see might be
   made blind.'

   So then the mere sign, important as it is, is the least thing that we
   have to look at in our contemplations now.

   I. We have here our Lord unveiling His deepest motives for bestowing an
   unsought blessing.

   It is remarkable, I think, that out of the eight miracles recorded in
   this Gospel, there is only one in which our Lord responds to a request
   to manifest His miraculous power; the others are all spontaneous.

   In the other Gospels He heals sometimes because of the pleading of the
   sufferer; sometimes because of the request of compassionate friends or
   bystanders; sometimes unasked, because His own heart went out to those
   that were in pain and sickness. But in John's Gospel, predominantly we
   have the Son of God, who acts throughout as moved by His own deep
   heart. That view of Christ reaches its climax in His own profound words
   about His own laying down of His life: I came forth from the Father,
   and am come into the world. Again, I leave the world and go unto the
   Father.' So, not so much influenced by others as deriving motive and
   impulse and law from Himself, He moves upon earth a fountain and not a
   reservoir, the Originator and the Beginner of the blessings that He
   bears.

   And that is the point of view from which most strikingly the prologue
   of our narrative sets forth His action in the miracle here. As Jesus
   passed by,' says the story, He saw a man which was blind from his
   birth.' He fixes His eye upon him. No cry from the blind man's lips
   draws Him. He sits there unconscious of the kind eyes that were
   fastened upon him. The disciples stand at Christ's side, and have no
   share in His feelings. They ask Him to do nothing. To them the blind
   man is--what? A theological problem. No trace of pity touches their
   hearts. They do not even seem to have reckoned upon or expected
   Christ's miraculous intervention. And that is a very remarkable feature
   in the Gospels. At all events, they evidently do not expect it here;
   but all that the sight of this lifelong sufferer does in them is to
   raise a question, Who did sin; he or his parents?' Perhaps they do not
   quite see to the bottom of the alternative that they are suggesting;
   and we need not trouble ourselves to ask whether there was a full-blown
   notion of the pre-existence of the man's soul in their minds as they
   ask the question. Perhaps they remembered the impotent man to whom our
   Lord said, Go and sin no more lest a worse thing come unto thee.' And
   they may have thought that they had His sanction to the doctrine--as
   old as Job's friends--that wherever there was great suffering there
   must first have been great sin.

   That is all that the sight of sorrow does for some people. It leads to
   censorious judgments, or to mere idle and curious speculations. Christ
   lets us see what it did for Him, and what it is meant to do for us.
   Neither hath this man sinned nor his parents, but he is born blind that
   the works of God may be made manifest in him.' That is to say, human
   sorrow is to be looked at by us as an opportunity for the manifestation
   through us of God's mercy in relieving and stanching the wounds through
   which the lifeblood is ebbing away. Do not stand coldly curious or
   uncharitably censorious. Do not make miserable men theological
   problems, but see in them a call for service. See in them an
   opportunity for letting the light of God, so much of it as is in you,
   shine from you, and your hands move in works of mercy.

   And then the Master goes on to state still more distinctly the law
   which dominated His life, and which ought to dominate ours: I must work
   the works of Him that sent Me while it is day; the night cometh when no
   man can work.' Then poor men's misery is an occasion for the love of
   God manifesting itself. Yes. But the love of God manifests itself
   through human media, through persons; and if we adopt the reading of
   these words which you will find in the Revised Version, and instead of
   saying I must work,' read We must work,' then we have Christ extending
   the law which ruled over His own life to all His followers, and making
   it supremely obligatory and binding upon each of us. He for His part,
   as I have said, moves through this Gospel as the Son of God, whose
   mercy, and all whose doings are self-originated. But the other side of
   that is that He moves through this Gospel in the humble attitude of
   filial obedience, ever recognising that the Father's will is supreme in
   His life; and that He is bound, with an obligation in which He
   rejoices, to do the will of Him that sent Him. The consciousness of a
   mission, the sense of filial obedience, the joyful surrender and
   harmonising of the will of the Son with the will of the Father; these
   things were the secret of the Master's life.

   And coupled with them, even in Him there was the consciousness that
   time was short; and although beyond the Cross and the grave there
   stretched for Him an eternity in which He would work for the blessing
   of the world, yet the special work which He had to do, while wearing
   the veil and weakness of flesh, had but few days and hours in which it
   could be done. Therefore, as we ought to do, He worked under the
   limitations of mortality, and recognised in the brevity of life another
   call to eager and continuous service.

   These were His motives which, in common with Him, we may share. But He
   adds another in which we have no share; and declares the unique
   consciousness which ever stirred Him to His self-manifesting and
   God-manifesting acts: As long as I am in the world I am the Light of
   the world.'

   Thus, moved by sorrow, recognising in man's misery the dumb cry for
   help, seeing in it the opportunity for the manifestation of the higher
   mercy of God; taking all evil to be the occasion for a brighter display
   of the love and the good which are divine; feeling that His one purpose
   upon earth was to crowd the moments with obedience to the will, and
   with the doing of the works of Him that sent Him; and possessing the
   sole and strange consciousness that from His person streams out all the
   light which illuminates the world--the Christ pauses before the
   unconscious blind man, and looking upon the poor, useless eyeballs,
   unaware how near light and sight stood, obeys the impulse that shapes
   His whole life, and when He had spoken thus,' proceeds to the strange
   cure.

   II. So we come, in the next place, to consider Christ as veiling His
   power under material means.

   There is only one other instance in the Gospels where a miracle is
   wrought in the singular fashion which is here employed, namely, the
   healing of the deaf-mute recorded in Mark's Gospel, where, in like
   manner, our Lord makes clay of the spittle, and anoints the ears of the
   deaf man with the clay. The variety of method in our Lord's miracles
   serves important purposes, as teaching us that the methods are nothing,
   and that He moved freely amongst them all, the real cause in every case
   being one and the same, the bare forth-putting of His will; and
   teaching us further that in each specific case there were reasons in
   the moral and religious condition of the persons operated upon for the
   adoption of the specific means employed, which we of course have no
   means of discovering. There is here, first then, healing by material
   means. The clay had no power of healing; the water of Siloam had no
   power of healing. The thing that healed was Christ's will, but He uses
   these externals to help the poor blind man to believe that he is going
   to be healed. He condescends to drape and veil His power in order that
   the dim eye, unaccustomed to the light, may look upon that shadowed
   representation of it when it could not gaze upon the pure brightness;
   as an eye may look upon a shaded lamp which could not bear its
   brilliance unsoftened and naked.

   This healing by material means in order to accommodate Himself to the
   weak faith which He seeks to evoke, and to strengthen thereby, is
   parallel, in principle, to His own Incarnation, and to His appointment
   of external rites and ordinances. Baptism, the Lord's Supper, a visible
   Church, outward means of worship, and so on, all these come under that
   same category. There is no life nor power in them except His will works
   through them, but they are crutches and helps for a weak and
   sense-bound faith to climb to the apprehension of the spiritual
   reality. It is not the clay, it is not the water, it is not the Church,
   the ordinances, the outward worship, the form of prayer, the
   sacrament--it is none of these things that have the healing and the
   grace in them. They are only ladders by which we may ascend to Him. So
   let us neither presumptuously antedate the time when we shall be able
   to do without them--the Heaven in which there is no Temple'--nor
   grovellingly and superstitiously elevate them to a place of importance
   and of power in the Christian life which Christ never meant them to
   fill. He heals through material means; the true source of healing is
   His own loving will.

   Further, He heals at a distance. We have here a parallel with the story
   of the nobleman's son at Capernaum, which we have already considered.
   There, too, we have the same phenomenon, the healing power sent forth
   from the Master, and operating far away from His corporeal personal
   presence. This was a test of faith, as the use of the clay had been a
   help to faith. Still He works His healing from afar, because to Him
   there is neither near nor far. In His divine ubiquity, that Son of Man,
   who in His glorified manhood is at the right hand of God the Father
   Almighty, is here and everywhere where there are weakness and suffering
   that turn to Him; ready to help, ready to bless and heal. Lo, I am with
   you always, even unto the end of the world.'

   Our Evangelist sees in the very name of that fountain in which the man
   washed, a symbol which is not to be passed by. Go, wash in the Pool of
   Siloam,' which, says John, is by interpretation, Sent.' We have heard
   already about the Pool of Siloam in this section of the Gospel. In
   Chapter vii. we read, In the last day, that great day of the Feast,
   Jesus stood and said, "If any man thirst let him come to Me and
   drink."' These words were probably spoken on the last day of the Feast
   of Tabernacles, on which one part of the ceremonial was the drawing,
   with exuberant rejoicing, of water from the Pool of Siloam, and bearing
   it up to the Temple. In these words Christ pointed to that fountain
   which rises fast by the oracles of God,' and wells up from beneath the
   hill, that on which the Temple is built, as being a symbol of Himself.

   And here the Evangelist would have us suppose that, in like manner, the
   very name which the fountain bore (whether as being an outgush from
   beneath the Temple rock, or whether as being the gift of God) as
   applicable to Himself. The lesson to be learned is that the fountain in
   which we have to be cleansed from sin and from uncleanness,' whose
   waters are the lotion that will give eyesight to the blind, the true
   fountain of perpetual youth,' which men have sought for in every land,
   is Christ Himself. In Him we have the welling forth of the heart of
   God, the water of life, the water of gladness, the immortal stream of
   which whoso drinketh shall never thirst,' and which, touching the blind
   eyeballs, washes away obscuration and gives new power of vision.

   III. Then, still further, we have here our Lord suspending healing on
   obedience.

   Go and wash.' As He said to the impotent man: Stretch forth thine
   hand'; as He said to the paralytic in this Gospel: Take up thy bed and
   walk'; so here He says, Go and wash.' And some friendly hand being
   stretched out to the blind man, or he himself feeling his way over the
   familiar path, he comes to the pool and washes, and returns seeing.

   There is a double lesson there, on which I have no need to dwell. There
   is, first, the general truth that healing is suspended by Christ on
   compliance with His conditions. He does not simply say to any man, Be
   whole. He could and did say so sometimes in regard to bodily healing.
   But He cannot do so as regards the cure of our blind souls. To the
   sin-sick and sin-blinded man He says, Thou shalt be whole, if'--or I
   will make thee whole, provided that'--what?--provided that thou goest
   to the fountain where He has lodged the healing power. The condition on
   which sight comes to the blind is compliance with Christ's invitation,
   Come to Me; trust in Me; and thou shalt be whole.'

   Then there is a special lesson here, and that is, Obedience brings
   sight. If any man will do His will he shall know of the doctrine.' Are
   there any of you groping in darkness, compassed about with theological
   perplexities and religious doubts? Obey what you know. Do what you see
   clearly you ought to do. Bow your wills to the recognised truth. He who
   has turned all his knowledge into action will get more knowledge as
   soon as he needs it. Go and wash; and he went, and came seeing.'

   IV. And now, lastly, we have here our Lord shadowing His highest work
   as the Healer of blind souls.

   It is impossible for me to enter upon that wonderfully dramatic and
   instructive narrative which follows the account of the miracle, and
   describe the controversies between the sturdy, quick-witted, candid,
   blind man, and the narrow, bitter Pharisees. But just notice one or two
   points.

   The two parties are evidently represented as types of two contrasted
   classes. The blind man stands for an example of honest ignorance,
   knowing itself ignorant, and not to be coaxed or frightened or in any
   way provoked to pretending to knowledge which it does not possess;
   firmly holding by what it does know, and because conscious of its
   little knowledge, therefore waiting for light and willing to be led.
   Hence he is at once humble and sturdy, docile and independent, ready to
   listen to any voice which can really teach, and formidably quick to
   prick with wholesome sarcasm the inflated claims of mere official
   pretenders. The Pharisees, on the other hand, are sure that they know
   everything that can be known about anything in the region of religion
   and morality, and in their absolute confidence of their absolute
   possession of the truth, in their blank unconsciousness that it was
   more than their official property and stock-in-trade, in their complete
   incapacity to discern the glory of a miracle which contravened
   ecclesiastical proprieties and conventionalities, in their contempt for
   the ignorance which they were responsible for and never thought of
   enlightening, in their cruel taunt directed against the man's calamity,
   and in their swift resort to the weapon of excommunication of one whom
   it was much easier to cast out than to answer, are but too plain a type
   of a character which is as ready to corrupt the teachers of the Church
   as of the synagogue.

   One cannot but notice how constantly the phrase We know' occurs. The
   parents of the man use it thrice. The Pharisees have it on their lips
   in their first interview with him: We know that this man is a sinner.'
   He answers, declining to affirm anything about the character of the Man
   Jesus, because he, for his part, knows not,' but standing firmly by the
   solid reality which he knows,' in a very solid fashion, that his eyes
   have been opened. So we have the first encounter between knowledge
   which is ignorant, and ignorance which knows, to the manifest victory
   of the latter. Again, in the second round, they try to overbear the
   man's cool sarcasm with their vehement assertion of knowledge that God
   spake to Moses, but by the admission that even their knowledge did not
   reach to the determination of the question of the origin of Jesus'
   mission, lay themselves open to the sudden thrust of keen-eyed, honest
   humility's sharp rapier-like retort. Herein is a marvellous thing,'
   that you Know-alls, whose business it is to know where a professed
   miracle-worker comes from, know not from whence He is, and yet He hath
   opened mine eyes.' Now we know' (to use your own words) that God
   heareth not sinners, but if any man be a worshipper of God, and doeth
   His will, him He heareth.'

   Then observe how, on both sides, a process is going on. The man is
   getting more and more light at each step. He begins with a Man which is
   called Jesus.' Then he gets to a prophet,' then he comes to a
   worshipper of God, and one that does His will.' Then he comes to, If
   this man were not of God,' in some very special sense, He could do
   nothing.' These are his own reflections, the working out of the
   impression made by the fact on an honest mind; and because he had so
   used the light which he had, therefore Jesus gives him more, and finds
   him with the question, Dost thou believe on the Son of God?' Then the
   man who had shown himself so strong in his own convictions, so
   independent, and hard to cajole or coerce, shows himself now all docile
   and submissive, and ready to accept whatever Jesus says: Lord, who is
   He, that I might believe on Him?' That was not credulity. He already
   knew enough of Christ to know that he ought to trust Him. And to his
   docility there is given the full revelation; and he hears the words
   which Pharisees and unrighteous men were not worthy to hear: Thou hast
   both seen it is He that talketh with thee.' Then intellectual
   conviction, moral reliance, and the utter prostration and devotion of
   the whole man bow him at Christ's feet. Lord, I believe; and He
   worshipped Him.'

   There is the story of the progress of an honest, ignorant soul that
   knew itself blind, into the illumination of perfect vision.

   And as he went upwards, so steadily and tragically, downwards went the
   others. For they had light and they would not look at it; and it
   blasted and blinded them. They had the manifestation of Christ, and
   they scoffed and jeered at it, and turned their backs upon it, and it
   became a curse to them; falling not like dew but like vitriol on their
   spirits, blistering, not refreshing.

   Therefore Christ pronounces their fate, and sums up the story in the
   solemn two-edged sentence: For judgment am I come into the world, that
   they which see not might see, and that they which see might be made
   blind.'

   The purpose of His coming is not to judge, but to save. But if men will
   not let Him save, the effect of His coming will be to harm. Therefore,
   His coming will separate men into two parts, as a magnet will draw all
   the iron filings out of a heap and leave the brass. He comes not to
   judge, but His coming does judge. He is set for the rise or for the
   fall of men, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the
   heart.'

   Light has a twofold effect. It is torture to the diseased eye; it is
   gladdening to the sound one. Christ is the light, as He is also both
   the power of seeing and the thing seen. Therefore, it cannot but be
   that His shining upon men's hearts shall judge them, and shall either
   enlighten or darken.

   We all have eyes--the organs by which we may see the light of the
   knowledge of the glory of God.' We have all blinded ourselves by our
   sin. Christ is come to show us God, to be the light by which we see
   God, and to strengthen and restore our faculty of seeing Him. If you
   welcome Him, and take Him into your hearts, He will be at once light
   and eyesight to you. But if you turn away from Him He will be blindness
   and darkness to you. He comes to pour eyesight on the blind, but He
   comes therefore also, most assuredly, to make still blinder those who
   do not know themselves to be blind, and conceit themselves to be
   clear-sighted. I thank Thee, Father, that Thou hast hid these things
   from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.'

   They who see themselves to be blind, who know themselves to be
   ignorant, the lowly who recognise their sinfulness and misery and
   helplessness, and turn in their sore need to Christ, will be led by
   paths of growing knowledge and blessedness to the perfect day where
   their strengthened vision will be able to see light in the blaze which
   to us now is darkness. They who say I see,' and know not that they are
   miserable and blind, nor hearken to His counsel to anoint their eyes
   with eye salve that they may see,' will have yet another film drawn
   over their eyes by the shining of the light which they reject, and will
   pass into darkness where only enough of light and of eyesight remain to
   make guilt. Jesus Christ is for us light and vision. Trust to Him, and
   your eyes will be blessed because they see God. Turn from Him and
   Egyptian darkness will settle on your soul. To him that hath shall be
   given, and from him that hath not, even that which he hath shall be
   taken away.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE GIFTS TO THE FLOCK

   . . . By Me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and
   out, and find pasture.'--JOHN x. 9.

   One does not know whether the width or the depth of this marvellous
   promise is the more noteworthy. Jesus Christ presents Himself before
   the whole race of man, and declares Himself able to deal with the needs
   of every individual in the tremendous whole. If any man'--no matter
   who, where, when.

   For all noble and happy life there are at least three things needed:
   security, sustenance, and a field for the exercise of activity. To
   provide these is the end of all human society and government. Jesus
   Christ here says that He can give all these to every one.

   The imagery of the sheep and the fold is still, of course, in His mind,
   and colours the form of the representation. But the substance is the
   declaration that, to any and every soul, no matter how ringed about
   with danger, no matter how hampered and hindered in work, no matter how
   barren of all supply earth may be, He will give these, the primal
   requisites of life. He shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and
   find pasture.'

   Now I only wish to deal with these three aspects of the blessedness of
   a true Christian life which our Lord holds forth here as accessible to
   us all: security, the unhindered exercise of activity, and sustenance
   or provision.

   I. First, then, in and through Christ any man may be saved.

   I take it that the word saved' here is rather used with reference to
   the imagery of the parable than in its full Christian sense of ultimate
   and everlasting salvation, and that its meaning in its present
   connection might perhaps better be set forth by the rendering safe'
   than saved.' At the same time, the two ideas pass into one another; and
   the declaration of my text is that because, step by step, conflict by
   conflict, in passing danger after danger, external and internal, Jesus
   Christ, through our union with Him, will keep us safe, at the last we
   shall reach eternal and everlasting salvation. He will save us' by the
   continual exercise of His protecting power, into His everlasting
   kingdom.' There is none other shelter for men's defenceless heads and
   naked, soft, unarmed bodies except only the shelter that is found in
   Him. There are creatures of low grade in the animal world which have
   the instinct, because their own bodies are so undefended and impotent
   to resist contact with sharp and penetrating substances, that they take
   refuge in the abandoned shells of other creatures. You and I have to
   betake ourselves behind the defences of that strong love and mighty
   Hand if ever we are to pass through life without fatal harm.

   For consider that, even in regard to outward dangers, union with Jesus
   Christ defends and delivers us. Suppose two men, two Manchester
   merchants, made bankrupt by the same commercial crisis; or two
   shipwrecked sailors lashed upon a raft; or two men sitting side by side
   in a railway carriage and smashed by the same collision. One is a
   Christian and the other is not. The same blow is altogether different
   in aspect and actual effect upon the two men. They endure the same
   thing externally, in body or in fortune. The outward man is similarly
   affected, but the man is differently affected. The one is crushed, or
   embittered, or driven to despair, or to drink, or to something or other
   to soothe the bitterness; the other bows himself with It is the Lord!
   Let Him do what seemeth Him good.'

   So the two disasters are utterly different, though in form they may be
   the same, and he that has entered into the fold by Jesus Christ is
   safe, not from outward disaster--that would be but a poor thing--but in
   it. For to the true heart that lives in fellowship with Jesus Christ,
   Sorrow, though it be dark-robed, is bright-faced, soft-handed,
   gentle-hearted, an angel of God. By Me if any man enter in, he shall be
   safe.'

   And further, in our union with Jesus Christ, by simple faith in Him and
   loyal submission and obedience, we do receive an impenetrable defence
   against the true evils, and the only things worth calling dangers. For
   the only real evil is the peril that we shall lose our confidence and
   be untrue to our best selves, and depart from the living God. Nothing
   is evil except that which tempts, and succeeds in tempting, us away
   from Him. And in regard to all such danger, to cleave to Christ, to
   realise His presence, to think of Him, to wear His name as an amulet on
   our hearts, to put the thought of Him between us and temptation as a
   filter through which the poisonous air shall pass, and be deprived of
   its virus, is the one secret of safety and victory.

   Real gift of power from Jesus Christ, the influx of His strength into
   our weakness, of some portion of the Spirit of life that was in Him
   into our deadness, is promised, and the promise is abundantly fulfilled
   to all men who trust Him when their hour of temptation comes. As the
   dying martyr, when he looked up into heaven, saw Jesus Christ standing
   at the right hand of God' ready to help, and, as it were, having
   started from His eternal seat on the Throne in the eagerness of His
   desire to succour His servant, so we may all see, if we will, that dear
   Lord ready to succour us, and close by our sides to deliver us from the
   evil in the evil, its power to tempt. If we could carry that vision
   into our daily life, and walk in its light, when temptation rings us
   round, how poor all the inducements to go away from Him would look!

   There is a power in the remembrance of Jesus to slay every wicked
   thought; and the things that tempt us most, that most directly appeal
   to our worst sides, to our sense, our ambition, our pride, our
   distrust, our self-will, all these lose their power upon us, and are
   discovered in their emptiness and insignificance, when once this
   thought flashes across the mind--Jesus Christ is my Defence, and Jesus
   Christ is my Pattern and my Companion.

   Oh, brother! do not trust yourself out amongst the pitfalls and snares
   of life without Him. If you do, the real evil of all evils will seize
   you for its own; but keep close to that dear Lord, and then there shall
   no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.'
   The hidden temptation thou wilt pass by without being harmed; the
   manifest temptation thou wilt trample under foot. Thou shalt not be
   afraid for the pestilence that walketh in darkness, nor for the
   destruction that wasteth at noonday.' Hidden known temptations will be
   equally powerless; and in the fold into which all pass by faith in
   Christ thou shalt be safe. And so, kept safe from each danger and in
   each moment of temptation, the aggregate and sum of the several
   deliverances will amount to the everlasting salvation which shall be
   perfected in the heavens.

   Only remember the condition, By Me if any man enter in.' That is not a
   thing to be done once for all, but needs perpetual repetition. When we
   clasp anything in our hands, however tight the initial grasp, unless
   there is a continual effort of renewed tightening, the muscles become
   lax, and we have to renew the tension, if we are to keep the grasp. So
   in our Christian life it is only the continual repetition of the act
   which our Lord here calls entering in by Him' that will bring to us
   this continual exemption from, and immunity in, the dangers that beset
   us.

   Keep Christ between you and the storm. Keep on the lee side of the Rock
   of Ages. Keep behind the breakwater, for there is a wild sea running
   outside; and your little boat, undecked and with a feeble hand at the
   helm, will soon be swamped. Keep within the fold, for wolves and lions
   lie in every bush. Or, in plain English, live moment by moment in the
   realising of Christ's presence, power, and grace. So, and only so,
   shall you be safe.

   II. Now, secondly, note, in Jesus Christ any man may find a field for
   the unrestricted exercise of his activity.

   That metaphor of going in and out' is partly explained to us by the
   image of the flock, which passes into the fold for peaceful repose, and
   out again, without danger, for exercise and food; and is partly
   explained by the frequent use, in the Old Testament and in common
   conversation, of the expression going out and in' as the designation of
   the two-sided activity of human life. The one side is the contemplative
   life of interior union with God by faith and love; the other, the
   active life of practical obedience in the field of work which God
   provides for us. These two are both capable of being raised to their
   highest power, and of being discharged with the most unrestricted and
   joyous activity, on condition of our keeping close to Christ, and
   living by the faith of Him.

   Note, then, He shall go in.' That comes first, though it interferes
   with the propriety of the metaphor, since the previous words already
   contemplate an initial entering in by Me, the Door.' That is to say,
   that, given the union with Jesus Christ by faith, there must then, as
   the basis of all activity, follow very frequent and deep inward acts of
   contemplation, of faith, and aspiration, and desire. You must go into
   the depths of God through Christ. You must go into the depths of your
   own souls through Him. You must become accustomed to withdraw
   yourselves from spreading yourselves out over the distractions of any
   external activity, howsoever imperative, charitable, or necessary, and
   live alone with Jesus, in the secret place of the Most High.' It is
   through Him that we have access to the mysteries and innermost shrine
   of the Temple. It is through Him that we draw near to the depths of
   Deity. It is through Him that we learn the length and breadth and
   height and depth of the largest and loftiest and noblest truths that
   concern the spirit. It is through Him that we become familiar with the
   inmost secrets of our own selves. And only they who habitually live
   this hidden and sunken life of solitary and secret communion will ever
   do much in the field of outward work. Christians of this generation are
   far too much accustomed to live only in the front rooms of the house,
   that look out upon the street; and they know very little--far too
   little for their soul's health, and far too little for the freshness of
   their work and its prosperity--of that inward life of silent
   contemplation and expectant adoration, by which all strength is fed. Do
   not keep all your goods in the shop windows, and have nothing on your
   shelves but dummies, as is the case with far too many of us to-day.
   Remember that the Lord said first, He shall go in,' and unless you do
   you will not be saved.'

   But then, further, if there have been, and continue to be, this
   unrestricted exercise through Christ of that sweet and silent life of
   solitary communion with Him, then there will follow upon that an
   enlargement of opportunity, and power for outward service such as
   nothing but emancipation by faith in Him can ever bring. Howsoever, by
   external circumstances, you and I may be hampered and hindered, however
   often we may feel that if something outside of us were different, the
   development of our active powers would be far more satisfactory, and we
   could do a great deal more in Christ's cause, the true hindrance lies
   never without, but within; and it is only to be overcome by that
   plunging into the depths of fellowship with Him. And then, if we carry
   with us into the field of work, whether it be the commonplace, dusty,
   tedious, and often repulsive duties of our monotonous business; or
   whether it be the field of more distinctly unselfish and Christian
   service--if we carry with us into all places where we go to labour, the
   sweet thought of His presence, of His example, of His love, and of the
   smile that may come on His face as the reward of faithful service, then
   we shall find that external labour, drawing its pattern, its motive,
   its law, and the power for its discharge, from communion with Him, is
   no more task-work nor slavery; and even the rough places will be made
   smooth, and the crooked things will be made straight,' and distasteful
   work will be made at least tolerable, and hard burdens will be
   lightened, and the things that are seen and temporal' will shimmer into
   transparency, through which will shine out the things that are unseen
   and eternal.'

   Some of us are constitutionally made to prefer the one of these forms
   of Christian activity; some of us to prefer the other. The tendencies
   of this generation are far too much to the latter, to the exclusion of
   the former. It is hard to reconcile the conflicting claims, and I know
   of no better way to hit the just medium than by trying to keep
   ourselves always in touch with Jesus Christ, and then outward labour of
   any sort, whether for the bread that perishes or for His kingdom and
   righteousness, will never become so absorbing but that in it we may
   have our hearts in heaven, and the silent hour of communion with Him
   will never be so prolonged as to neglect outward duties. There was a
   demoniac boy in the plain, and therefore it was impossible to build
   tabernacles on the Mount of Transfiguration. But the disciples that had
   not climbed the Mount were all impotent to cast out the demoniac boy.
   We, if we keep near to Jesus Christ, will find that through Him we can
   go in and out,' and in both be pursuing the one uniform purpose of
   serving and pleasing Him. So shall be fulfilled in our cases the
   Psalmist's prayer, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the
   days of ray life, to behold His beauty, and to inquire in His Temple.'

   III. Lastly, in Jesus Christ any man may receive sustenance. They shall
   find pasture.'

   The imagery of the sheep and the fold is still, of course, present to
   the Master's mind, and shapes the form in which this great promise is
   set forth.

   I need only remind you, in illustration of it, of two facts, one, that
   in Jesus Christ Himself all the true needs of humanity are met and
   satisfied. He is the Bread of God that came down from heaven to give
   life to the world.' Do I want an outward object for my intellect? I
   have it in Him. Does my heart feel with its tendrils, which have no
   eyes at the ends of them, after something round which it may twine, and
   not fear that the prop shall ever rot or be cut down or pulled up?
   Jesus Christ is the home of love in which the dove may fold its wings
   and be at rest. Do I want (and I do if I am not a fool) an absolute and
   authoritative command to be laid upon my will; some one whose looks
   enjoin, whose lightest words are spells'? I find absolute authority,
   with no taint of tyranny, and no degradation to the subject, in that
   Infinite Will of His. Does my conscience need some strong detergent to
   be laid upon it which shall take out the stains that are most
   indurated, inveterate, and ingrained? I find it only in the blood that
   cleanseth from all sin.' Do my aspirations and desires seek for some
   solid and substantial and unquestionable and imperishable good to
   which, reaching out, they may be sure that they are not anchoring on
   cloudland? Christ is our hope. For all this complicated and craving
   commonwealth that I carry within my soul, there is but one
   satisfaction, even Jesus Christ Himself. Nothing else nourishes the
   whole man at once, but in Him are all the constituents that the human
   system requires for its nutriment and its growth in every part. So in
   and through Christ we find pasture.'

   But beyond that, if we are knit to Him by simple and continual faith,
   love, and obedience, then what is else barrenness becomes full of
   nourishment, and the unsatisfying gifts of the world become rich and
   precious. They are nought when they are put first, they are much when
   they are put second.

   I remember when I was in Australia seeing some wretched cattle trying
   to find grass on a yellow pasture where there was nothing but here and
   there a brown stalk that crumbled to dust in their mouths as they tried
   to eat it. That is the world without Jesus Christ. And I saw the same
   pasture six weeks after, when the rains had come, and the grass was
   high, rich, juicy, satisfying. That is what the world may be to you, if
   you will put it second, and seek first that your souls shall be fed on
   Jesus Christ. Then, and only then, will what is else water be turned by
   His touch and blessing into wine that shall fill the great jars to the
   brim, and be pronounced by skilled palates to be the good wine. I will
   feed them in a good pasture, and upon the high mountains of Israel
   shall their fold be. There shall they lie in a good fold, and in a fat
   pasture shall they feed upon the mountains of Israel.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE GOOD SHEPHERD

   I am the Good Shepherd, and know My sheep, and am known of Mine. 15. As
   the Father knoweth Me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down My
   life for the sheep.'--JOHN x. 14, 15.

   I am the Good Shepherd.' Perhaps even Christ never spoke more fruitful
   words than these. Just think how many solitary, wearied hearts they
   have cheered, and what a wealth of encouragement and comfort there has
   been in them for all generations. The little child as it lays itself
   down to sleep, cries--


     Jesus, tender Shepherd, hear me,

     Bless Thy little lamb to-night,'

   and the old man lays himself down to die murmuring to himself, Though I
   walk through the valley of the shadow of Death, I will fear no evil,
   for Thou art with me.' I am the Good Shepherd.' No preaching can do
   anything but weaken and dilute the force of such words, and yet, though
   in all their sweet, homely simplicity they appeal to every heart, there
   are great depths in them that are worth pondering, and profound
   thoughts that need some elucidation.

   There are three points to be noticed--First, the general force of the
   metaphor, and then the two specific applications of it which our Lord
   Himself makes.

   I. First of all, then, let me say a few words as to the general
   application of the metaphor. The usual notion of these words confines
   itself to the natural meaning, and runs out into very true, but perhaps
   a little sentimental, considerations, laying hold of what is so plain
   on the very surface that I need not spend any time in speaking about
   it. Christ's pattern is my law; Christ's providence is my guidance and
   defence--which in the present case means Christ's companionship--is my
   safety, my sustenance--which in the present case means that Christ
   Himself is the bread of my soul. The Good Shepherd exercises care,
   which absolves the sheep from care, and in the present case means that
   my only duty is meek following and quiet trust. I am the Good
   Shepherd'--here is guidance, guardianship, companionship,
   sustenance--all responsibility laid upon His broad shoulders, and all
   tenderness in His deep heart, and so for us simple obedience and quiet
   trust.

   Another way by which we get the whole significance of this symbol is by
   noticing how the idea is strengthened by the word that accompanies it.
   Christ does not say I am a Shepherd,' but He says, I am the good
   Shepherd.' At first sight that word good' is interpreted, as I have
   said, in a kind of sentimental, poetic way, as expressing our Lord's
   tenderness and love and care; but I do not think that is the full
   meaning here. You find up and down this Gospel of St. John phrases such
   as, I am the true bread,' I am the true vine,' and the meaning of the
   word that is here translated good' is very nearly parallel with that
   idea. The true bread, the true vine, the true Shepherd--which comes to
   this, to use modern phraseology, that Jesus Christ, in His relation to
   you and me, fulfils all that in figure and shadow is represented to the
   meditative eye by that lower relationship between the material shepherd
   and his sheep. That is the picture, this the reality. There is another
   point to be made clear, and that is, that whilst the word good' is
   perhaps a fair enough representation of that which is employed by our
   Lord, there is a special force and significance attached to the
   original, which is lost in our Bible. I do not know that it could have
   been preserved; but still it is necessary to state it. The expression
   here is the one that is generally rendered fair,' or lovely,' or
   beautiful,' and it belongs to the genius of that wonderful tongue in
   which the New Testament is written that it has a name for moral purity,
   considered as being lovely, the highest goodness, and the serenest
   beauty, which was what the old Greeks taught, howsoever little they may
   have practised it in their lives. And so here the thought is that the
   Shepherd stands before us, the realisation of all which that name
   means, set forth in such a fashion as to be infinitely lovely and
   perfectly fair, and to draw the admiration of any man who can
   appreciate that which is beautiful, and can admire that which is of
   good report.

   There is another point still in reference to this first view of the
   text. Our Lord not only declares that He is the reality of which the
   earthly shepherd is the shadow, and that He as such is the flawless,
   perfect One, but that He alone is the reality. I am the Good Shepherd;
   in Me and in Me alone is that which men need.' And that leads me to
   another point which must just be mentioned, that we shall not reach the
   full meaning of these great words without taking into account the
   history of the metaphor in the Old Testament. Christ gives a second
   edition of the figure, and we are to remember all that went before. The
   Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want'; Thou leddest Thy people like a
   flock, by the hand of Moses and Aaron.' These are but specimens of a
   continuous series of utterances in the old Revelation in which Jehovah
   Himself is the Shepherd of mankind; and there is also another class of
   passages of which I will quote one or two. He shall feed His flock like
   a shepherd, and carry them in His arms.' Awake, O sword, against the
   Man who is my fellow; smite the Shepherd, and the sheep shall be
   scattered.' There were, we should remember, two streams of
   representation, according to the one of which God Himself was the
   Shepherd of Israel, and according to the other of which the Messiah was
   the Shepherd; and here, as I believe, Jesus lays His hand on both the
   one and the other, and says: They are Mine, and they testify of Me.' So
   sweet, so gracious are the words, that we lose the sense of the
   grandeur of them, and need to think before we are able to understand
   how great and immense the claim that is made here upon our faith, and
   that this Man stands before us and arrogates to Himself the divine
   prerogative witnessed from of old by psalmist and prophet, and says
   that for Him were meant the prophecies of ancient times that spake of a
   human shepherd, and asserts that all the sustenance, care, authority,
   command, which the emblem suggests meet in Him in perfect measure.

   II. Now let us turn to the two special points which our Lord emphasises
   here, as being those in which His relation as the Good Shepherd is most
   conspicuously given. The language of my text runs: I am the Good
   Shepherd, and know My sheep, and am known of Mine. As the Father
   knoweth Me, even so know I the Father.' Our Western ways fail to bring
   out the full meaning of the emblem; but all Eastern travellers tell us
   what a strange bond of sympathy and loving regard, and docile
   recognition, springs up between the shepherd and his sheep away there
   in the Eastern pastures and deserts; and how he knows every one, though
   to a stranger's eye they are so like each other; and how even the dumb
   instincts and the narrow intelligence of the silly sheep recognise the
   shepherd, and will not be deceived by shepherd's garments worn to
   deceive, and will not follow the voice of a stranger.

   But we must further note that Christ lays hold of the dumb instincts of
   the animal, as illustrating, at the one end of the scale, the relation
   between Him and His followers, and lays hold of the communion between
   the Father and the Son at the other end of the scale, as illustrating
   the same thing. I know My sheep.' That is a knowledge like the
   knowledge of the shepherd, a bond of close intimacy. But He does not
   know them by reason of looking at them and thinking about them. It is
   something far more blessed than that. He knows me because He loves me;
   He knows me because He has sympathy with me, and I know Him, if I know
   Him at all, by my love, and I know Him by my sympathy, and I know Him
   by my communion. A loveless heart does not know the Shepherd, and
   unless the Shepherd's heart was all love He would not know His sheep.
   The Shepherd's love is an individualised love. He knows His flock as a
   flock because He knows the units of it, and we can rest ourselves upon
   the personal knowledge, which is personal love and sympathy, of Jesus
   Christ. And My sheep know Me'--not by force of intellect, not by
   understanding certain truths, all-important as that may be, but by
   having our hearts harmonised in Him, and our spirits put into sympathy
   and communion with Him. They know Me,' and rest comes with the
   knowledge; they know Me,' and in that knowing is the best answer to all
   doubt and fear. They are exposed to danger, but in the fold they can go
   quietly to rest, for they know that He is at the door watching through
   all dangers.

   III. Turn for a moment to the last point, I lay down My life for the
   sheep.' I have said that our Western ways fail to bring out fully the
   element of the metaphor which refers to the kind of sympathy between
   the shepherd and the sheep; and our Western life also fails to bring
   out this other element also. Shepherds in England never have need to
   lay down their life for the sheep. Shepherds in Palestine often did,
   and sometimes do. You remember David with the lion and the bear, which
   is but an illustration of the reality which underlies this metaphor.
   So, then, in some profound way, the shepherd's death is the sheep's
   safety. First of all, look at that most unmistakable, emphatic--I was
   going to say vehement, at any rate, intense--expression of the absolute
   voluntariness of Christ's death, I lay down My life,' as a man might
   strip off a vesture. And this application of the metaphor is made all
   the stronger by the words which follow: Therefore doth My Father love
   Me, because I lay down My life that I might take it again. No man
   taketh it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it
   down, and I have power to take it again.' We read, Smite the shepherd,
   and the sheep shall be scattered,' but here, somehow or other, the
   smiting of the Shepherd is not the scattering but the gathering of the
   flock. Here, somehow or other, the dead Shepherd has power to guard, to
   guide, to defend them. Here, somehow or other, the death of the
   Shepherd is the security of the sheep; and I say to you, the flock,
   that for every soul the entrance into the flock of God is through the
   door of the dying Christ, who laid down His life for the sheep, and
   makes them His sheep who trust in Him.
     __________________________________________________________________

OTHER SHEEP' [1]

   Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring,
   and they shall hear My voice; and they shall become one flock and one
   Shepherd.'--JOHN x. 16 (R.V.).

   There were many strange and bitter lessons in this discourse for the
   false shepherds, the Pharisees, to whom it was first spoken. But there
   was not one which would jar more upon their minds, and as they fancied,
   on their sacredest convictions, than this, that God's flock was wider
   than God's fold. Our Lord distinctly recognises Judaism with its middle
   wall of partition as a divine institution, and then as distinctly
   carries His gaze beyond it. To His hearers this fold,' their own
   national polity, held all the flock. Without were dogs, a doleful land,
   where the wild beasts of the desert met with the wild beasts of the
   islands.' And now this new Teacher, not content with declaring them
   hirelings, and Himself the only true Shepherd of Israel, breaks down
   the hedges and speaks of Himself as the Shepherd of men. No wonder that
   they said, He hath a devil and is mad.'

   During His earthly life our Lord, as we know, confined His own personal
   ministry for the most part to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
   Not exclusively so, for He made at least one journey into the coasts of
   Tyre and Sidon, teaching and healing; a Syro-Phoenician woman held His
   feet, and received her request; and one of His miracles, of feeding the
   multitude, was wrought for hungry Gentiles. But while His work was in
   Israel, it was for mankind; and while this fold,' generally speaking,
   circumscribed His toils, it did not confine His love nor His thoughts.
   More than once world-wide declarations and promises broke from His
   lips, even before the final universal commission, Preach the Gospel to
   every creature.' I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me.' I am
   the Light of the world.' These and other similar sayings give us His
   lofty consciousness that He has received the heathen for His
   inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for His possession.'
   Parallel with them in substance are the words before us, which, for our
   present purpose, we may regard as containing lessons from our Lord
   Himself of how He looked and would have us look on the heathen world,
   on His work and ours, and on the certain issues of both.

   I. We have here Christ teaching us how to think of the heathen world.

   Observe that His words are not a declaration that all mankind are His
   sheep. The previous verses have distinctly defined a class of men as
   possessing the name, and the succeeding ones reiterate the definition,
   and with equal distinctness exclude another class. Ye believe not,
   because ye are not My sheep as I said unto you.' His sheep are they who
   know Him and are known of Him. Between Him and them there is a
   communion of love, a union of life, and a consequent reciprocal
   knowledge, which transcends the closest intimacies of earthly life, and
   finds its only analogue in that deep and mysterious oneness which
   subsists between the Father, who alone knoweth the Son, and the only
   begotten Son, who being ever in the bosom of the Father, alone knoweth
   Him and revealeth Him to us. I know My sheep and am known of Mine; as
   the Father knoweth Me and I know the Father. They hear My voice and
   follow Me, and I give unto them eternal life.' Such are the
   characteristics of that relation between Christ and men by which they
   become His sheep. It is such souls as these whom our Lord beholds in
   the wasteful wilderness. He is speaking not of a relation which all men
   bear to Him by virtue of their creation, but of one which they bear to
   Him who believe in His name.

   Now this interpretation of the words does by no means contradict, but
   rather presupposes and rests upon the truth that all mankind come
   within the love of the divine heart, that He died for all, that all may
   be the subjects of His mediatorial kingdom, recipients of the offered
   mercy of God in Christ, and committed to the stewardship of the
   missionary Church. Resting upon these truths, the words of our text
   advance a step further and contemplate those who shall hereafter
   believe on Me.' Whether they be few or many is not the matter in hand.
   Whether at any future time they shall include all the dwellers upon
   earth is not the matter in hand. That every soul of man is included in
   the adaptation and intention and offer of the Gospel is not the matter
   in hand. But this is the matter in hand, that Jesus Christ in that
   moment of lofty elevation when He looked onwards to giving His life for
   the sheep, looked outwards also, far afield, and saw in every nation
   and people souls that He knew were His, and would one day know Him, and
   be led by Him in green pastures and beside still waters.'

   But where or what were they when He spoke? He does not mean that
   already they had heard His voice and were following His steps, and knew
   His love, and had received eternal life at His hand. This He cannot
   mean, for the plain reason that He goes on to speak of His bringing'
   them and of their hearing,' a work yet to be done. It can only be,
   then, that He speaks of them thus in the fullness of that divine
   knowledge which calls things that are not as though they were.' It is
   then a prophetic word which He speaks here.

   We have only to think of the condition of the civilised heathendom of
   Christ's own day in order to feel the force of our text in its primary
   application. While the work of salvation was being prepared for the
   world in the life and death of our Lord, the world was being prepared
   for the tidings of salvation. Everywhere men were losing their faith in
   their idols, and longing for some deliverer. Some had become weary of
   the hollowness of philosophical speculation, and, like Pilate, were
   asking What is truth?' whilst, unlike Him, they waited for an answer,
   and will believe it when it comes from the lips of the Incarnate
   wisdom. Such were the Magi who were led by their starry science to His
   cradle, and went back to the depths of the Eastern lands with a better
   light than had guided them thither. Such were not a few of the early
   Christian converts, who had long been seeking hopelessly for goodly
   pearls, and had so been learning to know the worth of the One when it
   was offered to them. There were men who had been long sickening with
   despair amidst the rottenness of decaying mythologies and corrupting
   morals, and longing for some breath from heaven to blow health to
   themselves and to the world, and had so been learning to welcome the
   rushing mighty wind' when it came in power. There were simple souls,
   without as well as within the chosen people, waiting for the
   Consolation, though they knew not whence it was to come. There were
   many who had already learned to believe that salvation is of the Jews,'
   though they had still to learn that salvation is in Jesus. Such were
   that Aethiopian statesman who was poring over Isaiah when Philip joined
   him, the Roman centurion at Caesarea whose prayers and alms came up
   with acceptance before God, these Greeks of the West who came to His
   cross as the Eastern sages to His cradle, and were in Christ's eyes the
   advance guard and first scattered harbingers of the flocks who should
   come flying for refuge to Him lifted on the Cross, like doves to their
   windows.' The whole world showed that the fullness of time had come;
   and the history of the early years of the Church reveals in how many
   souls the process of preparation had been silently going on. It was
   like the flush of early spring, when all the buds that had been
   maturing and swelling in the cold, burst, and the tender flowers that
   had been reaching upwards to the surface in all the hard winter laugh
   out in beauty, and a green veil covers all the hedges at the first
   flash of the April sun.

   Not only these were in our Lord's thoughts when He saw His sheep in
   heathen lands. There were many who had no such previous preparation,
   but were plunged in all the darkness, nor knew that it was dark. Not
   only those wearied of idolatry, and dissatisfied with creeds outworn,
   but the barbarous people of Illyricum, the profligates of Corinth, hard
   rude men like the jailer at Philippi, and many more were before His
   penetrating eye. He who sees beneath the surface, and beyond the
   present, beholds His sheep where men can only see wolves. He sees an
   Apostle in the blaspheming Saul, a teacher for all generations in the
   African Augustine while yet a sensualist and a Manichee, a reformer in
   the eager monk Luther, a poet-evangelist in the tinker Bunyan. He sees
   the future saint in the present sinner, the angel's wings budding on
   many a shoulder where the world's burdens lie heavy, and the new name
   written on many a forehead that as yet bears but the mark of the beast,
   and the number of His name.

   And the sheep whom He sees while He speaks are not only the men of that
   generation. These mighty words are world-wide and world-lasting. The
   whole of the ages are in His mind. All nations are gathered before His
   prophetic vision, even as they shall one day be gathered before His
   judgment throne, and in all the countless mass His hand touches and His
   love clasps those who to the very end of time shall come to His call
   with loving faith, shall follow His steps with glad obedience.

   Thus does Christ look out upon the world that lay beyond the fold. I
   cannot stay to do more than refer in passing to the spirit which the
   words of our text breathe. There is the lofty consciousness that He is
   the Leader and Guide, the Friend and Helper of all, that He stands
   solitary in His power to bless. There is the full confidence that the
   earth is His to its uttermost border. There is the clear vision of the
   sorrowful condition of these heathen people, without a shepherd and
   without a fold, wandering on every high mountain and dying in every
   thirsty land where there is no water. There are the tenderest pity and
   yearning love for them in their extremity. There is the clear assurance
   that they will come and be blessed in Him. I pass by all the other
   thoughts, which naturally found themselves on these words, in order to
   urge the one which is most appropriate to our present engagement. Let
   us, dear brethren, take Christ as our pattern in our contemplations of
   the heathen world.

   He has set us the example of an outgoing look directed far beyond the
   limits of the existing churches, far beyond the point of present
   achievement. We are but too apt to circumscribe our operative thoughts
   and our warm sympathies within the circle of our sight, or of our own
   personal associations. Our selfishness and our indolence affect the
   objects of our contemplations quite as much as they do the character of
   our work. They vitiate both, by making ourselves the great object of
   both, and by weakening the force of both in a ratio that increases
   rapidly with the increasing distance from that favourite centre. It is
   but a subtle form of the same disease which keeps our thoughts penned
   within the bounds of any fold, or limited by the progress already
   achieved. For us the whole world is the possession of our Lord, who has
   died to redeem us. By us the whole ought to be contemplated with that
   same spirit of prophetic confidence which filled Him when He said,
   Other sheep I have which are not of this fold.' To press onwards,
   forgetting the things that are behind, and reaching forth to those
   which are before,' is the only fitting attitude for Christian men,
   either in regard to the gradual purifying of their own characters, or
   in regard to the gradual winning of the world for Christ. We ought to
   make all past successes stepping-stones to nobler things. The true use
   of the present is to reach up from it to a loftier future. The distance
   beckons; well for us if it do not beckon us in vain. We have yet to
   learn the first lesson of our Master's spirit, as expressed in these
   words, if we have not become familiar with the pitying contemplation of
   the wastes beyond the fold, nor fixed deep in our minds the faith that
   the amplitude of its walls will have to be widened with growing years
   till it fills the world. The cry echoes to us from of old, Lengthen thy
   cords, and strengthen thy stakes, for thou shalt break forth on the
   right hand and on the left.' We take the first step to respond to the
   summons when we make the regions beyond' one of the standing subjects
   of our devout thoughts, and take heed of supposing that the Church as
   we know it, has the same measurement which the man with the golden rod
   has measured for the eternal courts of Jerusalem, that shall be the joy
   of the whole earth. The very genius of the Gospel is aspiring. It is
   content with nothing short of universality for the sweep, and eternity
   for the duration, and absolute completeness for the measure, of its
   bestowments on man. We should be like men on a voyage of discovery,
   whose task is felt to be incomplete until headland after headland that
   fades in the dim distance has been rounded and surveyed, and the flag
   of our country planted upon it. After each has been passed another
   arises from the water, onwards we must go. There is no pause for our
   thoughts, none for our sympathy, none for our work, till our keels have
   visited, and the shout of a King' has been heard on every shore that
   fills the breadth of Thy land, O Emmanuel!' The limits of the visible
   community of Christ's Church to-day are far within the borders to which
   it must one day stretch. It is for us, taught by His words, to
   understand that we are yet as it were but encamped by Jericho, and at
   the beginning of the campaign. Ai and Bethhoron, and many a fight more
   are before us yet. The camp of the invaders, when they lay around the
   city of palm-trees, with the mountains in front and the Jordan behind,
   was not more unlike the settled order of the nation when it filled the
   land, than the ranks of Christ's army to-day are to the mighty
   multitudes that shall one day name His name, and follow His banner. Let
   us live in the future, and lay strongly hold on the distant; for both
   are our Lord's, and by so doing we shall the better do our Master's
   work in the present, and at hand.

   He has set us the example of a penetrating gaze into heathenism, which
   reveals beneath its monotonous miseries, the souls that are His. We
   ought to look on every field of Christian effort with the assurance
   that in it there are some who will hear His voice. As it was when He
   came, so it is ever and everywhere. The world is being prepared for the
   Gospel. In some broad regions, faith in idolatry is dying out, and the
   moral condition of the people is undergoing a slow elevation.
   Individuals are being weaned from their gods, they know not how, and
   they will not know why till they hear of Christ. He sees in every land
   where the Gospel is being taken a people prepared for the Lord.' He
   sees the gold gleaming in the crevices of the caves, the gems, rough
   and unpolished, lying in the matrix. He looks not merely on the great
   mass of idolaters, but He sees the single souls who shall hear. It is
   for us to look on the same mass with confidence caught from His.
   Neither apathetic indifference nor faint-hearted doubt should be
   permitted to weaken our hands. The prospect may seem very dark, the
   power of the enemy very great, our resources very inadequate; but let
   us look with Christ's eye, we shall know that everywhere we may hope to
   find a response to our message. Who they may be, we know not. How many
   they may be, we know not. How they may be guided by Him, they know not.
   But He knows all. We may know that they are there. And as we cannot
   tell who they are but only that they are, we are bound to cherish hopes
   for all--the most degraded and outcast of our race. We have no right to
   give up any field or any man as hopeless. Christ's sheep will be found
   coming out of the midst of wolves and goats. Darkness may cover the
   earth, and gross darkness the people; but if we look upon it as Christ
   did, and as He would have us to look, we shall see lights flickering
   here and there in the obscurity, which shall burst out into a blaze.
   The prophetic eye, the boundlessly hopeful heart, the strong confidence
   that in every land where He is preached there will be those who shall
   hear--these are what He gives us when He says, Other sheep I have,
   which are not of this fold.'

   There is one other thought connected with these words which may be
   briefly referred to. It is that even now, in all lands where the Gospel
   has been preached, there are those whom Christ has received, although
   they have no connection with His visible Church.

   There are many goats within the fold. There are many sheep without it.
   Even in lands where the Gospel has long been preached, we do not
   venture to identify profession by Church fellowship with living union
   with Christ. Much more is this true of our missionary efforts, and the
   apparent converts whom they make. The results that appear are no
   measure of the results that have actually been accomplished. We often
   hear of men who had caught up some stray word in a Bengali
   market-place, or received a tract by the roadside from some passing
   missionary, and who, having carried away the seed in their hearts, had
   long been living as Christians remote from all churches and unknown by
   any. We can easily conceive that timidity in some cases, and distance
   in others, swell the ranks of these secret disciples. Though they
   follow not the footsteps of the flock, the Shepherd will lead them in
   their solitude. There will be many more names in the Lamb's book of
   life, depend upon it, than ever are written on the roll-calls of our
   churches, or in missionary statistics. The shooting-stars that yearly
   fill our sky are visible to us for a moment, when their orbit passes
   into the lighted heavens, and then they disappear in the shadow of the
   earth. But astronomers tell us that they are always there though to us
   they seem to blaze but for a moment. We cannot see them, but they move
   on their darkling path and have a sun round which they circle. So be
   sure that in many heathen lands there are believing souls, seen by us
   but for an instant and then lost, who yet fill their unseen place, and
   move obedient round the Sun of Righteousness. Their names on earth are
   dark, but when the manifestation of the sons of God shall come, they
   shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and as the stars for
   ever and ever. Our work has results beyond our knowledge now. When the
   Church, the Lamb's wife, shall lift up her eyes at the end of the days,
   prophecy tells us that she shall wonder to see her thronging children,
   whom she had never known till then, and will say, Who hath begotten me
   these? Behold I was left alone. These, where had they been?' These were
   God's hidden ones, nourished and brought up beyond the pale of the
   outward Church, but brought at last to share her triumph, and to abide
   at her side. Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold.'

   What confidence then, what tender pity, what hope should fill our minds
   when we look on the heathen world! We must never be contented with
   present achievements. We are committed to a task which cannot end till
   all the world hears the joyful sound and is blessed by walking in the
   light of His countenance. When the great Roman Catholic missionary, the
   Apostle of the East, was lying on his dying bed among the barbarous
   people whom he loved, his passing spirit was busy about his work, and,
   even in the article of death, while the glazing eye saw no more clearly
   and the ashen lips had begun to stiffen into eternal silence, visions
   of further conquests flashed before him, and his last word was
   Amplius'--Onward! It ought to be the motto of the missionary work of
   us, who boast a purer faith, to carry to the heathen and to fire our
   own souls. If ever we are tempted to repose, to despondency, to rest
   and be thankful when we number up our work and our converts, let us
   listen to His voice as it speaks in that supreme hour when He beheld
   the vision of the Cross, and beyond it that of a gathered world: Other
   sheep I have, which are not of this fold.'

   We have here--

   II. Christ teaching us how to think of His work and ours.

   Them also I must bring.' A necessity is laid upon Him, which springs at
   once from that divine work which is the law of His life, and from His
   own love and pity. The means for accomplishing this necessary work are
   implied in the context, as in other parallel Scriptural sayings, to be
   His propitiatory death. The instrumentality employed is not only His
   own personal agency on earth, nor only His throned rule on the right
   hand of God with power over the Spirit of holiness, but also the work
   of His Church, and His work through them. Of that He is mainly speaking
   when He says, Them also I must bring.' Here, then, are some truths
   which ought to underlie and shape as well as animate our efforts for
   heathenism.

   And first, remember that the same sovereign necessity which was laid on
   Him presses on us.

   The Spirit of life' which was in Christ had its law,' which was the
   will of God. That shaped all His being, and He set us the example of
   perfectly clear recognition of, and perfect obedience to it, from the
   first moment when He said, I must be about My Father's business,' to
   the last, when He sighed forth, Father, into Thy hands I commit My
   spirit.' Hence the frequent sayings setting forth His work as
   determined by an imperative must,' which, whether it be alleged in
   reference to some apparently small or to some manifestly great thing in
   His life, is always equally imperative, and whether it seem to be based
   on the need for the fulfilment of some prophetic word, or on the
   proprieties and congruities of sonship, reposes at last on the will of
   God. His final words on the Passover night, before he went out to
   Gethsemane in the moonlight, contain the influence which moulded His
   whole earthly life, As the Father gave Me commandment, even so I do.'

   And this divine will constitutes for Him the deepest ground of the
   necessity in the case before us. The eternal counsels of God had willed
   that all the ends of the earth should see the salvation of the Lord';
   therefore, whatever the toils and the pains, the loss and the death,
   He, whose meat and drink was to do the will of Him that sent Him, must
   give Himself to the task, nor rest till, one by one, the weary
   wanderers are brought back on His shoulders and folded in His love.

   In all which, let us remember, Jesus Christ is our pattern, not in His
   work for the salvation of men, but in the spirit in which He did His
   work. The solemn law of duty before which He bowed His head is a law
   for us also. The authoritative imperative which He obeyed has power
   over us. If we would have our lives holy and strong, wise and good, we
   must have the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, making us free
   from the law of sin and death,' for the obedience to the higher law
   enfranchises from slavery to the lower, and all other authority ceases
   over us when we are Christ's men. We are bound to service directed to
   the same end as His--even the salvation of the world. The same voice
   which says to Him, I will give Thee for a light to the Gentiles,' says
   to us, Ye are My witnesses, and My servant whom I have chosen.' The
   same Will which hath constituted Him the anointed Prophet, says of us,
   Touch not Mine anointed and do My prophets no harm.' We are redeemed
   that we may show forth God's praises. Not for ourselves alone, nor for
   purposes terminating in our own personal acceptance with God, or the
   perfecting of our own characters, priceless as these are, but for ends
   which affect the world has God had mercy on us. We are bought with a
   price that we may be the servants of God. We have received that we may
   give forth,


     God doth with us, as we with torches do,

     Not light them for themselves.'

   Arise, shine, for thy light is come.'

   This missionary work of ours, then, is not one that can be taken up and
   laid down at our own pleasure. It is no excrescence, or accidental
   outgrowth of the Church's life. We are all too apt to think of it as an
   extra, a kind of work of supererogation, which those may engage in who
   have a liking that way, and which those who do not care about it may
   leave alone, and no harm done. When shall we come to feel deeply,
   constantly, practically, that it must be done, and that we are sinning
   when we neglect it? Dear brethren, have we laid on our hearts and
   consciences the solemn weight of that necessity which moulded His life?
   Have we felt the awful power of God's plainly spoken will, driving us
   to this task? Do we know anything of that spirit which hears
   ever-pealing in our ears that awful commandment, Go, go to all the
   world, preach, preach the Gospel to every creature?' God commands us to
   take the trumpet, and if we would not soil our souls with gross and
   palpable sin, we must set it to our lips and sound an alarm, that by
   His grace shall wake the sleepers, and make the hoary walls of the
   robber-city that has afflicted the earth for so many weary millenniums,
   rock to their fall, that the redeemed of the Lord may pass over and set
   the captives free.

   If we felt this as we ought, surely our consecration would be more
   complete, and our service more worthy. A clear conviction of God's will
   pointing the path for us, is, in all things, a wondrous help to
   vigorous action, to calmness of heart, and thus to success. In this
   mighty work, it would brace us for larger efforts, and fit us for
   larger results. It would simplify and deepen our motives, and thus
   evolve from them nobler deeds and purer sacrifices. To all objections
   from so-called prudence, to all calculations from sparse results, to
   all cavils of onlookers who may carp and seek to hinder, we should have
   one all-sufficient answer. It is not for us to bandy arguments on such
   points as these. We care nothing for difficulties, for discouragements,
   for cost. We may think about these till we lose all the manly chivalry
   of Christian character, like the Apostle who gazed on the white crests
   of the angry breakers flashing in the pale moonlight, till he forgot
   who stood on the storm, and began to sink in his great fear. A nobler
   spirit ought to be ours. The toil is sore, the sacrifices many, and the
   yield seems small. Be it so! To all such thoughts we have one
   answer--Oh! that we felt more its solemn power!--such is the will of
   God. We are doing as we are bid, and we mean to go on. Them also must I
   bring,' says the Master. Necessity is laid upon me, yea, woe is me if I
   preach not the Gospel,' echoes the Apostle. Let us, in the consecration
   of resolved hearts, and in trembling obedience to the divine will, add
   our choral Amen, and in the face of all the paralysing suggestions of
   our own selfishness, and all the tempting voices of worldly wisdom and
   unbelieving scornfulness that would stay our enterprise, let us fling
   back the grand old answer, Whether it be right in the sight of God to
   hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye, for we cannot but speak
   the things which we have seen and heard.'

   We must not forget, however, that it was no abhorrent toil to which
   Christ reluctantly consented. But in this case, as always with Him, the
   words of prophecy were true, I delight to do Thy will.' The schism
   between law and choice had no existence for Him; and when He says that
   He must bring the wandering sheep into the fold, He means not more
   because of God's will than because of His own yearning desire to pour
   out the treasures of His mercy.

   So it ought to be with us. Our missionary work should not be degraded
   beneath the level of duty indeed, but neither should it be left on that
   level. We ought not only to be led to it by a power without, but
   impelled by an energy within. If we would be like our Master, we must
   know the necessity arising from our own heart's promptings, which leads
   us to work for Him. He has very imperfectly caught the spirit of the
   Gospel who has never felt the word as a fire in his bones, making him
   weary of forbearing. If we only take to this work because we are bid,
   and without sympathy for men, and longing desire to bring them all to
   Him who has blessed us, we may almost as well leave it alone. We shall
   do very little good to anybody, to ourselves little, to the world less.
   That our own hearts may teach us this necessity, we must live near our
   Master, and know His grace for ourselves. In proportion as we do, we
   shall be eager to proclaim it, and not stand idling in a corner of the
   market-place, till some unmistakable order sends us into the vineyard,
   but go for the relief of our own feelings. This is a day of good
   tidings, and we cannot hold our peace,' said the poor lepers in the
   camp to one another. The same feeling that we must tell the good news
   just because we know it, and it will make our brethren glad, is part of
   the Christian character. A blessed necessity, then, is laid upon us. A
   blessed work is given us, which brings with it at once the joy of
   obedience to our Father's will, and the joy of gratifying a deep
   instinct of our nature. Them also must I bring,' said the Saviour,
   because He loved men. To me who am less than the least of all saints,
   is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the
   unsearchable riches,' echoes the Apostle. Let us live in the light of
   our Lord's eye, and drink deep of His spirit, till the talk becomes a
   grace and privilege, not a burden, and till silence and idleness in His
   cause shall be felt to be impossible, because it would be violence to
   our own feelings, and the loss of a great joy as well as sin against
   our Father's will.

   Consider again, by what means the sheep are to be brought to Christ?
   The context distinctly answers the question. There His propitiatory
   death is emphatically set forth as the power by which it is to be
   accomplished. The verse before our text says, I lay down My life for
   the sheep'; that after our text says, Therefore doth My Father love Me,
   because I lay down My life.' It is the same connection of means and end
   as appears in the wonderful words with which He received the Greeks who
   came up to the feast, and heard the great truth, for want of which
   their philosophy and art came to nothing. Except a corn of wheat fall
   into the ground and die it abideth alone'--I, if I be lifted up from
   the earth will draw all men unto Me.'

   Yes, brethren! the Cross of Christ, and it alone, gathers men into a
   unity; for it alone draws men to Christ. His death, as our
   propitiation, effects such a change in the aspects of the divine
   government, and in the incidence of the divine justice, that we who
   were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.' His death, as the
   constraining motive of life in the hearts which receive it, draws them
   away from their own ways by the cords of love, and binds them to Him.
   His death is His purchase of the gifts of that divine Spirit for the
   rebellious, who now convinces the world and endows the Church, till we
   all come unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.'
   The First Begotten from the dead is therefore the prince of all the
   kings of the earth, and He so rides among the nations as to bring the
   world to Himself. The philosophy of history lies in the words, Other
   sheep I have, them also I must bring.'

   Christian missions abundantly prove that the Cross and the proclamation
   of the Cross have this power, and that nothing else has. It is not the
   ethics of Christianity, nor the abstract truths which may be deduced
   from its story, but it is the story of the suffering Redeemer that
   gives it its power over human hearts, in all conditions, and climates,
   and stages of culture. The magnetism of the Cross alone is mighty
   enough to overcome the gravitation of the soul to sin and the world. We
   hear much nowadays about a new reformation which is to be effected on
   Christianity, by purifying it of its historical facts and of its
   repulsive sacrificial aspect. When this is done, and the pure spiritual
   ideas are disengaged from their fleshly garb, then, we are told, will
   be the apotheosis and glorification of Christ. This will be the real
   lifting up from the earth; this will draw all men. Aye, and when this
   is done what will be left? Christianity will be purified back again
   into a vague Deism, which one would have thought had proved itself
   toothless and impotent, centuries ago. Spiritualising will turn out to
   be very like evaporating, the residuum will be a miserably
   unsatisfactory something, near akin to nothing, and certainly incapable
   either of firing its disciples with a desire to spread their faith, if
   we may call it so by courtesy, or of drawing men to itself. A
   Christianity without a Sacrifice on the altar will be a Christianity
   without worshippers in the Temple. The King of Kings who rides forth
   conquering is clothed in a vesture dipped in blood. The Christian
   Emperor saw in the heavens the Cross, with the legend: In this sign
   thou shalt conquer!' It is an emblem true for all time. The Cross is
   the power unto salvation. The races scattered on the earth have often
   sought to make for themselves a rallying-point, and their attempts at
   union have become Babels, centres of repulsion and confusion. God has
   given us the Centre, the Tree of life in the midst. The crucified
   Saviour is the Root of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign for the
   people; to it shall the Gentiles seek, and resting beneath the shadow
   of the Cross be at peace. I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will
   draw all men unto Me.'

   Once more our Lord teaches us here to identify the work of the Church
   with His own. What His servants do for Him He does, for from Him they
   derive the power to do it, and from Him comes the blessing which makes
   it effectual. He works in us, He works with us, He works for us. He
   works in us. We have the grace of His Spirit to touch our hearts and
   sanctify us for service. He puts it into the wills and desires of His
   Church to consecrate themselves to the task. He teaches them sympathy
   and self-devotion. He breathes world-wide aspirations into them. He
   raises up men to go forth. He works with us, helping our weakness,
   enlightening our ignorance, directing our steps, giving power to the
   student at his dry task of grammar and dictionary, being mouth and
   wisdom to them that speak in His name, touching the hearts of them that
   hear. In our basket He puts the seed-corn; the furrows of the field He
   makes soft with showers, and when it is sown He blesses the springing
   thereof. He works for us, opening doors among the nations, ordering the
   courses of providence, and holding His hand around His servants, so
   that they are immortal till their work is done; and can ever lift up
   thankful voices to Him who leads them joyful captives at His own
   triumphal car, as it rolls on its stately march, scattering the sweet
   odours of His name wherever the long procession sweeps through the
   world. We neither go a warfare at our own charges, nor in our own
   might. He will fight with us, and He will pay us liberally at the last.
   When we count up our own resources, do not we often leave Christ out of
   the reckoning? Do we not measure our strength against the enemies', and
   forget that one weak man, plus Christ, is always in the majority? It is
   not ye that speak, but the Spirit of My Father which speaketh in you.'
   I laboured, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.' So
   helped, so inspired, we are wrong to despond; we are wrong not to
   expect great things and attempt great things; we are wrong not to dare,
   we are wrong to do the work of the Lord negligently. Let us feel that
   Christ's work is ours, and we shall be bowed beneath the solemnity of
   the thought, shall accept joyfully the necessity. Let us feel that our
   work is Christ's, and we shall rejoice in infirmity that His power may
   rest upon us, shall bid adieu to faint-hearted fears, and be sure that
   then it must prosper. Arise, O Lord! plead Thine own cause.' Not unto
   us, O Lord! not unto us, but to Thy name give glory.

   The Lord ascended into Heaven and sat on the right hand of God, and
   they went everywhere preaching the word.' It seems a strange contrast
   between the rest of the Lord, sitting in sublime expectancy of
   conscious power til His enemies become His footstool, and the toils of
   His scattered disciples. It is like that moment which the genius of the
   great painter has caught in an immortal work, when Jesus in rapt
   communion with the mighty dead, and crowned with the accepting word
   from Heaven, floated transfigured above the Holy Mount, while below His
   disciples wrestled impotently with the demon that would not be cast
   out. But it is not really contrast. He has not so parted the toils as
   that His are over ere ours begin. He has not left His Church militant
   to bear the brunt of the battle while the Captain of the Lord's host
   only watches the current of the heady fight--like Moses from the safe
   mountain. The Evangelist goes on to tell us that the Lord also was
   working with them and sharing their toils, lightening their burdens,
   preparing for them successes on earth, and a rest like His when He
   shall gird Himself and serve them. Thus, the first time that the
   heavens opened again to mortal eyes after they closed on His ascending
   form, was to show Him to the martyr in the council chamber, not sitting
   careless or restful, but standing at the right hand of God, to
   intercede for, to strengthen, to receive and glorify His dying servant.
   He goes with us where we go, and through our works and gifts and
   prayers, through our proclamation of the Cross, He worketh His will,
   and shall finally accomplish that great necessity laid upon Him by the
   Father's counsels, and upon us by His commandment, and to be effected
   by His death, that He should die, not for that nation only, but also
   that He should gather together in one the children of God who are
   scattered abroad.

   We have here--

   III. Our Lord teaching us how to think of the certain issues of His
   work and ours.

   They shall hear My voice, and there shall be one fold and one
   Shepherd.' We may regard these words as embracing two things; a nearer
   issue, namely, the response that will always attend His call; and a
   more remote, namely, the completion of His work. There is, of course, a
   very blessed sense in which the latter words are true now, and have
   been ever since Paul could say to those who had been aliens from the
   commonwealth of Israel, He hath made both one. Now, therefore, ye are
   no more foreigners but fellow-citizens with the saints.' But the fold
   which now exists, limited in numbers, with its members but partially
   conscious of their unity, and surrounded by those who follow hireling
   shepherds, does not exhaust these great words. They shall not be
   accomplished till that far-off future have come.

   But for the present we have the predictions of the former clause, They
   shall hear My voice.' What manner of expectations does it teach us to
   cherish? It seems to speak not of universal reception of Christ's
   message, but of some as hearing and some as forbearing. It teaches us
   to look for divers results attending our missionary work. There will
   always be a Dionysius the Areopagite, the woman Lydia, the kindly
   barbarians, the conscience-stricken jailer. There will always be the
   scoffers, who mock when they hear of Jesus and the resurrection'; the
   hesitating who compound with conscience by promising to hear again of
   this matter, the fierce opponents who invoke constituted authorities or
   mob violence to crush the message.

   Again, the words seem to contemplate a long task. There is nothing
   about the rate at which His Kingdom shall spread, not a syllable to
   answer inquiries as to when the end shall come. The whole tone of the
   language suggests the idea that bringing back the sheep is to take a
   long time, and to cost many a tedious journey into the wilderness. Not
   a sudden outburst, but a slow kindling of the flame, is what our Lord
   teaches us here to expect.

   But while thus calm in tone and moderate in expectation, the words
   breathe a hope as confident as it is calm, as clear as it is moderate.
   There will always be a response. His voice shall never be lifted up in
   the snow-storm or lonely hillsides only to be blown back into His own
   ears, unheard and unheeded. Be they few or many, they shall hear. Be
   the toil longer or shorter, more or less severe, it shall not be in
   vain.

   And to these expectations we shall do wisely if we attune ours. Omit
   from your hopes what your Lord has omitted from His promises; do not
   ask what He has not told. Do not wonder if you encounter what He met,
   for the disciple is not greater than his Master, and only if they have
   kept My saying will they keep yours also. But, on the other hand,
   expect as much as He has prophesied; accept it when it comes as the
   fruit of His work, not of yours, and build a firm faith that your
   labour shall not be in vain on these calm and prescient words.

   So much for the course of the kingdom. And what of the end? One by one
   the sheep have been brought, at last they are all gathered in, not a
   hoof left behind. The stars steal singly into their places in the
   heavens as the darkness deepens, and He bringeth them forth by number,'
   until at the noon of night the sky is crowded with their lights, and
   for that He is great in power, not one faileth.' What expectations are
   we here taught to cherish then of the final issue?

   Mark, to begin with, that there is implied the ultimate universality of
   His dominion and sole supremacy of His throne. There is to be but one
   Shepherd, and over all the earth a great unity of obedience to Him.
   Here is the knell of all authority that does not own Him, and the
   subordination of all that does. The hirelings, the blind guides, that
   have misled and afflicted humanity for so many weary ages, shall be all
   sunk in oblivion. The false gods shall be discrowned, and lie shattered
   on their temple-sill, and there shall be no worshippers to care for or
   to try to repair their discomfiture. Bow your heads before Him,
   thinkers who have led men on devious paths and spoken but a partial
   truth and a wisdom all confused with foolishness! Lower your swords
   before Him, warriors who have builded your cities on blood and led men
   like sheep to the slaughter! He is more glorious and excellent than the
   mountains of prey. Cast your crowns before Him, princes and all judges
   of the earth, for He is King by right of the crown of thorns! This is
   the Lord of all--Teacher, Leader, Ruler of all men. All other names
   shall be forgotten but His shall abide. If they have been shepherds who
   would not come in by the door, a ransomed world shall rejoice over
   their fall with the ancient hymn, Other gods beside Thee have had
   dominion over us; they are dead, they shall not live, Thou hast
   destroyed them, and made all their memory to perish.' If they have been
   subject to the chief Shepherd and ensamples to the flock, they will
   rejoice to decrease before His increase, and having helped to bring the
   Bride to the Bridegroom, will gladly stand aside and be forgotten in
   the perfect love that enters into full fruition at the last. Then when
   none contest nor intercept the reverential obedience that the whole
   world brings to Him, shall be fulfilled the firm promise which declared
   long ago: I will set up one Shepherd over them, and He will feed them
   and be their Shepherd.'

   Mark again the blessed nature of the relation between Christ and all
   men which is here foretold. From of old, the shepherd has been in all
   nations the emblem of kingly power, of leadership of every sort. How
   often the fact has contradicted the symbol let history tell. But with
   Jesus the reality does not only contradict, but even transcends, the
   tender old comparison. He rules with a gentle sway. His sceptre is no
   rod of iron, but the shepherd's crook, and the inmost meaning of its
   use is that it may comfort' us, as David learned to feel. There gather
   round the metaphor all thoughts of merciful guidance, of tender care,
   of a helping arm when we are weak, of a loving bosom where we are
   carried when we are weary. It speaks of a seeking love that roams over
   every high hill till it finds, and of a strong shoulder that bears us
   back when He has found. It tells of sweet hours of rest in the hot
   noontide by still waters, of ample provision for all the soul's
   longings in green pastures. It speaks of footsteps that go before, in
   which men may follow and find them ways of pleasantness. It speaks of
   gentle callings by name which draw the heart. It speaks of defence when
   lion and bear come ravening down, and of safe couching by night when
   the silent stars behold the sleeping sheep and the wakeful shepherd. He
   Himself gives its highest significance to the emblem, in the words of
   this great discourse, when He fixes on His knowledge, His calling of
   His sheep, His going before them, His giving His life for them. Such
   are the gracious blessings which here He teaches us to think of as
   possessed in the happy days that shall be, by all the world.

   And, on the other hand, the symbol speaks of confiding love in the
   hearts of men, of a great peacefulness of meek obedience stilling and
   gladdening their wills, of the consciousness of His perfect love, and
   the knowledge of all His gracious character, of sweet answering
   communion with Him, of safety from all enemies, of freedom, of familiar
   passage in and out to God. Thus knit together shall be the one fold and
   the one Shepherd. They shall feed in the ways, and their pastures shall
   be in all high places. They shall not hunger nor thirst, neither shall
   the heat nor sun smite them, for He that hath mercy on them shall feed
   them, even by the springs of water shall He guide them.'

   Mark again what a vision is here given of the relations of men with one
   another.

   They are to be all gathered into a peaceful unity. They are to be one
   because they all hearken to one voice. It is to be observed that our
   Lord does not say, as our English Bible makes Him say, that there is to
   be one fold. He drops that word of set purpose in the latter clause of
   our text, and substitutes for it another, which may perhaps be best
   rendered flock. Why this change in the expression? Because, as it would
   seem, he would have us learn that the unity of that blessed future time
   is not to be like the unity of the Jewish Church, a formal and external
   one. That ancient polity was a fold. It held its members together by
   outward bonds of uniformity. But the universal Church of the future is
   to be a flock. It is to be really and visibly one. But it is to be so,
   not because it is hemmed in by one enclosure, but because it is to be
   gathered round one Shepherd. The more closely they are drawn to Him,
   the more near will they be to each other. The centre in which all the
   radii meet keeps them all in their places. We being many are one bread,
   for we are all partakers of that one bread.' In the ritual of the Old
   Covenant, the great golden candlestick with its seven branches stood in
   the court of the Temple, emblem of the formal oneness of the people,
   which was meant to be the light of the Lord to a dark world. In the
   vision of the New Covenant, the seer in Patmos beheld not the one lamp
   with its branches, but the seven golden candlesticks, which were made
   into a holier and a freer unity because the Son of Man walked in their
   midst--emblem of the oneness in diversity of the peoples, who were
   sometimes darkness, but shall one day be light in the Lord. There may
   continue to be national distinctions. There may or there may not be any
   external unity. But at all events our Lord turns away our thoughts from
   the outward to the inward, and bids us be sure that though the folds be
   many the flock shall be one, because they shall all hear and follow
   Him.

   The words, however, suggest for us the blessed thought of the peaceful
   relations that shall then subsist among men. The tribes of the earth
   shall couch beside each other like the quiet sheep in the fold, and
   having learned of His great meekness, they shall no more bite nor
   devour one another. Alas! alas! the words seem too good to be true.
   They seem long, long of coming to pass. Ever since they were spoken the
   old bloody work has been going on, and the old lusts of the human heart
   have been busy sowing the dragon's teeth that shall spring up in wars
   and fightings. In savage lands warfare rages on, ceaseless, ignoble,
   unrecorded, and seemingly purposeless as that of animalcules in a drop
   of water. On civilised soil, men, who love the same Christ and worship
   Him in the same tongue, are fronting each other at this hour. The war
   of actual swords, and the war of conflicting creeds, and the jostling
   of human selfishness in the rough road of life, are all around us, and
   their seeds are within ourselves. The race of men do not live like
   folded sheep, rather like a flock of wolves, who first run over and
   then devour their weaker fellows.

   But here is a fairer hope, and it will be fulfilled when all evil
   thoughts, and all selfish desires, and all jealous grudgings shall
   vanish from men's hearts, as unclean spirits at cockcrow, and shall
   leave them, self-forgetful, yielding of their own prerogatives,
   desirous of no other man's, abhorrent of inflicting, and patient of
   receiving wrong. There will be no fuel then to blow into sulphurous
   flame, though all the blasts from hell were to fan the embers. But
   peace and concord shall be in all men, for Christ shall be in all.
   National distinctions may abide, but national enmities--the oldest and
   deepest, shall disappear. There shall still be Assyria, and Egypt, and
   Israel, but their former relation will be replaced by a bond of amity
   in their common possession of Him who is our peace. In that day shall
   Israel be the third with Egypt, and with Assyria, even a blessing in
   the midst of the land, whom the Lord shall bless, saying, Blessed be
   Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine
   inheritance.' God be thanked! that though we see, and our fathers have
   seen, so much that seems to contradict our hopes of a peaceful world,
   and though to-day the hell-hounds of war are baying over the earth, and
   though nowhere can we see signs even of the approach of the halcyon
   time, yet we can wait for the vision, knowing that it will come at the
   appointed time, when


     No war or battle's sound

     Is heard the world around,

     The idle spear and shield are high uphung;

     The trumpet speaks not to the armed throng,

     And Kings sit still, with awful eye,

     As if they surely knew their Sovereign Lord was by.'

   Such are the thoughts which our Lord would teach us as to the present
   and as to the future of our missionary work. For the one, moderate
   expectations of success, not unchequered by disappointment, and a brave
   patience in long toil. For the other, hopes which cannot be too
   glowing, and a faith which cannot be too obstinate. The one is being
   fulfilled in our own and our brethren's experience even now; we may be
   therefore all the more sure that the other will be so in due time. If
   we look with Christ's eyes, we shall not be depressed by the apparent
   unbroken surface of heathenism but see, as He did, everywhere souls
   that belong to Him, who may and must be won; we shall joyfully embrace
   the work which He has given us to do; we shall arm ourselves against
   the discouragements of the present, by living much in the past at the
   foot of the Cross, till we catch the true image of the Saviour's love,
   and much in the future in the midst of the ransomed flock, till we too
   behold the roses blossoming in the wilderness, the bright waters
   covering all the dry places in the desert, and the families of men
   sitting, clothed and in their right mind, at the feet of Jesus.

   Our missionary work is the pure and inevitable result of a belief in
   these words of my text. Can a man believe that Christ has other sheep
   for whom He died because He must bring them in, whom He will bring in
   because He died, and not work according to his power in the line of the
   divine purposes? The missionary spirit is but the Christian spirit
   working in one particular direction. Missionary societies are but one
   of the authentic outcomes of Christian principles, as natural as
   holiness of life, or the act of prayer.

   To secure, then, a more vigorous energy in such work, we need chiefly
   what we need for all Christian growth--namely, more and deeper
   communion with Christ, a more vivid realisation of His grace and love
   for ourselves. And then we need that, under the double stimulus of His
   love and of His commandment--which at bottom are one--our minds should
   be more frequently occupied with this subject of Christian missions.
   Most of us know too little about the matter to feel very much. And then
   we need that we should more seriously reflect upon the facts in
   relation to our own personal responsibility and duty. You complain of
   the triteness of such appeals as this sermon. Brethren, have you ever
   tried that recipe for freshening up well-worn truths, namely, thinking
   about them in connection with the simplest, most important of all
   questions--what, then, ought I to do in view of these truths? Am I
   exaggerating when I say, that not one-half of the professing Christians
   of our day give an hour in the year to pondering that question, with
   reference to missionary work? Oh! dear friends, see to it that you live
   in Christ for yourselves, and then see to it that you think His
   thoughts about the heathen world, till your pity is stirred and your
   mind braced to the firm resolve that you too will work the works of
   Christ and bring in the wanderers.

   We have had as large results as Christ has led us to expect, and far
   larger than we deserved. Christian missions are yet in their
   infancy--alas! that it should be so. But in these seventy years since
   they may be said to have begun, what wonderful successes have been
   achieved. We are often told that we have done nothing. Is it so? The
   plant has been got together, methods of working have been systematised,
   mistakes in some measure corrected. We have spent much of our time in
   learning how to work, and that process is by no means over yet. But
   with all these deductions, which ought fairly to be made, how much has
   been accomplished? The Bible has been put into the languages of seven
   hundred millions of men. The beginnings of a Christian literature have
   been supplied for five-sixths of the world. Half a million of professed
   converts have been gathered in, or as many as there were at the end of
   the first century, after about the same number of years of labour, and
   with apostles for missionaries and miracles for proof. And if these
   still bear on their ankles the marks of the fetters, and limp as they
   walk, or cannot see very clearly at first, it is no more than might be
   expected from their long darkness in the prison-house, and it is no
   more than Paul had to contend with at Ephesus and Corinth.

   Every church that has engaged in the toil has shared in the blessing,
   and has its own instances of special prosperity. We have had Jamaica;
   the London Missionary Society, Madagascar, and the South Seas; the
   Wesleyans, Fiji; the Episcopal Societies, Tinnevelly; the American
   brethren, Burmah, and the Karens. Some of the ruder mythologies have
   been so utterly extirpated that the children of idolaters have seen the
   gods whom their fathers worshipped for the first time in the British
   Museum. While over those more compact and scientific systems which lie
   like an incubus on mighty peoples, there has crept a sickening
   consciousness of a coming doom, and they already half own their
   conqueror in the Stronger One than they.


     They feel from Judah's land

     The dreaded Infant's hand.'

   Bel boweth down, Nebo stoopeth, the idols are upon the beasts.' Surely
   God has granted us success enough for our thankful confidence, more
   than enough for our deserts. I repeat it, it is as much as He promised,
   as much as we had any right to expect, and it is a vast deal more than
   any other system of belief or of no belief, any of your spiritualised
   Christianities, or still more intangible creeds has ever managed, or
   ever thought of trying. To those who taunt us with no success, and who
   perhaps would not dislike Christian missions so much if they disliked
   Christian truth a little less, we may very fairly and calmly
   answer--This rod has budded at all events; do you the same with your
   enchantments.

   But the past is no measure of the future. From the very nature of the
   undertaking the ratio of progress increases at a rapid rate. The first
   ten years of labour in India showed twenty-seven converts, the seventh
   ten showed more than twenty-seven thousand. The preparation may be as
   slow as the solemn gathering of the thunder-clouds, as they noiselessly
   steal into their places, and slowly upheave their grey billowing
   crests; the final success may be as swift as the lightning which
   flashes in an instant from one side of the heavens to the other. It
   takes long years to hew the tunnel, to make the crooked straight, and
   the rough places plain,' and then smooth and fleet the great power
   rushes along the rails. To us the cry comes, Prepare ye in the desert
   an highway for our God.' The toil is sore and long, but the glory of
   the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.' The
   Alpine summits lie white and ghastly in the spring sunshine, and it
   seems to pour ineffectual beams on their piled cold; but by slow
   degrees it is silently loosening the bands of the snow, and after a
   while a goat's step, as it passes along a rocky ledge, or a breath of
   wind will move a tiny particle, and in an instant its motion spreads
   over a mile of mountain side, and the avalanche is rushing swifter and
   mightier at every foot down to the valley below, where it will all turn
   into sweet water, and ripple glancing in the sunshine. Such is our
   work. It may seem very hopeless, and be mostly unobservable in surface
   results, but it is very real for all that. The conquering impulse, for
   which our task may have been to prepare the way, will be given, and
   then we shall wonder to see how surely the kingdom was coming, even
   when we observed it not.

   Ye have need of patience, and to feed your patience, ye have need of
   fellowship with Christ, of faith in His promises, of sympathy with His
   mind. God has given us, dear brethren, special reason for renewed
   consecration to this service in the blessings which have during the
   year terminated our anxieties and crowned our work for our own Society.
   But let us not dwell upon what has been done. These successes are
   brooks by the way at which we may drink--nothing more. We ought to be
   like shepherds in the lonely mountain glens, who see in the
   fast-falling snow and the bitter blast a summons to the hillside, and
   there all the night long wherever the drift lies deepest and the wind
   bites the most sharply, search the most eagerly for the poor half-dead
   creatures, and as they find each, bear it back to the safe shelter, nor
   stay behind to count the rescued, nor to rest their weariness, for all
   the bright light in the cottage and the blackness without, but forth
   again on the same quest, till all the Master's sheep have been rescued
   from the white death that lay treacherous around, and are sleeping at
   peace in His folds. A mighty Voice ought ever to be sounding in our
   ears, Other sheep I have,' and the answer of our hearts and of our
   lives should be, Them also, O Lord! will I try to bring.' Not till the
   far-off issue is accomplished shall we have a right to rest, and then
   we, with all those He has helped us to gather to His side, shall be
   among that flock, whom He who is at once Lamb and Shepherd, our Brother
   and our Lord, our Sacrifice and King, shall feed and lead by living
   fountains of waters,' in the sweet pastures of the upper world, where
   there are no ravening wolves, nor false guides to terrify and bewilder
   His flock any more at all for ever.
     __________________________________________________________________

   [1] Preached before the Baptist Missionary Society.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE DELAYS OF LOVE

   Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus. When He had heard
   therefore that he was sick, He abode two days still in the same place
   where He was.'--JOHN xi. 5, 6.

   We learn from a later verse of this chapter that Lazarus had been dead
   four days when Christ reached Bethany. The distance from that village
   to the probable place of Christ's abode, when He received the message,
   was about a day's journey. If, therefore, to the two days on which He
   abode still after the receipt of the news, we add the day which the
   messengers took to reach Him and the day which He occupied in
   travelling, we get the four days since which Lazarus had been laid in
   his grave. Consequently the probability is that, when our Lord had the
   message, the man was dead. Christ did not remain still, therefore, in
   order to work a greater miracle by raising Lazarus from the dead than
   He would have done by healing, but He stayed--strange as it would
   appear--for reasons closely connected with the highest well-being of
   all the beloved three, and because He loved them.

   John is always very particular in his use of that word therefore,' and
   he points out many a subtle and beautiful connection of cause and
   effect by his employment of it. I do not know that any of them are more
   significant and more full of illumination with regard to the ways of
   divine providence than the instance before us. How these two sisters
   must have looked down the rocky road that led up from Jericho during
   those four weary days, to see if there were any signs of His coming.
   How strange it must have appeared to the disciples themselves that He
   made no sign of movement, notwithstanding the message. Perhaps John's
   scrupulous carefulness in pointing out that His love was Christ's
   reason for His quiescence may reflect a remembrance of the doubts that
   had crept over the minds of himself and his brethren during these two
   days of strange inaction. The Evangelist will have us learn a lesson,
   which reaches far beyond the instance in hand, and casts light on many
   dark places.

   I. Christ's delays are the delays of love.

   We have all of us, I suppose, had experience of desires for the removal
   of bitterness or sorrows, or for the fulfilment of expectations and
   wishes, which we believed, on the best evidence that we could find, to
   be in accordance with His will, and which we have been able to make
   prayers out of, in true faith and submission, which prayers have had to
   be offered over and over and over again, and no answer has come, It is
   part of the method of Providence that the lifting away of the burden
   and the coming of the desires should be a hope deferred. And instead of
   stumbling at the mystery, or feeling as if it made a great demand upon
   our faith, would it not be wiser for us to lay hold of that little word
   of the Apostle's here, and to see in it a small window that opens out
   on to a boundless prospect, and a glimpse into the very heart of the
   divine motives in His dealings with us?

   If we could once get that conviction into our hearts, how quietly we
   should go about our work! What a beautiful and brave patience there
   would be in us, if we habitually felt that the only reason which
   actuates God's providence in its choice of times of fulfilling our
   desires and lifting away our bitterness is our own good! Nothing but
   the purest and simplest love, transparent and without a fold in it,
   sways Him in all that He does. Why should it be so difficult for us to
   believe this? If we were more in the way of looking at life, with all
   its often unwelcome duty, and its arrows of pain and sorrow, and all
   the disappointments and other ills that it is heir to, as a discipline,
   and were to think less about the unpleasantness, and more about the
   purpose, of what befalls us, we should find far less difficulty in
   understanding that His delay is born of love, and is a token of His
   tender care.

   Sorrow is prolonged for the same reason as it was sent. It is of little
   use to send it for a little while. In the majority of cases, time is an
   element in its working its right effect upon us. If the weight is
   lifted, the elastic substance beneath springs up again. As soon as the
   wind passes over the cornfield, the bowing ears raise themselves. You
   have to steep foul things in water for a good while before the pure
   liquid washes out the stains. And so time is an element in all the good
   that we get out of the discipline of life. Therefore, the same love
   which sends must necessarily protract, beyond our desires, the
   discipline under which we are put. If we thought of it, as I have said,
   more frequently as discipline and schooling, and less frequently as
   pain and a burden, we should understand the meaning of things a great
   deal better than we do, and should be able to face them with braver
   hearts, and with a patient, almost joyous, endurance.

   If we think of some of the purposes of our sorrows and burdens, we
   shall discern still more clearly that time is needed for accomplishing
   them, and that, therefore, love must delay its coming to take them
   away. For example, the object of them all, and the highest blessing
   that any of us can obtain, is that our wills should be bent until they
   coincide with God's, and that takes time. The shipwright, when he gets
   a bit of timber that he wants to make a knee' out of, knows that to
   mould it into the right form is not the work of a day. A will may be
   broken at a blow, but it will take a while to bend it. And just because
   swiftly passing disasters have little permanent effect in moulding our
   wills, it is a blessing, and not an evil, to have some standing fact in
   our lives, which will make a continual demand upon us for continually
   repeated acts of bowing ourselves beneath His sweet, though it may seem
   severe, will. God's love in Jesus Christ can give us nothing better
   than the opportunity of bowing our wills to His, and saying, Not mine,
   but Thine be done.' If that is why He stops on the other side of
   Jordan, and does not come even to the loving messages of beloved
   hearts, then He shows His love in the sweetest and the loftiest form.
   So, dear friends, if you carry a lifelong sorrow, do not think that it
   is a mystery why it should lie upon your shoulders when there are
   omnipotence and an infinite heart in the heavens. If it has the effect
   of bending you to His purpose, it is the truest token of His loving
   care that He can send. In like manner, is it not worth carrying a
   weight of unfulfilled wishes, and a weariness of unalleviated sorrows,
   if these do teach us three things, which are one thing--faith,
   endurance, prayerfulness, and so knit us by a threefold cord that
   cannot be broken, to the very heart of God Himself?

   II. This delayed help always comes at the right time.

   Do not let us forget that Heaven's clock is different from ours. In our
   day there are twelve hours, and in God's a thousand years. What seems
   long to us is to Him a little while.' Let us not imitate the
   shortsighted impatience of His disciples, who said, What is this that
   He saith, A little while? We cannot tell what He saith.' The time of
   separation looked so long in anticipation to them, and to Him it had
   dwindled to a moment. For two days, eight-and-forty hours, He delayed
   His answer to Mary and Martha, and they thought it an eternity, while
   the heavy hours crept by, and they only said, It's very weary, He
   cometh not, they said.' How long did it look to them when they had got
   Lazarus back?

   The longest protraction of the fulfilment of the most yearning
   expectation and fulfilled desire will seem but as the winking of an
   eyelid when we get to estimate duration by the same scale by which He
   estimates it, the scale of Eternity. The ephemeral insect, born in the
   morning and dead when the day fades, has a still minuter scale than
   ours, but we should not think of regulating our estimate of long and
   short by it. Do not let us commit the equal absurdity of regulating the
   march of His providence by the swift beating of our timepieces. God
   works leisurely because God has eternity to work in.

   The answer always comes at the right time, and is punctual though
   delayed. For instance, Peter is in prison. The Church keeps praying for
   him; prays on, day after day. No answer. The week of the feast comes.
   Prayer is made intensely and fervently and continuously. No answer. The
   slow hours pass away. The last day of his life, as it would appear,
   comes and goes. No answer. The night gathers; prayer rises to heaven.
   The last hour of the last watch of the last night that he had to live
   has come, and as the veil of darkness is thinning, and the day is
   beginning to break, the angel of the Lord shone round about him.' But
   there is no haste in his deliverance. All is done leisurely, as in the
   confidence of ample time to spare, and perfect security. He is bidden
   to arise quickly, but there is no hurry in the stages of his
   liberation. Gird thyself and bind on thy sandals.' He is to take time
   to lace them. There is no fear of the quaternion of soldiers waking, or
   of there not being time to do all. We can fancy the half-sleeping and
   wholly-bewildered Apostle fumbling at the sandal-strings, in dread of
   some movement rousing his guards, and the calm angel face looking on.
   The sandals fastened, he is bidden to put on his garments and follow.
   With equal leisure and orderliness he is conducted through the first
   and the second guard of sleeping soldiers, and then through the prison
   gate. He might have been lifted at once clean out of his dungeon, and
   set down in the house many were gathered praying for him. But more
   signal was the demonstration of power which a deliverance so gradual
   gave, when it led him slowly past all obstacles and paralysed their
   power. God is never in haste. He never comes too soon nor too late. The
   Lord shall help them, and that right early.' Sennacherib's army is
   round the city, famine is within the walls. To-morrow will be too late.
   But to-night the angel strikes, and the enemies are all dead men. So
   God's delay makes the deliverance the more signal and joyous when it is
   granted. And though hope deferred may sometimes make the heart sick,
   the desire, when it comes, is a tree of life.

   III. The best help is not delayed.

   The principle which we have been illustrating applies only to one
   half--and that the less important half--of our prayers and of Christ's
   answers. For in regard to spiritual blessings, and our petitions for
   fuller, purer, and diviner life, there is no delay. In that region the
   law is not He abode still two days in the same place,' but Before they
   call I will answer, and while they are yet speaking I will hear.' If
   you have been praying for deeper knowledge of God, for lives liker His,
   for hearts more filled with the Spirit, and have not had the answer, do
   not fall back upon the misapplication of such a principle as this of my
   text, which has nothing to do with that region; but remember that the
   only reason why good people do not immediately get the blessings of the
   Christian life for which they ask lies in themselves, and not at all in
   God. Ye have not, because ye ask not. Ye ask and have not,
   because'--not because He delays, but because--ye ask amiss,' or
   because, having asked, you get up from your knees and go away, not
   looking to see whether the blessing is coming down or not.

   Ah! there is a sad amount of lying and hypocrisy in prayers for
   spiritual blessings. Many petitioners do not want to have them. They
   would not know what to do with them if they got them. They make the
   requests because their fathers did so before them, and because these
   are the right kind of things to say in a prayer. Such prayers get no
   answers. If a man prays for some spiritual enlargement, and then goes
   out into the world and lives clean contrary to his prayers, what right
   has he to say that God delays His answers? No, He does not delay His
   answers, but we push back His answers, and the gift that is given we
   will not take. Let us remember that the two halves of the divine
   dealings are not regulated by the same principle, though they be
   regulated by the same motive; and that the love which often delays for
   our good, in regard to the desires that have reference to outward
   things, is swift as the lightning to answer every petition which moves
   within the circle of our spiritual life.

   Whatsoever things ye desire, when ye stand praying, believe that' then
   and there ye receive them'; and the undelaying God will take care that
   you shall have them.'
     __________________________________________________________________

CHRIST'S QUESTION TO EACH

   For the Young

   . . . Believest then this? She saith unto Him, Yea, Lord.'--JOHN xi.
   26, 27.

   As each of these annual sermons which I have preached for so long comes
   round, I feel more solemnly the growing probability that it may be the
   last. Like a man nearing the end of his day's work, I want to make the
   most of the remaining moments. Whether this is the last sermon of the
   sort that I shall preach or not, it is certainly the last of the kind
   that some of you will hear from me, or possibly from any one.

   So, dear friends, I have felt that neither you nor I can afford to
   waste this hour in considering subjects of secondary interest,
   appropriate as some of them might be. I wish to come to the main point
   at once, and to press upon you all, and especially on the younger
   portion of this audience, the question of your own personal religion.

   The words of my text, as you will probably remember, were addressed by
   our Lord to Martha, as she was writhing in agony over her dead brother.
   Christ proclaims, with singular calmness and majesty, His character and
   work as the Resurrection and the Life, and then seeks to draw her from
   her absorbing sorrow to an effort of faith which shall grasp the truths
   He proclaims. He flashes out this sudden question, like the swift
   thrust of a gleaming dagger. It is a demand for credence to His
   assertion--on His bare word--tremendous as that assertion is. And nobly
   was the demand met by the as swift, unfaltering answer, Yea, Lord,' I
   believe in Thee, and so I believe in Thy word.

   Now, friends, Jesus Christ is putting the same question to each of us.
   And I pray that our answers may be Martha's.

   I. Note, first, the significance of the question.

   This.' What is this? The answer will tell us what are the central
   essential facts, faith in which makes a Christian. Of course the form
   in which our Lord's previous utterance was cast was coloured by the
   circumstances under which He spoke, and was so shaped as to meet the
   momentary exigency. But whilst thus the form is determined by the fact
   that He was speaking to a heart wrung by separation, and as a
   preliminary to a mighty act of resurrection, the essential truths which
   are so expressed are those which, as I believe, constitute the
   fundamental truths of Christianity--the very core and heart of the
   Gospel.

   Turn, then, but for a moment, to what immediately precedes my text. Our
   Lord says three things. First, He asserts His supernatural character
   and divine relation to life: I am the Resurrection and the Life.' Next,
   He declares that it is possible for Him to communicate to dying and to
   dead men a life which triumphs over death, and laughs at change, and
   persists through the superficial experience which we christen by the
   name of Death, unaffected, undiminished, as some sweet spring might
   gush up in the heart of a salt, solitary sea. And then He declares that
   the condition on which He, the Life-giver, gives of His immortal life
   to dying men, is their trust in Him. These three--His character and
   work, the gifts of which His hands are full, and the way by which the
   gifts may be appropriated by us men--these three are, as I take it, the
   central facts of Christianity. Believest thou this?'

   The question comes to us all; and in these days of unsettlement it is
   well to have some clear understanding of what is the irreducible
   minimum' of Christian teaching. I take it that it lies here. There are
   two opposite errors which, like all opposite errors, are bolted
   together, and revolve round a common centre. The one of them is the
   extreme conservative tendency which regards every pin and bolt of the
   tabernacle as if it were equally sacred with the altar and the ark. And
   the other is the tendency which christens itself liberal and
   progressive,' and which is always ready to exchange old lamps, though
   they have burnt brightly in the past, for new ones that are as yet only
   glittering metal and untried. In these days, when it is a presumption
   against any opinion, that our fathers believed it (an error into which
   young people are most prone to fall), and when, by the energy of
   contradiction, that error has evoked, and is evoking, the opposite
   exaggeration that adheres to all that is traditional, to all that has
   been regarded as belonging to the essentials of the Christian faith,
   and so is fearful, trembling for the Ark of God when there is no need,
   let us fall back upon these great words of the Master, and see that the
   things which constitute the living heart of His message and gift to the
   world are neither more nor less than these three: the supernatural
   Christ, the life which He imparts, and the condition on which He
   bestows it. Believest thou this?' If you do, you need take very little
   heed of the fluctuations of contemporary opinion as to other matters,
   valuable and important as these may be in their place; and may let men
   say what they will about disputed questions--about the method by which
   the vehicle of revelation has been created and preserved, about the
   regulation of the external forms of the Church, about a hundred other
   things that men often lose their tempers and spoil their Christianity
   by fighting for, and fall back upon the great central verity, a Christ
   from above, the Giver of Life to all that put their trust in Him.

   Let me expand this question for you. We all have sinned and come short
   of the glory of God'--believest thou this?' We must all appear before
   the judgment-seat of Christ'--believest thou this?' God so loved the
   world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on
   Him should not perish'--believest thou this?' The Son of Man came . . .
   to give His life a ransom for many'--believest thou this?' Being
   justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus
   Christ'--believest thou this?' Now is Christ risen from the dead, and
   become the first fruits of them that slept'--believest thou this?' I go
   to prepare a place for you'--believest thou this?' Where I am there
   shall also My servant be'--believest thou this?' So shall we ever be
   with the Lord'--believest thou this?' That is Christianity; and not
   theories about inspiration, and priesthood, and sacramental efficacy,
   or any of the other thorny questions which have, in the course of ages,
   started up. Here is the living centre; hold fast, I beseech you, by it.

   Then, again, the significance of this question is in the direction of
   making clear for us the way by which men lay hold of these great
   truths. The truths are of such a sort as that merely to say, Oh yes, I
   believe it; it is quite true!' is by no means sufficient. If a man
   tells me that two parallel lines produced ever so far will never meet,
   I say, Yes, I believe it'; and there is nothing more to be done or
   said. If a man says to me, Two and two make four,' I say, Yes'; and
   there my assent ends. If a man says, It is right to do right,' it is
   quite clear that the attitude of intellectual assent, which was quite
   enough for the other order of statements, is not enough for this one;
   and to merely say, Oh yes, it is right to do right,' is by no means the
   only attitude which we ought to take in regard to such a truth. And if
   God comes to me and says, Thou art a sinful man, and Jesus Christ has
   died for thee; and if thou takest Him for thy Saviour thou shalt be
   saved in this life, and saved for ever,' it is just as clear that no
   mere acceptance of the saying as a verity exhausts my proper attitude
   in reference to it. Or to come to plainer words, no man will really,
   and out and out, and adequately, believe this gospel unless he does a
   great deal more than assent to it or refrain from contradicting it.

   So I desire to urge this form of the question on you now. Dear
   brethren, do you trust in this,' which you say you believe? There is no
   greater enemy of the Christian faith than the ordinary lazy--what the
   philosophers call otiose, which is only a grand word for lazy--assent
   of the understanding, because men will not take the trouble to
   contradict it or think about it.

   That is the sort of Christianity which is the Christianity of a good
   many church and chapel-goers. They do not care enough about the subject
   to contradict the ordinary run of belief. Of all impotent things there
   is nothing more impotent than a creed which lies idly in a man's head,
   and never has touched his heart or his will. Why, I should get on a
   great deal better if I were talking to people that had never heard
   anything about the gospel than I have any chance of getting on with
   you, who have been drenched with it all your days, till it goes over
   you and runs off like water off a duck's back. The shells that were
   hurled against the earthworks of Sebastopol broke away the front
   surface of the mounds, and then the rubbish protected the
   fortifications; and that is what happens with many of my hearers. You
   have heard the gospel so often that the debris of your old hearings is
   raised between you and me, and my words cannot get at you. Believest
   thou this?'--not in the fashion in which people stand up in church or
   chapel and look about them and rattle off the Creed every Sunday of
   their lives, and attach not the ghost of an idea to a single clause of
   it; but in the sense that the conviction of these truths is so deep in
   your hearts that it moves your whole nature to cast yourselves on Jesus
   Christ as your Saviour and your all. That is the belief to which alone
   the life that is promised here will come. Oh! brethren, I have no
   business to ask you the question, and you have no need to answer it to
   me! Sometimes good, well-meaning people do a mint of harm by pushing
   such questions into the faces of people unprepared. But take the
   question into your own hearts, and remember what belief is, and what it
   is that you have to believe, and answer according to its true
   significance, and in the light of conscience, the solemn question that
   I press upon you.

   II. Now, secondly, let me ask you to think of what depends upon the
   answer.

   In the case before us--if I may look back to it for an instant--there
   is a very illuminative instance of what did depend upon it. Martha had
   to believe that Christ was the Resurrection and the Life as a condition
   precedent to her seeing that He was so. For, as He said Himself before
   He spoke the mighty word which raised Lazarus, Said I not unto thee
   that if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?'
   and so her faith was the condition of her being able to verify the
   facts which her faith grasped. Well, let me put that into plainer
   words. It is just this--a man gets from Christ what he trusts Christ to
   give him, and there is no other way of proving the truth of His
   promises than by accepting His promises, and then they fulfil
   themselves. You cannot know that a medicine will cure you till you
   swallow it. You must first taste' before you see that God is good.'
   Faith verifies itself by the experience it brings.

   And what does it bring? I said, all for which a man trusts Christ. All
   is summed up in that one favourite word of our Lord as revealed in this
   fourth Gospel, which includes in itself everything of blessedness and
   of righteousness--life, life eternal. Dear brethren, you and I, apart
   from Jesus Christ, are dead in trespasses and sins. The life that we
   live in the flesh is an apparent life, which covers over the true death
   of separation from God. And you young people, fix this in your minds at
   the beginning, it will save you many a heartache, and many an
   error--there is nothing worth calling life, except that which comes to
   a quiet heart submissive and enfranchised through faith in Jesus
   Christ. And if you will trust yourselves to Him, and answer this
   question with your ringing Yea, Lord!' then you will get a life which
   will quicken you out of your deadness; a life which will mould you day
   by day into more entire beauty of character and conformity with
   Himself; a life which will shed sweetness and charm over dusty
   commonplaces, and make sudden verdure spring in dreary, herbless
   deserts; a life which will bring a solemn joy into sorrow, a strength
   for every duty; which will bring manna in the wilderness, honey from
   the rock, light in darkness, and a present God for your sufficient
   portion; a life which will run on into the dim glories of eternity, and
   know no change but advancement, through the millenniums of ages.

   But, dear brethren, whilst thus, on condition of their faith, the door
   into all divine and endless blessedness and progress is flung wide open
   for men, do not forget the other side of the issues which depend on
   this question. For if it is true that Jesus Christ is Life, and the
   Source of it, and that faith in Him is the way by which you and I get
   it, then there is no escape from the solemn conclusion that to be out
   of Christ, and not to be exercising faith in Him, is to be infected
   with death, and to be shut up in a charnel-house. I dare not suppress
   the plain teaching of Jesus Christ Himself: He that hath the Son hath
   life; he that hath not the Son hath not life.' The issues that depend
   upon the answer to this question of my text may be summed up, if I may
   venture to say so, by taking the words of our Lord Himself and
   converting them into their opposite. He said, He that believeth . . .
   though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and
   believeth on Me shall never die.' That implies, He that believeth not
   in Christ, though he were living, yet shall he die, and whosoever
   liveth and believeth not shall never live. These are the issues--the
   alternative issues--that depend on your answer to this question.

   III. And now, lastly, let me ask you to think of the direct personal
   appeal to every soul that lies in this question.

   I have dwelt upon two out of the three words of which the question is
   composed--believest thou this?' Let me dwell for a moment on the third
   of them--believest thou?'

   Now that suggests the thought on which I do not need to dwell, but
   which I seek briefly to lay upon your hearts and consciences--viz., the
   intensely personal act of your own faith, by which alone Jesus Christ
   can be of any use to you. Do not be led away by any vague notions which
   people have about the benefits of a Church or its ordinances. Do not
   suppose that any sacraments or any priest can do for you what you have
   to do in the awful solitude of your own determining will--put out your
   hand and grasp Jesus Christ. Can any person or thing be the condition
   or channel of spiritual blessing to you, except in so far as your own
   individual act of trust comes into play? You must take the bread with
   your own hands, you must masticate it with your own teeth, you must
   digest it with your own organs, before it can minister nourishment to
   your blood and force to your life. And there is only one way by which
   any man can come into any vital and life-giving connection with Jesus
   Christ, and that is, by the exercise of his own personal faith.

   And remember, too, that as the exercise of uniting trust in Jesus
   Christ is exclusively your own affair, so exclusively your own affair
   is the responsibility of answering this question. To you alone is it
   addressed. You, and only you, have to answer it.

   There was once a poor woman who went after Jesus Christ, and put out a
   pale, wasted, tremulous finger to touch the hem of His garment. His
   fine sensitiveness detected the light pressure of that petitioning
   finger, and allowed virtue to go out, though the crowd surged about Him
   and thronged Him. No crowds come between you and Jesus Christ. You and
   He, the two of you, have, so to speak, the world to yourselves, and
   straight to you comes this question, Believest thou?'

   Ah! brethren, that habit of skulking into the middle of the multitude,
   and letting the most earnest appeal from the pulpit go diffused over
   the audience is the reason why you sit there quiet, complacent, perhaps
   wholly unaffected by what I am trying to make a pointed, individual
   address. Suppose all the other people in this place of worship were
   away but you and I, would not the word that I am trying to speak come
   with more force to your hearts than it does now? Well, think away the
   world and all its millions, and realise the fact that you stand in
   Christ's presence, with all His regard concentrated upon you, and that
   to thee individually this question comes from a gracious, loving heart,
   which longs that you answer, Yea, Lord, I believe!'

   Why should you not? Suppose you said to Him, No, Lord, I do not'; and
   suppose He said, Why do you not?' what do you think you would say then?
   You will have to answer it one day, in very solemn circumstances, when
   all the crowds will fall away, as they do from a soldier called out of
   the ranks to go up and answer for mutiny to his commanding officer.
   Every one of us shall give an account of himself,' and the lips that
   said so lovingly at the grave of Lazarus, Believest thou this?' and are
   saying it again, dear friend, to you, even through my poor words, will
   ask it once more. For this is the question the answer to which settles
   whether we shall stand at His right hand or at His left. Say now, with
   humble faith, Yea, Lord!' and you will have the blessing of them who
   have not seen, and yet have believed.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE OPEN GRAVE AT BETHANY

   Now Jesus was not yet come into the town, but was in that place where
   Martha met Him. The Jews then which were with her in the house, and
   comforted her, when they saw Mary, that she rose up hastily and went
   out, followed her, saying, She goeth unto the grave to weep there. Then
   when Mary was come where Jesus was, and saw Him, she fell down at His
   feet, saying unto Him, Lord, if Thou hadst been here, my brother had
   not died. When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also
   weeping which came with her, He groaned in the spirit, and was
   troubled, And said, Where have ye laid him? They say unto Him, Lord,
   come and see. Jesus wept. Then said the Jews, Behold how He loved him!
   And some of them said. Could not this Man, which opened the eyes of the
   blind, have caused that even this man should not have died! Jesus
   therefore again groaning in Himself, cometh to the grave. It was a
   cave, and a stone lay upon it. Jesus said, Take ye away the stone.
   Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto Him, Lord, by this
   time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days. Jesus saith unto
   her, Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou
   shouldest see the glory of God? Then they took away the stone from the
   place where the dead was laid. And Jesus lifted up His eyes, and said,
   Father, I thank Thee that Thou hast heard Me. And I know that Thou
   hearest Me always: but because of the people which stand by I said it,
   that they may believe that Thou hast sent Me. And when He thus had
   spoken, He cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he that
   was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his
   face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him,
   and let him go. Then many of the Jews which came to Mary, and had seen
   the things which Jesus did, believed on Him.'--JOHN xi. 30-45.

   Why did Jesus stay outside Bethany and summon Martha and Mary to come
   to Him? Apparently that He might keep Himself apart from the noisy
   crowd of conventional mourners whose presence affronted the majesty and
   sanctity of sorrow, and that He might speak to the hearts of the two
   real mourners. A divine decorum forbade Him to go to the house. The
   Life-bringer keeps apart. His comforts are spoken in solitude. He
   reverenced grief. How beautifully His sympathetic delicacy contrasts
   with the heartless rush of those who were comforting' Mary when they
   thought that she was driven to go suddenly to the grave by a fresh
   burst of sorrow! If they had had any real sympathy or perception, they
   would have stayed where they were, and let the poor burdened heart find
   ease in lonely weeping. But, like all vulgar souls, they had one
   idea--never to leave mourners alone or let them weep.

   Three stages seem discernible in the self-revelation of Jesus in this
   crowning miracle: His agitation and tears, His majestic confidence in
   His life-giving power now to be manifested, and His actual exercise of
   that power.

   I. The repetition by Mary of Martha's words, as her first salutation,
   tells a pathetic story of the one thought that had filled both sisters'
   hearts in these four dreary days. Why had He not come? How easily He
   could have come! How surely He could have prevented all this misery!
   Confidence in His power blends strangely with doubt as to His care. A
   hint of reproach is in the words, but more than a hint of faith in His
   might. He does not rebuke the rash judgment implied, for He knew the
   true love underlying it; but He does not directly answer Mary, as He
   had done Martha, for the two sisters needed different treatment.

   We note that Mary has no such hope as Martha had expressed. Her more
   passive, meditative disposition had bowed itself, and let the grief
   overwhelm her. So in her we see a specimen of the excess of sorrow
   which indulges in the monotonous repetition of what would have happened
   if something else that did not happen had happened, and which is too
   deeply dark to let a gleam of hope shine in. Words will do little to
   comfort such grief. Silent sharing of its weeping and helpful deeds
   will do most.

   So a great wave of emotion swept across the usually calm soul of Jesus,
   which John bids us trace to its cause by therefore' (ver. 33). The
   sight of Mary's real, and the mourners' half-real, tears, and the sound
   of their loud keening,' shook His spirit, and He yielded to, and even
   encouraged, the rush of feeling (troubled Himself') . But not only
   sympathy and sorrow ruffled the clear mirror of His spirit; another
   disturbing element was present. He was moved with indignation' (Rev.
   Ver. marg.). Anger at Providence often mingles with our grief, but that
   was not Christ's indignation. The only worthy explanation of that
   strange ingredient in Christ's agitation is that it was directed
   against the source of death,--namely, sin. He saw the cause manifested
   in the effects. He wept for the one, He was wroth at the other. The
   tears witnessed to the perfect love of the man, and of the God revealed
   in the man; the indignation witnessed to the recoil and aversion from
   sin of the perfectly righteous Man, and of the holy God manifested in
   Him. We get one glimpse into His heart, as on to some ocean heaving and
   mist-covered. The momentary sight proclaims the union in Him, as the
   Incarnate Word, of pity for our woes and of aversion from our sins.

   His question as to the place of the tomb is not what we should have
   expected; but its very abruptness indicates effort to suppress emotion,
   and resolve to lose no time in redressing the grief. Most sweetly human
   are the tears that start afresh after the moment's repression, as the
   little company begin to move towards the grave. And most sadly human
   are the unsympathetic criticisms of His sacred sorrow. Even the best
   affected of the bystanders are cool enough to note them as tokens of
   His love, at which perhaps there is a trace of wonder; while others
   snarl out a sarcasm which is double-barrelled, as casting doubt on the
   reality either of the love or of the power. It is easy to weep, but if
   He had cared for him, and could work miracles, He might surely have
   kept him alive.' How blind men are! Jesus wept,' and all that the
   lookers-on felt was astonishment that He should have cared so much for
   a dead man of no importance, or carping doubt as to the genuineness of
   His grief and the reality of His power. He shows us His pity and sorrow
   still--to no more effect with many.

   II. The passage to the tomb was marked by his continued agitation. But
   his arrival there brought calm and majesty. Now the time has come which
   He had in view when He left his refuge beyond Jordan; and, as is often
   the case with ourselves, suddenly tremor and tumult leave the spirit
   when face to face with a moment of crisis. There is nothing more
   remarkable in this narrative than the contrast between Jesus weeping
   and indignant, and Jesus serene and authoritative as He stands fronting
   the cave-sepulchre. The sudden transformation must have awed the
   gazers.

   He points to the stone, which, probably like that of many a grave
   discovered in Palestine, rolled in a groove cut in the rocky floor in
   front of the tomb. The command accords with His continual habit of
   confining the miraculous within the narrowest limits. He will do
   nothing by miracle which can be done without it. Lazarus could have
   heard and emerged, though the stone had remained. If the story had been
   a myth, he very likely would have done so. Like loose him, and let him
   go,' this is a little touch that cannot have been invented, and helps
   to confirm the simple, historical character of the account.

   Not less natural, though certainly as unlikely to have been told unless
   it had happened, is Martha's interruption. She must have heard what was
   going on, and, with her usual activity, have joined the procession,
   though we left her in the house. She thinks that Jesus is going into
   the grave; and a certain reverence for the poor remains, as well as for
   Him, makes her shrink from the thought of even His loving eyes seeing
   them now. Clearly she has forgotten the dim hopes which had begun in
   her when she talked with Jesus. Therefore He gently reminds her of
   these; for His words (ver. 40) can scarcely refer to anything but that
   interview, though the precise form of expression now used is not found
   in the report of it (vers. 25-27).

   We mark Christ's calm confidence in His own power. His identification
   of its effect with the outflashing of the glory of God, and His
   encouragement to her to exercise faith by suspending her sight of that
   glory upon her faith. Does that mean that He would not raise her
   brother unless she believed? No; for He had determined to awake him out
   of sleep' before He left Peraea. But Martha's faith was the condition
   of her seeing the glory of God in the miracle. We may see a thousand
   emanations of that glory, and see none of it. We shall see it if we
   exercise faith. In the natural world, seeing is believing'; in the
   spiritual, believing is seeing.

   Equally remarkable, as breathing serenest confidence, is the wonderful
   filial prayer. Our Lord speaks as if the miracle were already
   accomplished, so sure is He: Thou heardest Me.' Does this thanksgiving
   bring Him down to the level of other servants of God who have wrought
   miracles by divine power granted them? Certainly not; for it is in full
   accord with the teaching of all this Gospel, according to which the Son
   can do nothing of Himself,' but yet, whatsoever things the Father
   doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.' Both sides of the truth must
   be kept in view. The Son is not independent of the Father, but the Son
   is so constantly and perfectly one with the Father that He is conscious
   of unbroken communion, of continual wielding of the whole divine power.

   But the practical purpose of the thanksgiving is to be specially noted.
   It suspends His whole claims on the single issue about to be decided.
   It summons the people to mark the event. Never before had He thus
   heralded a miracle. Never had He deigned to say thus solemnly, If God
   does not work through Me now, reject Me as an impostor; if He does,
   yield to Me as Messiah.' The moment stands alone in His life. What a
   scene! There is the open tomb, with its dead occupant; there are the
   eager, sceptical crowd, the sisters pausing in their weeping to gaze,
   with some strange hopes beginning to creep into their hearts, the
   silent disciples, and, in front of them all, Jesus, with the radiance
   of power in the eyes that had just been swimming in tears, and a new
   elevation in His tones. How all would be hushed in expectance of the
   next moment's act!

   III. The miracle itself is told in the fewest words. What more was
   there to tell? The two ends, as it were, of a buried chain, appear
   above ground. Cause and effect were brought together. Rather, here was
   no chain of many links, as in physical phenomena, but here was the
   life-giving word, and there was the dead man living again. The loud
   voice' was as needless as the rolling away of the stone. It was but the
   sign of Christ's will acting. And the acting of His will, without any
   other cause, produces physical effects.

   Lazarus was far away from that rock cave. But, wherever he was, he
   could hear, and he must obey. So, with graveclothes entangling his
   feet, and a napkin about his livid face, he came stumbling out into the
   light that dazed his eyes, closed for four dark days, and stood silent
   and motionless in that awestruck crowd. One Person there was not
   awestruck. Christ's calm voice, that had just reverberated through the
   regions of the dead, spoke the simple command, Loose him, and let him
   go.' To Him it was no wonder that He should give back a life. For the
   Christ who wept is the Christ whose voice all that are in the graves
   shall hear, and shall come forth.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE SEVENTH MIRACLE IN JOHN'S GOSPEL -- THE RAISING OF LAZARUS

   And when Jesus thus had spoken, He cried with a loud voice, Lazarus,
   Come forth. 44. And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot
   with grave-clothes; and his face was bound about with a napkin.'--JOHN
   xi. 43, 44.

   The series of our Lord's miracles before the Passion, as recorded in
   this Gospel, is fitly closed with the raising of Lazarus. It crowns the
   whole, whether we regard the greatness of the fact, the manner of our
   Lord's working, the minuteness and richness of the accompanying
   details, the revelation of our Lord's heart, the consolations which it
   suggests to sorrowing spirits, or the immortal hopes which it kindles.

   And besides all this, the miracle is of importance for the development
   of the Evangelist's purpose, in that it makes the immediate occasion of
   the embittered hostility which finally precipitates the catastrophe of
   the Cross. Therefore the great length to which the narrative extends.

   Of course it is impossible for us to attempt, even in the most cursory
   manner, to go over the whole. We must content ourselves with dealing
   with one or two of the salient points. And there are three things in
   this narrative which I think well worthy of our notice. There is the
   revelation of Christ as our Brother, by emotion and sorrow. There is
   the revelation of Christ as our Lord by His consciousness of divine
   power. There is the revelation of Christ as our Life by His mighty
   life-giving word. And to these three points I ask you to turn briefly.

   I. First, then, we have here a revelation of Christ as our Brother, by
   emotion and sorrow.

   This miracle stands alone in the whole majestic series of His mighty
   works by the fact that it is preceded by a storm of emotion, which
   shakes the frame of the Master, which He is represented by the
   Evangelist not so much as suppressing as fostering, and which diverges
   and parts itself into the two feelings expressed by His groans and by
   His tears. The word which is rendered in our version He groaned in the
   spirit,' and which is twice repeated in the narrative, is, according to
   the investigations of the most careful philological commentators,
   expressive not only of the outward sign of an emotion, but of the
   nature of it. And the nature of the emotion is not merely the grief and
   the sympathy which distilled in tears, but it is something deeper and
   other than that. The word contains in it at least a tinge of the
   passion of indignation' (as it is expressed in the margin of the
   Revised Version). What caused the indignation? Cannot we fancy how
   there rose up, as in pale, spectral procession before His vision, the
   whole long series of human sorrows and losses, of which one was visible
   there before Him? He saw, in the one individual case, the whole genus.
   He saw the whole mass represented there, the ocean in the drop, and He
   looked beyond the fact and linked it with its cause. And as there rose
   before Him the reality of man's desolation through sin, and the thought
   that all this misery, loss, pain, parting, death, was a contradiction
   of the divine purpose, and an interruption of God's order, and that it
   had all been pulled down upon men's desperate heads by their own evil
   and their own folly, there rose in His heart the anger which is part of
   the perfectness of humanity when it looks upon sorrow linked by
   adamantine chains with sin.

   But the lightning of the wrath dissolved soon into the rain of pity and
   of sorrow, and, as we read, Jesus wept.' Looking upon the weeping Mary
   and the lamenting crowd, and Himself feeling the pain of the parting
   from the friend whom He loved, the tears, which are the confession of
   human nature that it is passing through an emotion too deep for words,
   came to His all-seeing eyes.

   Oh! brethren, surely--surely in this manifestation, or call it better,
   this revelation of Christ the Lord, expressed in these two
   emotions--surely there are large and blessed lessons for us! On them I
   can only touch in the lightest manner. Here, for one thing, is the
   blessed sign and proof of His true brotherhood with us. This
   Evangelist, to whom it was given to tell the Church and the world more
   than any of the others had imparted to them of the divine uniqueness of
   the Master's person, had also given to him in charge the corresponding
   and complementary message--to insist upon the reality and the verity of
   His manhood. His proclamation was the Word was made flesh,' and he had
   to dwell on both parts of that message, showing Him as the Word and
   showing Him as flesh. So he insists upon all the points which emerge in
   the course of his narrative that show the reality of Christ's corporeal
   manhood.

   He joins with the others, who had no such lofty proclamation entrusted
   to them, in telling us how He was bone of our bone, and flesh of our
   flesh,' in that He hungered and thirsted and slept, and was wearied;
   how He was man, reasonable soul and human spirit, in that He grieved
   and rejoiced, and wondered and desired, and mourned and wept. And so we
   can look upon Him, and feel that this in very deed is One of ourselves,
   with a spirit participant of all human experiences, and a heart
   tremulously vibrating with every emotion that belongs to man.

   Here we are also taught the sanction and the limits of sorrow.
   Christianity has nothing to do with the false Stoicism and the false
   religion which is partly pride and partly insincerity, that proclaims
   it wrong to weep when God smites. But just as clearly and distinctly as
   the story before us says to us, Weep for yourselves and for the loved
   ones that are gone,' so distinctly does it draw the limits within which
   sorrow is sacred and hallowing, and beyond which it is harmful and
   weakening. Set side by side the grief of these two poor weeping
   sisters, and the grief of the weeping Christ, and we get a large
   lesson. They could only repine that something else had not happened
   differently which would have made all different. If Thou hadst been
   here, my brother had not died.' One of the two sits with folded arms in
   the house, letting her sorrow flow over her pained head. Martha is
   unable, by reason of her grief, to grasp the consolation that is held
   out to her; her sorrow has made the hopes of the future seem to her
   very dim and of small account, and she puts away Thy brother shall rise
   again' with almost an impatient sweep of her hand. I know that he will
   rise in the resurrection at the last day. But oh! that is so far away,
   and what I want is present comfort.' Thus oblivious of duty, murmuring
   with regard to the accidents which might have been different, and
   unfitted to grasp the hopes that fill the future, these two have been
   hurt by their grief, and have let it overflow its banks and lay waste
   the land. But this Christ in His sorrow checks His sorrow that He may
   do His work; in His sorrow is confident that the Father hears; in His
   sorrow thinks of the bystanders, and would bring comfort and cheer to
   them. A sorrow which makes us more conscious of communion with the
   Father who is always listening, which makes us more conscious of power
   to do that which He has put it into our hand to do, which makes us more
   tender in our sympathies with all that mourn, and swifter and readier
   for our work--such a sorrow is doing what God meant for us; and is a
   blessing in so thin a disguise that we can scarcely call it veiled at
   all.

   And then, still further, there are here other lessons on which I cannot
   touch. Such, for instance, is the revelation in this emotion of the
   Master's, of a personal love that takes individuals to His heart, and
   feels all the sweetness and the power of friendship. That personal love
   is open to every one of us, and into the grace and the tenderness of it
   we may all penetrate. The disciple whom Jesus loved' is the Evangelist
   who, without jealousy, is glad to tell us that the same loving Lord
   took into the same sanctuary of His pure heart, Mary and Martha, and
   her brother. That which was given to them was not taken from him, and
   they each possessed the whole of the Master's love. So for every one of
   us that heart is wide open, and you and I, brethren, may contract such
   personal relations to the Master that we shall live with Christ as a
   man with his friend, and may feel that His heart is all ours.

   So much for the lessons of the emotions whereby Christ is manifested to
   us as our Brother.

   II. And now turn, in the next place, and that very briefly, to what
   lies side by side with this in the story, and at first sight may seem
   strangely contradictory of it, but in fact only completes the idea,
   viz. the majesties, calm consciousness of divine power by which He is
   revealed as our Lord.

   At one step from the agitation and the storm of feeling there comes,
   Take ye away the stone.' And in answer to the lamentations of the
   sister are spoken the great and wonderful words, Said I not unto thee
   that if thou wouldst believe, thou shouldst see the glory of God?' And
   He looks back there to the message that had been sent to the sisters in
   response to their unspoken hope that He would come, This sickness is
   not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be
   glorified thereby.' And He shows us that from the first moment, with
   the spontaneousness which, as I have already remarked in previous
   sermons on these signs,' characterises all the miracles of John's
   Gospel, He Himself knew what He would do,' and in the consciousness of
   His divine power had resolved that the dead Lazarus should be the
   occasion for the manifestation, the flashing out to the world, of the
   glory of God in the life-giving Son.

   And then, in the same tone of majestic consciousness, there follows
   that thanksgiving prior to the miracle as for the accomplished miracle.
   I thank Thee that Thou hast heard Me, and I knew that Thou hearest Me
   always: but because of the people which stand by I said it, that they
   may believe that Thou hast sent Me.' The best commentary upon these
   words, the deepest and the fullest exposition of the large truths that
   lie in them concerning the co-operation of the Father and the Son, is
   to be found in the passage from the fifth chapter of this Gospel,
   wherein there is set forth, drawn with the firmest hand, the clearest
   lines of truth upon this great and profound subject. The Son does
   nothing of Himself,' but whatsoever the Father doeth, that doeth the
   Son likewise.' A consciousness of continual co-operation with the
   Almighty Father, a consciousness that His will continually coincides
   with the Father's will, that unto Him there comes the power ever to do
   all that Omnipotence can do, and that though we may speak of a gift
   given and a power derived, the relation between the giving Father and
   the recipient Son is altogether different from, and other than the
   relation between, the man that asks and the God that bestows. Poor
   Martha said, I know that even now, whatsoever Thou askest of God He
   will give Thee.' She thought of Him as a good Man whose prayers had
   power with Heaven. But up into an altogether other region soars the
   consciousness expressed in these words as of a divine Son whose work is
   wholly parallel with the Father's work, and of whom the two things that
   sound contradictory can both be said. His omnipotence is His own; His
   omnipotence is the Father's: As the Father hath life' and therefore
   power in Himself, so hath He given'--there is the one half of the
   paradox--so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself'; there is
   the other. And unless you put them both together you do not think of
   Christ as Christ has taught us to think.

   III. Lastly, we have here the revelation of Christ as our Life in His
   mighty, life-giving word.

   The miracle, as I have said, stands high in the scale, not only by
   reason of what to us seems the greatness of the fact, though of course,
   properly speaking, in miracles there is no distinction as to the
   greatness of the fact, but also by reason of the manner of the working.
   The voice thrown into the cave reaches the ears of the sheeted dead:
   Lazarus, come forth!' And then, in words which convey the profound
   impression of awfulness and solemnity which had been made upon the
   Evangelist, we have the picture of the man with the graveclothes
   wrapped about his limbs, stumbling forth; and loving hands are bidden
   to take away the napkin which covered his face. Perhaps the hand
   trembled as it was put forth, not knowing what awful sight the veil
   might cover.

   With tenderest reticence, no word is spoken as to what followed. No
   hint escapes of the joy, no gleam of the experiences which the
   traveller brought back with him from that bourne' whence he had come.
   Surely some draught of Lethe must have been given him, that his spirit
   might be lulled into a wholesome forgetfulness, else life must have
   been a torment to him.

   But be that as it may, what we have to notice is the fact here, and
   what it teaches us as a fact. Is it not a revelation of Jesus Christ as
   the absolute Lord of Life and Death, giving the one, putting back the
   other? Death has caught hold of his prey. Shall the prey be taken from
   the mighty, and the lawful captive delivered? Yea, the prey shall be
   taken from the mighty.' His bare word is divinely operative. He says to
   that grisly shadow Come!' and he cometh; He says to him Go!' and he
   goeth. And as a shepherd will drive away the bear that has a lamb
   between his bloody fangs, and the brute retreats, snarling and
   growling, but dropping his prey, so at the Lord's voice Lazarus comes
   back to life, and disappointed Death skulks away to the darkness.

   The miracle shows Him as Lord of Death and Giver of Life. And it
   teaches another lesson, namely, the continuous persistency of the bond
   between Christ and His friend, unbroken and untouched by the
   superficial accident of life or death. Wheresoever Lazarus was he heard
   the voice, and wheresoever Lazarus was he knew the voice, and
   wheresoever Lazarus was he obeyed the voice. And so we are taught that
   the relationship between Christ our life, and all them that love and
   trust Him, is one on which the tooth of death that gnaws all other
   bonds in twain hath no power at all. Christ is the Life, and,
   therefore, Christ is the Resurrection, and the thing that we call death
   is but a film which spreads on the surface, but has no power to
   penetrate into the depths of the relationship between us and Him.

   Such, in briefest words, are the lessons of the miracle as a fact, but
   before I close I must remind you that it is to be looked at not only as
   a fact, but as a prophecy and as a parable.

   It is a prophecy in a modified sense, telling us at all events that He
   has the power to bid men back from the dust and darkness, and giving us
   the assurance which His own words convey to us yet more distinctly: The
   hour is coming when all that are in the graves shall hear His voice and
   shall come forth.' My brother! there be two resurrections in that one
   promise: the resurrection of Christ's friends and the resurrection of
   Christ's foes. And though to both His voice will be the awakening, some
   shall rise to joy and immortality and some to shame and everlasting
   contempt.' You will hear the voice; settle it for yourselves whether
   when He calls and thou answerest thou wilt say, Lo! here am I,' joyful
   to look upon Him; or whether thou wilt rise reluctant, and call upon
   the rocks and the hills to cover thee, and to hide thee from the face
   of Him that sitteth upon the Throne.'

   And this raising is a parable as well as a prophecy; for even as Christ
   was the life of this Lazarus, so, in a deeper and more real sense, and
   not in any shadowy, metaphorical, mystical sense, is Jesus Christ the
   life of every spirit that truly lives at all. We are dead in trespasses
   and sins.' For separation from God is death in all regions, death for
   the body in its kind, death for the mind, for the soul, for the spirit
   in their kinds; and only they who receive Christ into their hearts do
   live. Every Christian man is a miracle. There has been a true coming
   into the human of the divine, a true supernatural work, the infusion
   into a dead soul of the God-life which is the Christ-life.

   And you and I may have that life. What is the condition? They that hear
   shall live.' Do you hear? Do you welcome? Do you take that Christ into
   your hearts? Is He your Life, my brother?

   It is possible to resist that voice, to stuff your ears so full of
   clay, and worldliness, and sin, and self-reliance as that it shall not
   echo in your hearts. The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead
   shall hear the voice of the Son of Man, and they that hear shall live,'
   and obtain to-day a better resurrection' than the resurrection of the
   body. If you do not hear that voice, then you will remain in the
   congregation of the dead.'
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CAIAPHAS

   And one of them, named Caiaphas being the high priest that same year,
   said unto them, Ye know nothing at all, nor consider that it is
   expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the
   whole nation perish not.'--JOHN xi. 49, 50.

   The resurrection of Lazarus had raised a wave of popular excitement.
   Any stir amongst the people was dangerous, especially at the Passover
   time, which was nigh at hand, when Jerusalem would be filled with
   crowds of men, ready to take fire from any spark that might fall
   amongst them. So a hasty meeting of the principal ecclesiastical
   council of the Jews was summoned, in order to dismiss the situation,
   and concert measures for repressing the nascent enthusiasm. One might
   have expected to find there some disposition to inquire honestly into
   the claims of a Teacher who had such a witness to His claims as a man
   alive that had been dead. But nothing of the sort appears in their
   ignoble calculations. Like all weak men, they feel that something must
   be done' and are perfectly unable to say what. They admit Christ's
   miracles: This man doeth many miracles,' but they are not a bit the
   nearer to recognising His mission, being therein disobedient to their
   law and untrue to their office. They fear that any disturbance will
   bring Rome's heavy hand down on them, and lead to the loss of what
   national life they still possess. But even that fear is not patriotism
   nor religion. It is pure self-interest. They will take away our
   place'--the Temple, probably--and our nation.' The holy things were, in
   their eyes, their special property. And so, at this supreme moment, big
   with the fate of themselves and of their nation, their whole anxiety is
   about personal interests. They hesitate, and are at a loss what to do.

   But however they may hesitate, there is one man who knows his own
   mind--Caiaphas, the high priest. He has no doubt as to what is the
   right thing to do. He has the advantage of a perfectly clear and single
   purpose, and no sort of restraint of conscience or delicacy keeps him
   from speaking it out. He is impatient at their vacillation, and he
   brushes it all aside with the brusque and contemptuous speech: Ye know
   nothing at all!' The one point of view for us to take is that of our
   own interests. Let us have that clearly understood; when we once ask
   what is "expedient for us," there will be no doubt about the answer.
   This man must die. Never mind about His miracles, or His teaching, or
   the beauty of His character. His life is a perpetual danger to our
   prerogatives. I vote for death!' And so he clashes his advice down into
   the middle of their waverings, like a piece of iron into yielding
   water; and the strong man, restrained by no conscience, and speaking
   out cynically the thought that is floating in all their minds, but
   which they dare not utter, is master of the situation, and the resolve
   is taken. From that day forth' they determined to put Him to death.

   But John regards this selfish, cruel advice as a prophecy. Caiaphas
   spoke wiser things than he knew. The Divine Spirit breathed in strange
   fashion through even such lips as his, and moulded his savage utterance
   into such a form as that it became a fit expression for the very
   deepest thought about the nature and the power of Christ's death. He
   did indeed die for that people--thinks the Evangelist--even though they
   have rejected Him, and the dreaded Romans have come and taken away our
   place and nation--but His death had a wider purpose, and was not for
   that nation only, but that also He should gather together in one the
   children of God that are scattered abroad.'

   Let us, then, take these two aspects of the man and his counsel: the
   unscrupulous priest and his savage advice; the unconscious prophet and
   his great prediction.

   I. First, then, let us take the former point of view, and think of this
   unscrupulous priest and his savage advice. It is expedient for us that
   one man die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.'

   Remember who he was, the high priest of the nation, with Aaron's mitre
   on his brow, and centuries of illustrious traditions embodied in his
   person; set by his very office to tend the sacred flame of their
   Messianic hopes, and with pure hands and heart to offer sacrifice for
   the sins of the people; the head and crown of the national religion, in
   whose heart justice and mercy should have found a sanctuary if they had
   fled from all others; whose ears ought to have been opened to the
   faintest whisper of the voice of God; whose lips should ever have been
   ready to witness for the truth.

   And see what he is! A crafty schemer, as blind as a mole to the beauty
   of Christ's character and the greatness of His words; utterly
   unspiritual; undisguisedly selfish; rude as a boor; cruel as a
   cut-throat; and having reached that supreme height of wickedness in
   which he can dress his ugliest thought in the plainest words, and send
   them into the world unabashed. What a lesson this speech of Caiaphas,
   and the character disclosed by it, read to all persons who have a
   professional connection with religion!

   He can take one point of view only, in regard to the mightiest
   spiritual revelation that the world ever saw; and that is, its bearing
   upon his own miserable personal interests, and the interests of the
   order to which he belongs. And so, whatever may be the wisdom, or
   miracles, or goodness of Jesus, because He threatens the prerogatives
   of the priesthood, He must die and be got out of the way.

   This is only an extreme case of a temper and a tendency which is
   perennial. Popes and inquisitors and priests of all Churches have done
   the same, in their degree, in all ages. They have always been tempted
   to look upon religion and religious truth and religious organisations
   as existing somehow for their personal advantage. And so the Church is
   in danger!' generally means my position is threatened,' and heretics
   are got rid of, because their teaching is inconvenient for the
   prerogatives of a priesthood, and new truth is fought against, because
   officials do not see how it harmonises with their pre-eminence.

   It is not popes and priests and inquisitors only that are examples of
   the tendency. The warning is needed by every man who stands in such a
   position as mine, whose business it is professionally to handle sacred
   things, and to administer Christian institutions and Christian ritual.
   All such men are tempted to look upon the truth as their
   stock-in-trade, and to fight against innovations, and to array
   themselves instinctively against progress, and frown down new aspects
   and new teachers of truth, simply because they threaten, or appear to
   threaten, the position and prerogatives of the teachers that be.
   Caiaphas's sin is possible, and Caiaphas's temptation is actual, for
   every man whose profession it is to handle the oracles of God.

   But the lessons of this speech and character are for us all. Caiaphas's
   sentence is an undisguised, unblushing avowal of a purely selfish
   standpoint. It is not a common depth of degradation to stand up, and
   without a blush to say: I look at all claims of revelation, at all
   professedly spiritual truth, and at everything else, from one
   delightfully simple point of view--I ask myself, how does it bear upon
   what I think to be to my advantage?' What a deal of perplexity a man is
   saved if he takes up that position! Yes! and how he has damned himself
   in the very act of doing it! For, look what this absorbing and
   exclusive self-regard does in the illustration before us, and let us
   learn what it will do to ourselves.

   This selfish consideration of our own interests will make us as blind
   as bats to the most radiant beauty of truth; aye, and to Christ
   Himself, if the recognition of Him and of His message seems to threaten
   any of these. They tell us that fishes which live in the water of
   caverns come to lose their eyesight; and men that are always living in
   the dark holes of their own selfishly absorbed natures, they, too, lose
   their spiritual sight; and the fairest, loftiest, truest, and most
   radiant visions (which are realities) pass before their eyes, and they
   see them not. When you put on regard for yourselves as they do blinkers
   upon horses, you have no longer the power of wide, comprehensive
   vision, but only see straight forward upon the narrow line which you
   fancy to be marked out by your own interests. If ever there comes into
   the selfish man's mind a truth, or an aspect of Christ's mission, which
   may seem to cut against some of his practices or interests, how blind
   he is to it! When Lord Nelson was at Copenhagen, and they hoisted the
   signal of recall, he put his telescope up to his blind eye and said, I
   do not see it!' And that is exactly what this self-absorbed regard to
   our own interests does with hundreds of men who do not in the least
   degree know it. It blinds them to the plain will of the
   Commander-in-chief flying there at the masthead. There are none so
   blind as those who will not see'; and there are none who so certainly
   will not see as those who have an uneasy suspicion that if they do see
   they will have to change their tack. So I say, look at the instance
   before us, and learn the lesson of the blindness to truth and beauty
   which are Christ Himself, which comes of a regard to one's own
   interests.

   Then again, this same self-regard may bring a man down to any kind and
   degree of wrongdoing. Caiaphas was brought down by it, being the
   supreme judge of his nation, to be an assassin and an accomplice of
   murderers. And it is only a question of accident and of circumstances
   how far that man will descend who once yields himself up to the
   guidance of such a disposition and tendency. We have all of us to fight
   against the developed selfishness which takes the form of this, that,
   and the other sin; and we have all of us, if we are wise, to fight
   against the undeveloped sin which lies in all selfishness. Remember
   that if you begin with laying down as the canon of your conduct, It is
   expedient for me,' you have got upon an inclined plane that tilts at a
   very sharp angle, and is very sufficiently greased, and ends away down
   yonder in the depths of darkness and of death, and it is only a
   question of time how far and how fast, how deep and irrevocable, will
   be your descent.

   And lastly, this same way of looking at things which takes It is
   expedient' as the determining consideration, has in it an awful power
   of so twisting and searing a man's conscience as that he comes to look
   at evil and never to know that there is anything wrong in it. This
   cynical high priest in our text had no conception that he was doing
   anything but obeying the plainest dictates of the most natural
   self-preservation when he gave his opinion that they had better kill
   Christ than have any danger to their priesthood. The crime of the
   actual crucifixion was diminished because the doers were so unconscious
   that it was a crime; but the crime of the process by which they had
   come to be unconscious--Oh how that was increased and deepened! So, if
   we fix our eyes sharply and exclusively on what makes for our own
   advantage, and take that as the point of view from which we determine
   our conduct, we may, and we shall, bring ourselves into such a
   condition as that our consciences will cease to be sensitive to right
   and wrong; and we shall do all manner of bad things, and never know it.
   We shall wipe our mouths and say: "I have done no harm."' So, I beseech
   you, remember this, that to live for self is hell, and that the only
   antagonist of such selfishness, which leads to blindness, crime, and a
   seared conscience, is to yield ourselves to the love of God in Jesus
   Christ and to say: I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.'

   II. And now turn briefly to the second aspect of this saying, into
   which the former, if I may so say, melts away. We have the unconscious
   prophet and his great prediction.

   The Evangelist conceives that the man who filled the office of high
   priest, being the head of the theocratic community, was naturally the
   medium of a divine oracle. When he says, being the high priest that
   year, Caiaphas prophesied,' he does not imply that the high priestly
   office was annual, but simply desires to mark the fateful importance of
   that year for the history of the world and the priesthood. In that
   year' the great High Priest for ever' came and stood for a moment by
   the side of the earthly high priest--the Substance by the shadow--and
   by His offering of Himself as the one Sacrifice for sin for ever,
   deprived priesthood and sacrifice henceforward of all their validity.
   So that Caiaphas was in reality the last of the high priests, and those
   that succeeded him for something less than half a century were but like
   ghosts that walked after cock-crow. And what the Evangelist would mark
   is the importance of that year,' as making Caiaphas ever memorable to
   us. Solemn and strange that the long line of Aaron's priesthood ended
   in such a man--the river in a putrid morass--and that of all the years
   in the history of the nation, in that year' should such a person fill
   such an office!

   Being high priest he prophesied.' And was there anything strange in a
   bad man's prophesying? Did not the Spirit of God breathe through Balaam
   of old? Is there anything incredible in a man's prophesying
   unconsciously? Did not Pilate do so, when he nailed over the Cross,
   This is the King of the Jews,' and wrote it in Hebrew, and in Greek,
   and in Latin, conceiving himself to be perpetrating a rude jest, while
   he was proclaiming an everlasting truth? When the Pharisees stood at
   the foot of the Cross and taunted Him, He saved others, Himself He
   cannot save,' did they not, too, speak deeper things than they knew?
   And were not the lips of this unworthy, selfish, unspiritual,
   unscrupulous, cruel priest so used as that, all unconsciously, his
   words lent themselves to the proclamation of the glorious central truth
   of Christianity, that Christ died for the nation that slew Him and
   rejected Him, nor for them alone, but for all the world? Look, though
   but for a moment, at the thoughts that come from this new view of the
   words which we have been considering.

   They suggest to us, first of all, the twofold aspect of Christ's death.
   From the human point of view it was a savage murder by forms of law for
   political ends: Caiaphas and the priests slaying Him to avoid a popular
   tumult that might threaten their prerogatives, Pilate consenting to His
   death to avoid the unpopularity that might follow a refusal. From the
   divine point of view it is God's great sacrifice for the sin of the
   world. It is the most signal instance of that solemn law of Providence
   which runs all through the history of the world, whereby bad men's bad
   deeds, strained through the fine network, as it were, of the divine
   providence, lose their poison and become nutritious and fertilising.
   Thou makest the wrath of men to praise Thee; with the residue thereof
   Thou girdest Thyself.' The greatest crime ever done in the world is the
   greatest blessing ever given to the world. Man's sin works out the
   loftiest divine purpose, even as the coral insects blindly build up the
   reef that keeps back the waters, or as the sea in its wild, impotent
   rage, seeking to overwhelm the land, only throws upon the beach a
   barrier that confines its waves and curbs their fury.

   Then, again, this second aspect of the counsel of Caiaphas suggests for
   us the twofold consequences of that death on the nation itself. This
   Gospel of John was probably written after the destruction of Jerusalem.
   By the time that our Evangelist penned these words, the Romans had come
   and taken away their place and their nation. The catastrophe that
   Caiaphas and his party had, by their short-sighted policy, tried to
   prevent, had been brought about by the very deed itself. For Christ's
   death was practically the reason for the destruction of the Jewish
   commonwealth. When the husbandmen said, Come! let us kill Him, and
   seize on the inheritance,' which is simply putting Caiaphas's counsel
   into other language, they thereby deprived themselves of the
   inheritance. And so Christ's death was the destruction and not the
   salvation of the nation.

   And yet, it was true that He died for that people, for every man of
   them, for Caiaphas as truly as for John, for Judas as truly as for
   Peter, for all the Scribes and the Pharisees that mocked round His
   Cross, as truly as for the women that stood silently weeping there. He
   died for them all, and John, looking back upon the destruction of his
   nation, can yet say, He died for that people.' Yes! and just because He
   did, and because they rejected Him, His death, which they would not let
   be their salvation, became their destruction and their ruin. Oh!
   brethren, it is always so! He is either a savour of life unto life, or
   a savour of death unto death!' Behold! I lay in Zion for a foundation,
   a tried Stone.' Build upon it and you are safe. If you do not build
   upon it, that Stone becomes a stone of stumbling and a rock of
   offence.' You must either build upon Christ or fall over Him; you must
   either build upon Christ, or be crushed to powder under Him. Make your
   choice! The twofold effect is wrought ever, but we can choose which of
   the two shall be wrought upon us.

   Lastly, we have here the twofold sphere in which our Lord's mighty
   death works its effects.

   I have already said that this Gospel was written after the fall of
   Jerusalem. The whole tone of it shows that the conception of the Church
   as quite separate from Judaism was firmly established. The narrower
   national system had been shivered, and from out of the dust and hideous
   ruin of its crushing fall had emerged the fairer reality of a Church as
   wide as the world. The Temple on Zion--which was but a small building
   after all--had been burned with fire. It was their place, as Caiaphas
   called it. But the clearing away of the narrower edifice had revealed
   the rising walls of the great temple, the Christian Church, whose roof
   overarches every land, and in whose courts all men may stand and praise
   the Lord. So John, in his home in Ephesus, surrounded by flourishing
   churches in which Jews formed a small and ever-decreasing element,
   recognised how far the dove with the olive-branch In its mouth flew,
   and how certainly that nation was only a little fragment of the many
   for whom Christ died.

   The children of God that were scattered abroad' were all to be united
   round that Cross. Yes! the only thing that unites men together is their
   common relation to a Divine Redeemer. That bond is deeper than all
   national bonds, than all blood-bonds, than community of race, than
   family, than friendship, than social ties, than community of opinion,
   than community of purpose and action. It is destined to absorb them
   all. All these are transitory and they are imperfect; men wander
   isolated notwithstanding them all. But if we are knit to Christ, we are
   knit to all who are also knit to Him. One life animates all the limbs,
   and one life's blood circulates through all the veins. So also is
   Christ.' We are one in Him, in whom all the body fitly joined together
   maketh increase, and in whom all the building fitly framed together
   groweth. If we have yielded to the power of that Cross which draws us
   to itself, we shall have been more utterly alone, in our penitence and
   in our conscious surrender to Christ, than ever we were before. But He
   sets the solitary in families, and that solemn experience of being
   alone with our Judge and our Saviour will be followed by the blessed
   sense that we are no more solitary, but fellow-citizens with the saints
   and of the household of God.'

   That death brings men into the family of God. He will gather into one
   the scattered children of God.' They are called children by
   anticipation. For surely nothing can be clearer than that the doctrine
   of all John's writings is that men are not children of God by virtue of
   their humanity, except in the inferior sense of being made by Him, and
   in His image as creatures with spirit and will, but become children of
   God through faith in the Son of God, which brings about that new birth,
   whereby we become partakers of the Divine nature. To as many as
   received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to
   them that believe on His name.'

   So I beseech you, turn yourselves to that dear Christ who has died for
   us all, for us each, for me and for thee, and put your confidence in
   His great sacrifice. You will find that you pass from isolation into
   society, from death into life, from the death of selfishness into the
   life of God. Listen to Him, who says: Other sheep I have which are not
   of this fold, them also I must bring, and they shall hear My voice: and
   there shall be one flock' because there is one Shepherd.'
     __________________________________________________________________

LOVE'S PRODIGALITY CENSURED AND VINDICATED

   Then Jesus, six days before the passover, came to Bethany, where
   Lazarus was which had been dead, whom He raised from the dead. There
   they made Him a supper; and Martha served: but Lazarus was one of them
   that sat at the table with Him. Then took Mary a pound of ointment of
   spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped His
   feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the
   ointment. Then saith one of His disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon's son,
   which should betray Him, Why was not this ointment sold for three
   hundred pence, and given to the poor? This he said, not that he cared
   for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare
   what was put therein. Then said Jesus, Let her alone: against the day
   of My burying hath she kept this. For the poor always ye have with you;
   but Me ye have not always. Much people of the Jews therefore knew that
   He was there: and they came not for Jesus' sake only, but that they
   might see Lazarus also, whom He had raised from the dead. But the chief
   priests consulted that they might put Lazarus also to death; because
   that by reason of him many of the Jews went away, and believed on
   Jesus.'--JOHN xii. 1-11.

   Jesus came from Jericho, where He had left Zacchaeus rejoicing in the
   salvation that had come to his house, and whence Bartimaeus, rejoicing
   in His new power of vision, seems to have followed Him. A few hours
   brought Him to Bethany, and we know from other Evangelists what a
   tension of purpose marked Him, and awed the disciples, as He pressed on
   before them up the rocky way. His mind was full of the struggle and
   death which were so near. The modest village feast in the house of
   Simon the leper comes in strangely amid the gathering gloom; but, no
   doubt, Jesus accepted it, as He did everything, and entered into the
   spirit of the hour. He would not pain His hosts by self-absorbed
   aloofness at the table. The reason for the feast is obviously the
   raising of Lazarus, as is suggested by his being twice mentioned in
   verses 1 and 2.

   Our Lord had withdrawn to Ephraim so immediately after the miracle that
   the opportunity of honouring Him had not occurred. It was a brave
   tribute to pay Him in the face of the Sanhedrim's commandment (ch. xi.
   57). This incident sets in sharpest contrast the two figures of Mary,
   the type of love which delights to give its best, and Judas, the type
   of selfishness which is only eager to get; and it shows us Jesus
   casting His shield over the uncalculating giver, and putting meaning
   into her deed.

   I. In Eastern fashion, the guests seem to have all been males, no doubt
   the magnates of the village, and Jesus with His disciples. The former
   would have become accustomed to seeing Lazarus, but Christ's immediate
   followers would gaze curiously on him. And how he would gaze on Jesus,
   whom he had probably not seen since the napkin had been taken from his
   face. The two sisters were true to their respective characters. The
   bustling, practical Martha had perhaps not very fine or quickly moved
   emotions. She could not say graceful things to their benefactor, and
   probably she did not care to sit at His feet and drink in His teaching;
   but she loved Him with all her heart all the same, and showed it by
   serving. No doubt, she took care that the best dishes were carried to
   Jesus first, and, no doubt, as is the custom in those lands, she plied
   Him with invitations to partake. We do Martha less than justice if we
   do not honour her, and recognise that her kind of service is true
   service. She has many successors among Christ's true followers, who
   cannot gush' nor rise to the heights of His loftiest teaching, but who
   have taken Him for their Lord, and can, at any rate, do humble,
   practical service in kitchen or workshop. Their more intellectual' or
   poetically emotional brethren are tempted to look down on them, but
   Jesus is as ready to defend Martha against Mary, if she depreciates
   her, as He is to vindicate Mary's right to her kind of expression of
   love, if Martha should seek to force her own kind on her sister. There
   are differences of ministries, but the same Lord.'

   Mary was one of the unpractical sort, whom Martha is very apt to
   consider supremely useless, and often to lose patience with. Could she
   not find something useful to do in all the bustle of the feast? Had she
   no hands that could carry a dish, and no common sense that could help
   things on? Apparently not. Every one else was occupied, and how should
   she show the love that welled up in her heart as she looked at Lazarus
   sitting there beside Jesus? She had one costly possession, the pound of
   perfume. Clearly it was her own, for she would not have taken it if
   Lazarus and Mary had been joint owners. So, without thinking of
   anything but the great burden of love which she blessedly bore, she
   poured it on His head' (Mark) and on His feet, which the fashion of
   reclining at meals made accessible to her, standing behind Him, True
   love is profuse, not to say prodigal. It knows no better use for its
   best than to lavish it on the beloved, and can have no higher joy than
   that. It does not stay to calculate utility as seen by colder eyes. It
   has even a subtle delight in the very absence of practical results, for
   the expression of itself is the purer thereby. A basin of water and a
   towel would have done as well or better for washing Christ's feet, but
   not for relieving Mary's full heart. Do we know anything of that
   omnipotent impulse? Can we complacently set our givings beside Mary's?

   II. Judas is the foil to Mary. His sullen, black selfishness,
   stretching out hands like talons in eagerness to get, makes more
   radiant, and is itself made darker by, her shining deed of love.
   Goodness always rouses evil to self-assertion, and the other
   Evangelists connect Mary's action with Judas's final treachery as part
   of its impelling cause. They also show that his specious objection, by
   its apparent common sense and charitableness, found assent in the
   disciples. Three hundred pence worth of good ointment wasted which
   might have helped so many poor! Yes, and how much poorer the world
   would have been if it had not had this story! Mary was more utilitarian
   than her censors. She served the highest good of all generations by her
   uncalculating profusion, by which the poor have gained more than some
   few of them might have lost.

   Judas's criticism is still repeated. The world does not understand
   Christian self-sacrifice, for ends which seem to it shadowy as compared
   with the solid realities of helping material progress or satisfying
   material wants. A hundred critics, who do not do much for the poor
   themselves, will descant on the waste of money in religious
   enterprises, and smile condescendingly at the enthusiasts who are so
   unpractical. But love knows its own meaning, and need not be abashed by
   the censure of the unloving.

   John flashes out into a moment's indignation at the greed of Judas,
   which was masquerading as benevolence. His scathing laying bare of
   Judas's mean and thievish motive is no mere suspicion, but he must have
   known instances of dishonesty. When a man has gone so far in selfish
   greed that he has left common honesty behind him, no wonder if the
   sight of utterly self-surrendering love looks to him folly. The world
   has no instruments by which it can measure the elevation of the godly
   life. Mary would not be Mary if Judas approved of her or understood
   her.

   III. Jesus vindicates the act of His censured servant. His words fall
   into two parts, of which the former puts a meaning into Mary's act, of
   which she probably had not been aware, while the latter meets the
   carping criticism of Judas. That Jesus should see in the anointing a
   reference to His burying, pathetically indicates how that near end
   filled His thoughts, even while sharing in the simple feast. The clear
   vision of the Cross so close did not so absorb Him as to make Him
   indifferent either to Mary's love or to the villagers' humble
   festivity. However weighed upon, His heart was always sufficiently at
   leisure from itself to care for His friends and to defend them. He
   accepts every offering that love brings, and, in accepting, gives it a
   significance beyond the offerer's thought. We know not what use He may
   make of our poor service; but we may be sure that, if that which we can
   see to is right--namely, its motive,--He will take care of what we
   cannot see to--namely, its effect,--and will find noble use for the
   sacrifices which unloving critics pronounce useless waste.

   The poor always ye have with you.' Opportunities for the exercise of
   brotherly liberality are ever present, and therefore the obligation to
   it is constant. But these permanent duties do not preclude the
   opportunities for such special forms of expressing special love to
   Jesus as Mary had shown, and as must soon end. The same sense of
   approaching separation as in the former clause gives pathos to that
   restrained not always.' The fact of His being just about to leave them
   warranted extraordinary tokens of love, as all loving hearts know but
   too well. But, over and above the immediate reference of the words,
   they carry the wider lesson that, besides the customary duties of
   generous giving laid on us by the presence of ordinary poverty and
   distresses, there is room in Christian experience for extraordinary
   outflows from the fountain of a heart filled with love to Christ. The
   world may mock at it as useless prodigality, but Jesus sees that it is
   done for Him, and therefore He accepts it, and breathes meaning into
   it.

   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.' The Evangelist who records that promise does not mention Mary's
   name; John, who does mention the name, does not record the promise. It
   matters little whether our names are remembered, so long as Jesus beam
   them graven on His heart.
     __________________________________________________________________

A NEW KIND OF KING

   On the next day much people that were come to the feast, when they
   heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, took branches of palm-trees,
   and went forth to meet Him, and cried, Hosanna: Blessed is the King of
   Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord. And Jesus, when He had
   found a young ass, sat thereon; as it is written, Fear not, daughter of
   Sion: behold, thy King cometh, sitting on an ass's colt. These things
   understood not His disciples at the first: but when Jesus was
   glorified, then remembered they that these things were written of Him,
   and that they had done these things unto Him. The people therefore that
   was with Him when He called Lazarus out of his grave, and raised him
   from the dead, bare record. For this cause the people also met Him, for
   that they heard that He had done this miracle. The Pharisees therefore
   said among themselves, Perceive ye how ye prevail nothing! behold, the
   world is gone after Him. And there were certain Greeks among them that
   came up to worship at the feast: The same came therefore to Philip,
   which was of Bethsaida of Galilee, and desired him, saying, Sir, we
   would see Jesus. Philip cometh and telleth Andrew: and again Andrew and
   Philip tell Jesus, and Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come,
   that the Son of Man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto
   you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth
   alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his
   life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall
   keep it unto life eternal. If any man serve Me, let him follow Me; and
   where I am, there shall also My servant be: if any man serve Me, him
   will My Father honour.'--JOHN xii. 12-26.

   The difference between John's account of the entry into Jerusalem and
   those of the Synoptic Gospels is very characteristic. His is much
   briefer, but it brings the essentials out clearly, and is particular in
   showing its place as a link in the chain that drew on the final
   catastrophe, and in noting its effect on various classes.

   The next day' in verse 12 was probably the Sunday before the
   crucifixion. To understand the events of that day we must try to
   realise how rapidly, and, as the rulers thought, dangerously,
   excitement was rising among the crowds who had come up for the
   Passover, and who had heard of the raising of Lazarus. The Passover was
   always a time when national feeling was ready to blaze up, and any
   spark might light the fire. It looked as if Lazarus were going to be
   the match this time, and so, on the Saturday, the rulers had made up
   their minds to have him put out of the way in order to stop the current
   that was setting in, of acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah.

   They had already made up their minds to dispose of Jesus, and now, with
   cynical contempt for justice, they determined to put Lazarus also to
   death.' So there were to be two men who were to die for the people.'
   Keeping all this wave of popular feeling in view, it might have been
   expected that Jesus would, as hitherto, have escaped into privacy, or
   discouraged the offered homage of a crowd whose Messianic ideal was so
   different from His.

   John is mainly concerned in bringing out two points in his version of
   the incident. First, he tells us what we should not have gathered from
   the other Evangelists, that the triumphal procession began in
   Jerusalem, not in Bethany. It was the direct result of the ebullition
   of enthusiasm occasioned by the raising of Lazarus. The course of
   events seems to have been that the common people of the Jews' came
   streaming out to Bethany on the Sunday to gape and gaze at the risen
   man and Him who had raised him, that they and some of those who had
   been present at the raising went back to the city and carried thither
   the intelligence that Jesus was coming in from Bethany next day, and
   that then the procession to meet Him was organised.

   The meaning of the popular demonstration was plain, both from the palm
   branches, signs of victory and rejoicing, and from the chant, which is
   in part taken from Psalm cxviii. The Messianic application of that
   quotation is made unmistakable by the addition, even the King of
   Israel.' In the Psalm, he that cometh in the name of Jehovah,' means
   the worshipper drawing near to the Temple, but the added words divert
   the expression to Jesus, hail Him as the King, and invoke Him as
   Saviour.' Little did that shouting crowd understand what sort of a
   Saviour He was. Deliverance from Rome was what they were thinking of.

   We must remember what gross, unspiritual notions of the Messiah they
   had, and then we are prepared to feel how strangely unlike His whole
   past conduct Jesus' action now was. He had shrunk from crowds and their
   impure enthusiasm; He had slipped away into solitude when they wished
   to come by force to make Him a King, and had in every possible way
   sought to avoid publicity and the rousing of popular excitement. Now He
   deliberately sets Himself to intensify it. His choice of an ass on
   which to ride into Jerusalem was, and would be seen by many to be, a
   plain appropriation to Himself of a very distinct Messianic prophecy,
   and must have raised the heat of the crowd by many degrees. One can
   fancy the roar of acclaim which hailed Him when He met the multitude,
   and the wild emotion with which they strewed His path with garments
   hastily drawn off and cast before Him.

   Why did He thus contradict all His past, and court the smoky enthusiasm
   which He had hitherto damped? Because He knew that His hour' had come,
   and that the Cross was at hand, and He desired to bring it as speedily
   as might be, and thus to shorten the suffering that He would not avoid,
   and to finish the work which He was eager to complete. The impatience,
   as we might almost call it, which had marked Him on all that last
   journey, reached its height now, and may indicate to us for our
   sympathy and gratitude both His human longing to get the dark hour over
   and His fixed willingness to die for us.

   But even while Jesus accepted the acclamations and deliberately set
   Himself to stir up enthusiasm, He sought to purify the gross ideas of
   the crowd. What more striking way could He have chosen of declaring
   that all the turbulent passions and eagerness for a foot-to-foot
   conflict with Rome which were boiling in their breasts were alien to
   His purposes and to the true Messianic ideal, than that choosing of the
   meek, slow-pacing ass to bear Him? A conquering king would have made
   his triumphal entry in a chariot or on a battle-horse. This strange
   type of monarch is throned on an ass. It was not only for a verbal
   fulfilment of the prophecy, but for a demonstration of the essential
   nature of His kingdom, that He thus entered the city.

   John characteristically takes note of the effects of the entry on two
   classes, the disciples and the rulers. The former remembered with a
   sudden flash of enlightenment the meaning of the entry when the Cross
   and the Resurrection had taught them it. The rulers marked the popular
   feeling running high with bewilderment, and were, as Jesus meant them
   to be, made more determined to take vigorous measures to stop this
   madness of the mob.

   The second incident in this passage contrasts remarkably with the
   first, and yet is, in one aspect, a continuation of it. In the former,
   Jesus brought into prominence the true nature of His rule by His
   choosing the ass to carry Him, so declaring that His dominion rested,
   not on conquest, but on meekness. In the latter, He reveals a yet
   deeper aspect of His work, and teaches that His influence over men is
   won by utter self-sacrifice, and that His subjects must tread the same
   path of losing their lives by which He passes to His glory. The details
   of the incident are of small importance as compared with that great and
   solemn lesson; but we may note them in a few words. The desire of a few
   Greeks to see Him was probably only a reflection of the popular
   enthusiasm, and was prompted mainly by curiosity and the characteristic
   Greek eagerness to see any new thing.' The addressing of the request to
   Philip is perhaps explained by the fact that he was of Bethsaida of
   Galilee,' and had probably come into contact with these Greeks in the
   neighbouring Decapolis, on the other side of the lake. Philip's
   consultation of his fellow-townsman, Andrew, who is associated with him
   in other places, probably implies hesitation in granting so
   unprecedented a request. They did not know what Jesus might say to it.
   And what He did say was very unlike anything that they could have
   anticipated.

   The trivial request was as a narrow window through which Jesus'
   yearning spirit saw a great expanse--nothing less than the coming to
   Him of myriads of Gentiles, the much fruit' of which He immediately
   speaks, the other sheep' whom He must bring.' The thought must have
   been ever present to Him, or it would never have leaped to utterance on
   such an occasion. The little window shows us, too, what was habitually
   in His mind and heart. He, as it were, hears the striking of the hour
   of His glorification; in which expression the ideas of His being
   glorified by drawing men to the knowledge of His love, and of the Cross
   being not the lowest depth of His humiliation, but the highest apex of
   His glory--as it is always represented in this Gospel--seemed to be
   fused together.

   The seed must die if a harvest is to spring from it. That is the law
   for all moral and spiritual reformations. Every cause must have its
   martyrs. No man can be fruit-bearing unless he sacrifices himself. We
   shall not quicken' our fellows unless we die,' either literally or by
   the not less real martyrdom of rigid self-crucifixion and suppression.

   But that necessity is not only for Apostles or missionaries of great
   causes; it is the condition of all true, noble life, and prescribes the
   path not only for those who would live for others, but for all who
   would truly live their own lives. Self-renunciation guards the way to
   the tree of life.' That lesson was specially needed by Greeks,' for
   ignorance of it was the worm that gnawed the blossoms of their trees,
   whether of art or of literature. It is no less needed by our sensuously
   luxurious and eagerly acquisitive generation. The world's war-cries
   to-day are two--Get!' Enjoy!' Christ's command is, Renounce!' And in
   renouncing we shall realise both of these other aims, which they who
   pursue them only, never attain.

   Christ's servant must be Christ's follower: indeed service is
   following. The Cross has aspects in which it stands alone, and is
   incapable of being reproduced and makes all repetition needless. But it
   has also an aspect in which it not only may, but must, be reproduced in
   every disciple. And he who takes it for the ground of his trust only,
   and not as the pattern of his life, has need to ask himself whether his
   trust in it is genuine or worth anything. Of course they who follow a
   leader will arrive where the leader has gone, and though our feet are
   feeble and our progress devious and slow, we have here His promise that
   we shall not be lost in the desert, but, sustained by Him, will reach
   His side, and at last be where He is.
     __________________________________________________________________

AFTER CHRIST: WITH CHRIST

   If any man serve Me, let him follow Me; and where I am, there shall
   also My servant be.'--JOHN xii. 26.

   Our Lord was strangely moved by the apparently trivial incident of
   certain Greeks desiring to see Him. He recognised and hailed in them
   the first-fruits of the Gentiles. The Eastern sages at His cradle, and
   these representatives of Western culture within a few hours of the
   Cross, were alike prophets. So, in His answer to their request, our
   Lord passes beyond the immediate bearing of the request, and
   contemplates it in its relation to the future developments of His work.
   And the thought that the Son of Man is now about to begin to be
   glorified, at once brings Him face to face with the fact which must
   precede the glory, viz., His death.

   That great law that a higher life can only be reached by the decay of
   the lower, of which the Cross is the great instance, He illustrates,
   first, by an example from Nature, the corn of wheat which must die ere
   it brings forth fruit. Then He declares that this is a universal law,
   He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in
   this world shall keep it unto life eternal.' And then He declares that
   this universal law, which has its adumbration in Nature, and applies to
   all mankind, and is manifested in its highest form on the Cross, is the
   law of the Christian discipleship. If any man serve Me, let him follow
   Me,' and, as a consequence, where I am, there shall also My servant
   be.'

   In two clauses He covers the whole ground of the present and the
   future. Many thinkers and teachers have tried to crystallise their
   systems into some brief formula which may stick in the memory and be
   capable of a handy application. Follow Nature,' said ancient sages,
   attaching a nobler meaning to the condensed commandment than its modern
   repeaters often do; Follow duty,' say others; Follow Me' says Christ.
   That is enough for life. And for all the dim regions beyond, this
   prospect is sufficient, Where I am, there shall also My servant be.'
   One Form towers above the present and the future, and they both derive
   their colouring and their worth from Him and our relation to Him. To
   follow'--that is the condensed summary of life's duty. To be
   with'--that is the crystallising of all our hopes.

   I. The all-sufficient law for life.

   If any man serve Me, let him follow Me.' Everything is smelted down
   into that; and there you have a sufficient directory for every man's
   every action.

   Now although it has nothing to do with my present purpose, I can
   scarcely avoid pausing, just for a moment, to ask you to consider the
   perfect uniqueness of such an utterance as that. Think of one Man
   standing up before all mankind, and coolly and deliberately saying to
   them, I am the realised Ideal of human conduct; I am Incarnate
   Perfection; and all of you, in all the infinite variety of condition,
   culture, and character, are to take Me for your pattern and your
   guide.' The world has listened, and the world has not laughed nor been
   angry. Neither indignation nor mockery, which one might have expected
   would have extinguished such absurdity, has waited upon Christ's
   utterance. I have no time to dwell on this; it is apart from my
   purpose, but I would ask you fairly to consider how strange it is, and
   to ask how it is to be accounted for, that a Man said that, and that
   the wisest part of the world has consented to take Him at His own
   valuation; and after such an utterance as that, yet calls Him meek and
   lowly of heart.'

   But I pass away from that. What does He mean by this commandment,
   Follow Me'? Of course I need not remind you that it brings all duty
   down to the imitation of Jesus Christ. That is a commonplace that I do
   not need to dwell upon, nor to follow out into the many regions into
   which it would lead us, and where we might find fruitful subjects of
   contemplation; because I desire, in a sentence or two, to insist upon
   the special form of following which is here enjoined. It is a very
   grand thing to talk about the imitation of Christ, and even in its most
   superficial acceptation it is a good guide for all men. But no man has
   penetrated to the depths of that stringent and all-comprehensive
   commandment who has not recognised that there is one special thing in
   which Christ is to be our Pattern, and that is in regard to the very
   thing in which we think that He is most unique and inimitable. It is
   His Cross, and not His life; it is His death, and not His virtues,
   which He is here thinking about, and laying it upon all of us as the
   encyclopaedia and sum of all morality that we should be conformed to
   it. I have already pointed out to you in my introductory remarks the
   force of the present context. And so I need not further enlarge upon
   that, nor vindicate my declaration that Christ's death is the pattern
   which is here set before us. Of course we cannot imitate that in its
   effects, except in a very secondary and figurative fashion. But the
   spirit that underlay it, as the supreme Example of self-sacrifice, is
   commended to us all as the royal law for our lives, and unless we are
   conformed thereto we have no right to call ourselves Christ's
   disciples. To die for the sake of higher life, to give up our own will
   utterly in obedience to God, and in the unselfish desire to help and
   bless others, that is the Alpha and the Omega of discipleship. It
   always has been so and always will be so. And so, dear brethren, let us
   lay it to our own hearts, and make very stringent inquiry into our own
   conduct, whether we have ever come within sight of what makes a true
   disciple--viz., that we should be conformable unto His death.'

   Now our modern theology has far too much obscured this plain teaching
   of the New Testament, because it has been concerned--I do not say too
   much, but too exclusively, concerned--in setting forth the other aspect
   of Christ's death, by which it is what none of ours can ever even begin
   to be, the sacrifice for a world's sin. But, mind, there are two ways
   of looking at Christ's Cross. You must begin with recognising it as the
   basis of all your hope, the power by which you are delivered from sin
   as guilt, habit, and condemnation. And then you must take it, if it is
   to be the sacrifice and atonement for your sins, for the example of
   your lives, and mould yourselves after it. If any man serve Me, let him
   follow Me,' and here is the special region in which the following is to
   be realised: He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateth
   his life shall keep it unto life eternal.'

   Now, further, let me remind you that this brief, crystallised
   commandment, the essence of all practical godliness and Christianity,
   makes the blessed peculiarity of Christian morality. People ask what it
   is that distinguishes the teaching of the New Testament in regard to
   duty, from the teaching of lofty moralists and sages of old. Not the
   specific precepts, though these are, in many cases, deeper. Not the
   individual commandments, though the perspective of human excellences
   and virtues has been changed in Christianity, and the gentler and
   sweeter graces have been enthroned in the place where the world's
   morality has generally set the more ostentatious ones; the hero is,
   roughly speaking, the world's type, the saint is the New Testament's.
   But the true characteristic of Christian teaching as to conduct lies in
   this, that the law is in a Person, and that the power to obey the law
   comes from the love of the Person. All things are different; unwelcome
   duties are made less repulsive, and hard tasks are lightened, and
   sorrows are made tolerable, if only we are following Him. You remember
   the old story in Scottish history of the knight to whom was entrusted
   the king's heart; how, beset by the bands of the infidels, he tossed
   the golden casket into the thickest of their ranks and said, Go on, I
   follow thee'; and death itself was light when that thought spurred his
   steed forward.

   And so, brethren, it is far too hard a task to tread the road of duty
   which our consciences command us, unless we are drawn by Him Who is
   before us there on the road, and see the shining of His garments as He
   sets His face forward, and draws us after Him. It is easy to climb a
   glacier when the guide has cut with his ice-axe the steps in which he
   sets his feet, and we may set ours. The sternness of duty, and the
   rigidity of law, and the coldness of I ought,' are all changed when
   duty consists in following Christ, and He is before us on the rocky and
   narrow road.

   This precept is all-sufficient. Of course it will be a task of wisdom,
   of common sense, of daily culture in prudence and other graces; to
   apply the generalised precept to the specific cases that emerge in our
   lives. But whilst the application may require a great many subordinate
   by-laws, the royal statute is one, and simple, and enough. Follow Me.'
   Is it not a strange thing--it seems to me to be a perfectly unique
   thing, inexplicable except upon one hypothesis--that a life so brief,
   of which the records are so fragmentary, in which some of the
   relationships in which we stand had no place, and which was lived out
   in a world so utterly different from our own, should yet avail to be a
   guide to men, not in regard to specific points, so much as in regard to
   the imperial supremacy in it of these motives--Even Christ pleased not
   Himself; My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me.'

   And so, brethren, take this sharp test and apply it honestly to your
   own lives, day by day, in all their minutiae as well as in their great
   things. If any man serve Me,' how miserably that Christian service' has
   been evacuated of its deepest meaning, and superficialised and
   narrowed! Service'--that means people getting into a building and
   singing and praying. Service--that means acts of beneficence, teaching
   and preaching and giving material or spiritual helps of various kinds.
   These things have almost monopolised the word. But Christ enlarges its
   shrivelled contents once more, and teaches us that, far above all
   specifically so-called acts of religious worship, and more
   indispensable than so-called acts of Christian activity and service,
   lies the self-sacrificing conformity of character to Him. If any man
   serve Me,' let him sing and praise and pray? Yes; If any man serve Me,'
   let him try to help other people, and in the service of man do service
   to Me? Yes; but deeper than all, and fundamental to the others, If any
   man serve Me, let him follow Me'--Is that my discipleship? Let each one
   of us professing Christians ask himself.

   II. We have here the all-sufficient hope for the future.

   I know few things more beautiful than the perfectly naive way in which
   the greatest of thoughts is here set forth by the simplest of figures.
   If two men are walking on the same road to a place, the one that is in
   front will get there first, and his friend that is coming up after him
   will get there second, if he keeps on; and they will be united at the
   end, because, one after the other, they travel the road. And so says
   Christ: Of course, if you follow Me, you will join Me; and where I am,
   there shall also My servant be.' The implications of a Christian life,
   which is true following of Christ here, necessarily led to the
   confidence that in that future there will be union with Him. That is a
   deep thought, which might afford material for much to be said, but on
   which I cannot dwell now.

   I remarked at an early stage of this sermon how singular it was that
   our Lord should present Himself as the Pattern for all human
   excellence. Is it not even more singular that He should venture to
   present His own companionship as the sufficient recompense for every
   sorrow, for every effort, for all pain, for all pilgrimage? To be with
   Him, He thinks, is enough for any man and enough for all men. Who did
   He think Himself to be? What did He suppose His relation to the rest of
   us to be, who could thus calmly suggest to the world that the only
   thing that a heart needed for blessedness was to be beside Him? And we
   believe it, too little as it influences our lives. To be with Christ'
   is very much better'; better than all beneath the stars; better than
   all on this side eternity.

   What does our Lord mean by this all-sufficient hope? We know very
   little of that dim region beyond, but we know that until He comes again
   His departed servants are absent from the body. And, in our sense of
   the word, there can be no place for spirits thus free from corporeal
   environment. And so place, to-day at all events for the departed
   saints, and in a subordinate degree all through eternity, even when
   they are clothed with a glorified body, must be but a symbol of state,
   of condition, of spiritual character. Where I am there shall My servant
   be,' means specially What I am, that shall My servant be.' This perfect
   conformity to that dear Lord, whose footsteps we have followed;
   assimilation there, which is the issue of imitation here, though broken
   and imperfect, this is the hope that may gladden and animate every
   Christian heart.

   To be with Him is to be like Him, and therefore to be conscious of His
   presence in some fashion so intimate, so certain, as that all our
   earthly notions of presence, derived from the juxtaposition of
   corporeal frames, are infinite distance as compared with it. That is
   what my text dimly shadows for us. We know not how that union, which is
   to be as close as is possible while the distinction of personality is
   retained, may be accomplished. But this we know, that the coalescence
   of two drops of mercury, the running together of two drops of water,
   the blending of heart with heart here in love, are distance in
   comparison with the complete union of Christ and of the happy soul that
   rests in Him, as in an atmosphere and an ocean. Oh, brethren! it is not
   a thing to talk about; it is a thing to take to our hearts, and in
   silence to be thankful for; absent from the body; present with the
   Lord.'

   And is that not enough? The ground of it is enough. If we believe that
   Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will
   God bring with Him.' That future companionship is guaranteed to the
   Christian man by the words of Incarnate Truth, and by the resurrection
   of his Lord. The ground of it is enough, and the contents are
   enough--enough for faith; enough for hope; enough for peace; enough for
   work; and eminently enough for comfort.

   Ah! there are many other questions that we would fain ask, but to which
   there is no reply; but as the good old rough music of one of the
   eighteenth-century worthies has it, we have sufficient.


     My knowledge of that life is small,

     The eye of faith is dim;

     But tis enough that Christ knows all,

     And I shall be with Him.'

   It is enough for the disciple that he be as' (that is, with) his
   Master.' So let us take that thought to our hearts and animate
   ourselves with it, for it is legitimate for us to do so. That one hope
   is sufficient for us all.

   Only let us remember that, according to the teaching of my text, the
   companionship that blesses the future is the issue of following Him
   now. I know of no magic in death that is able to change the direction
   in which a man's face is turned. As he is travelling and has travelled,
   so he will travel when he comes through the tunnel, and out into the
   brighter light yonder. The line of a railway marked upon a map may stop
   at the boundaries of the country with which the map is concerned, but
   it is clearly going somewhere, and in the same direction. You want the
   other sheet of the map in order to see whither it is going. That is
   like your life. The map stops very abruptly, but the line does not
   stop. Take an unfinished row of tenements. On the last house there
   stick out bricks preparatory to the continuation of the row. And so our
   lives are, as it were, studded over with protuberances and preparations
   for the attachment thereto of a house not made with hands,' and yet
   conformed in its architecture to the row that we have built. The man
   that follows will attain. For life, the all-sufficient law is, after
   Christ; for hope, the all-sufficient assurance is, with Christ.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE UNIVERSAL MAGNET

   I, if I be lifted up . . . will draw all men unto Me.'--JOHN xii. 32.

   Never man spake like this Man,' said the wondering Temple officials who
   were sent to apprehend Jesus. There are many aspects of our Lord's
   teaching in which it strikes one as unique; but perhaps none is more
   singular than the boundless boldness of His assertions of His
   importance to the world. Just think of such sayings as these: I am the
   Light of the world'; I am the Bread of Life'; I am the Door'; A greater
   than Solomon is here'; In this place is One greater than the Temple.'
   We do not usually attach much importance to men's estimate of
   themselves; and gigantic claims such as these are generally met by
   incredulity or scorn. But the strange thing about Christ's loftiest
   assertions of His world-wide worth and personal sinlessness is that
   they provoke no contradiction, and that the world takes Him at His own
   valuation. So profound is the impression that He has made, that men
   assent when He says, I am meek and lowly in heart,' and do not answer
   as they would to anybody else, If you were, you would never have said
   so.'

   Now there is no more startling utterance of this extraordinary
   self-consciousness of Jesus Christ than the words that I have used for
   my text. They go deep down into the secret of His power. They open a
   glimpse into His inmost thoughts about Himself which He very seldom
   shows us. And they come to each of us with a very touching and strong
   personal appeal as to what we are doing with, and how we individually
   are responding to, that universal appeal on which He says that He is
   exercising.

   I. So I wish to dwell on these words now, and ask you first to notice
   here our Lord's forecasting of the Cross.

   A handful of Greeks had come up to Jerusalem to the Passover, and they
   desired to see Jesus, perhaps only because they had heard about Him,
   and to gratify some fleeting curiosity; perhaps for some deeper and
   more sacred reason. But in that tiny incident our Lord sees the first
   green blade coming up above the ground which was the prophet of an
   abundant harvest; the first drop of a great abundance of rain. He
   recognises that He is beginning to pass out from Israel into the world.
   But the thought of His world-wide influence thus indicated and
   prophesied immediately brings along with it the thought of what must be
   gone through before that influence can be established. And he discerns
   that, like the corn of wheat that falls into the ground, the condition
   of fruitfulness for Him is death.

   Now we are to remember that our Lord here is within a few hours of
   Gethsemane, and a few days of the Cross, and that events had so
   unfolded themselves that it needed no prophet to see that there could
   only be one end to the duel which he had deliberately brought about
   between Himself and the rulers of Israel. So that I build nothing upon
   the anticipation of the Cross, which comes out at this stage in our
   Lord's history, for any man in His position might have seen, as clearly
   as He did, that His path was blocked, and that very near at hand, by
   the grim instrument of death. But then remember that this same
   expression of my text occurs at a very much earlier period of our
   Lord's career, and that if we accept this Gospel of John, at the very
   beginning of it He said, As Moses lifted up the serpent in the
   wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up'; and that that
   was no mere passing thought is obvious from the fact that midway in His
   career, if we accept the testimony of the same Gospel, He used the same
   expression to cavilling opponents when He said: When ye have lifted up
   the Son of Man, then shall ye know that I am He.' And so at the
   beginning, in the middle, and at the end of His career the same idea is
   cast into the same words, a witness of the hold that it had upon Him,
   and the continual presence of it to His consciousness.

   I do not need to refer here to other illustrations and proofs of the
   same thing, only I desire to say, as plainly and strongly as I can,
   that modern ideas that Jesus Christ only recognised the necessity of
   His death at a late stage of His work, and that like other reformers,
   He began with buoyant hope, and thought that He had but to speak and
   the world would hear, and, like other reformers, was disenchanted by
   degrees, are, in my poor judgment, utterly baseless, and bluntly
   contradicted by the Gospel narratives. And so, dear brethren, this is
   the image that rises before us, and that ought to appeal to us all very
   plainly; a Christ who, from the first moment of His consciousness of
   Messiahship--and how early that consciousness was I am not here to
   inquire--was conscious likewise of the death that was to close it. He
   came not to be ministered unto, but to minister,' and likewise for this
   end, to give His life a ransom for the many.' That gracious, gentle
   life, full of all charities, and long-suffering, and sweet goodness,
   and patience, was not the life of a Man whose heart was at leisure from
   all anxiety about Himself, but the life of a Man before whom there
   stood, ever grim and distinct away on the horizon, the Cross and
   Himself upon it. You all remember a well-known picture that suggests
   the Shadow of Death,' the shadow of the Cross falling, unseen by Him,
   but seen with open eyes of horror by His mother. But the reality is a
   far more pathetic one than that; it is this, that He came on purpose to
   die.

   But now there is another point suggested by these remarkable words, and
   that is that our Lord regarded the Cross of shame as exaltation or
   lifting up.' I do not believe that the use of this remarkable phrase in
   our text finds its explanation in the few inches of elevation above the
   surface of the ground to which the crucified victims were usually
   raised. That is there, of course, but there is something far deeper and
   more wonderful than that in the background, and it is this in part,
   that that Cross, to Christ's eyes, bore a double aspect. So far as the
   inflicters or the externals of it were concerned, it was ignominy,
   shame, agony, the very lowest point of humiliation. But there was
   another side to it. What in one aspect is the nadir, the lowest point
   beneath men's feet, is in another aspect the zenith, the very highest
   point in the bending heaven above us. So throughout this Gospel, and
   very emphatically in the text, we find that we have the complement of
   the Pauline view of the Cross, which is, that it was shame and agony.
   For our Lord says, Now the hour is come when the Son of Man shall be
   glorified.' Whether it is glory or shame depends on what it was that
   bound Him there. The reason for His enduring it makes it the very
   climax and flaming summit of His flaming love. And, therefore, He is
   lifted up not merely because the Cross is elevated above the ground on
   the little elevation of Calvary, but that Cross is His throne, because
   there, in highest and sovereign fashion, are set forth His glories, the
   glories of His love, and of the grace and truth' of which He was full.'

   So let us not forget this double aspect, and whilst we bow before Him
   who endured the Cross, despising the shame,' let us also try to
   understand and to feel what He means when, in the vision of it, He
   said, the hour is come that the Son of Man shall be glorified.' It was
   meant for mockery, but mockery veiled unsuspected truth when they
   twined round His pale brows the crown of thorns, thereby setting forth
   unconsciously the everlasting truth that sovereignty is won by
   suffering; and placed in His unresisting hand the sceptre of reed,
   thereby setting forth the deep truth of His kingdom, that dominion is
   exercised in gentleness. Mightier than all rods of iron, or sharp
   swords which conquerors wield, and more lustrous and splendid than
   tiaras of gold glistening with diamonds, are the sceptre of reed in the
   hands, and the crown of thorns on the head, of the exalted, because
   crucified, Man of Sorrows.

   But there is still another aspect of Christ's vision of His Cross, for
   the lifting up' on it necessarily draws after it the lifting up to the
   dominion of the heavens. And so the Apostle, using a word kindred with
   that of my text, but intensifying it by addition, says, He became
   obedient even unto the death of the Cross, wherefore God also hath
   highly lifted Him up.'

   So here we have Christ's own conception of His death, that it was
   inevitable, that it was exaltation even in the act of dying, and that
   it drew after it, of inevitable necessity, dominion exercised from the
   heavens over all the earth. He was lifted up on Calvary, and because He
   was lifted up He has carried our manhood into the place of glory, and
   sitteth at the right hand of the Majesty on high. So much for the first
   point to which I would desire to turn your attention.

   II. Now we have here our Lord disclosing the secret of His attractive
   power.

   I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.' That
   if' expresses no doubt, it only sets forth the condition. The Christ
   lifted up on the Cross is the Christ that draws men. Now I would have
   you notice the fact that our Lord thus unveils, as it were, where His
   power to influence individuals and humanity chiefly resides. He speaks
   about His death in altogether a different fashion from that of other
   men, for He does not merely say, If I be lifted up from the earth, this
   story of the Cross will draw men,' but He says, I will' do it; and thus
   contemplates, as I shall have to say in a moment, continuous personal
   influence all through the ages.

   Now that is not how other people have to speak about their deaths, for
   all other men who have influenced the world for good or for evil,
   thinkers and benefactors, and reformers, social and religious, all of
   them come under the one law that their death is no part of their
   activity, but terminates their work, and that thereafter, with few
   exceptions, and for brief periods, their influence is a diminishing
   quantity. So one Apostle had to say, To abide in the flesh is more
   needful for you,' and another had to say, I will endeavour that after
   my decease ye may keep in mind the things that I have told you'; and
   all thinkers and teachers and helpers glide away further and further,
   and are wrapped about with thicker and thicker mists of oblivion, and
   their influence becomes less and less.

   The best that history can say about any of them is, This man, having
   served his generation by the will of God, fell on sleep.' But that
   other Man who was lifted on the Cross saw no corruption, and the death
   which puts a period to all other men's work was planted right in the
   centre of His, and was itself part of that work, and was followed by a
   new form of it which is to endure for ever.

   The Cross is the magnet of Christianity. Jesus Christ draws men, but it
   is by His Cross mainly, and that He felt this profoundly is plain
   enough, not only from such utterances as this of my text, but, to go no
   further, from the fact that He has asked us to remember only one thing
   about Him, and has established that ordinance of the Communion or the
   Lord's Supper, which is to remind us always, and to bear witness to the
   world, of where is the centre of His work, and the fact which He most
   desires that men should keep in mind, not the graciousness of His
   words, not their wisdom, not the good deeds that He did, but This is My
   body broken for you . . . this cup is the New Testament in My blood.' A
   religion which has for its chief rite the symbol of a death, must
   enshrine that death in the very heart of the forces to which it trusts
   to renew the world, and to bless individual souls.

   If, then, that is true, if Jesus Christ was not all wrong when He spoke
   as He did in my text, then the question arises, what is it about His
   death that makes it the magnet that will draw all men? Men are drawn by
   cords of love. They may be driven by other means, but they are drawn
   only by love. And what is it that makes Christ's death the highest and
   noblest and most wonderful and transcendent manifestation of love that
   the world has ever seen, or ever can see? No doubt you will think me
   very narrow and old-fashioned when I answer the question, with the
   profoundest conviction of my own mind, and, I hope, the trust of my own
   heart. The one thing that entitles men to interpret Christ's death as
   the supreme manifestation of love is that it was a death voluntarily
   undertaken for a world's sins.

   If you do not believe that, will you tell me what claim on your heart
   Christ has because He died? Has Socrates any claim on your heart? And
   are there not hundreds and thousands of martyrs who have just as much
   right to be regarded with reverence and affection as this Galilean
   carpenter's Son has, unless, when He died, He died as the Sacrifice for
   the sins of the whole world, and for yours and mine? I know all the
   pathetic beauty of the story. I know how many men's hearts are moved in
   some degree by the life and death of our Lord, who yet would hesitate
   to adopt the full-toned utterance which I have now been giving. But I
   would beseech you, dear friends, to lay this question seriously to
   heart, whether there is any legitimate reason for the reverence, the
   love, the worship, which the world is giving to this Galilean young
   man, if you strike out the thought that it was because He loved the
   world that He chose to die to loose it from the bands of its sin. It
   may be, it is, a most pathetic and lovely story, but it has not power
   to draw all men, unless it deals with that which all men need, and
   unless it is the self-surrender of the Son of God for the whole world.

   III. And now, lastly, we have here our Lord anticipating continuous and
   universal influence.

   I have already drawn attention to the peculiar fullness of the form of
   expression in my text, which, fairly interpreted, does certainly imply
   that our Lord at that supreme moment looked forward, as I have already
   said, to His death, not as putting a period to His work, but as being
   the transition from one form of influence operating upon a very narrow
   circle, to another form of influence which would one day flood the
   world. I do not need to dwell upon that thought, beyond seeking to
   emphasise this truth, that one ought to feel that Jesus Christ has a
   living connection now with each of us. It is not merely that the story
   of the Cross is left to work its results, but, as I for my part
   believe, that the dear Lord, who, before He became Man, was the Light
   of the World, and enlightened every man that came into it, after His
   death is yet more the Light of the World, and is exercising influence
   all over the earth, not only by conscience and the light that is within
   us, nor only through the effects of the record of His past, but by the
   continuous operations of His Spirit. I do not dwell upon that thought
   further than to say that I beseech you to think of Jesus Christ, not as
   One who died for our sins only, but as one who lives to-day, and
   to-day, in no rhetorical exaggeration but in simple and profound truth,
   is ready to help and to bless and to be with every one of us. It is
   Christ that died, yea, rather that is risen again, who is even at the
   right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us.'

   But, beyond that, mark His confidence of universal influence: I will
   draw all men.' I need not dwell upon the distinct adaptation of
   Christian truth, and of that sacrifice on the Cross, to the needs of
   all men. It is the universal remedy, for it goes direct to the
   universal epidemic. The thing that men and women want most, the thing
   that you want most, is that your relation with God shall be set right,
   and that you shall be delivered from the guilt of past sin, from the
   exposure to its power in the present and in the future. Whatever
   diversities of climate, civilisation, culture, character the world
   holds, every man is like every other man in this, that he has sinned
   and come short of the glory of God.' And it is because Christ's Cross
   goes direct to deal with that condition of things that the preaching of
   it is a gospel, not for this phase of society or that type of men or
   the other stage of culture, but that it is meant for, and is able to
   deliver and to bless, every man.

   So, brethren, a universal attraction is raying out from Christ's Cross,
   and from Himself to each of us. But that universal attraction can be
   resisted. If a man plants his feet firmly and wide apart, and holds on
   with both hands to some staple or holdfast, then the drawing cannot
   draw. There is the attraction, but he is not attracted. You demagnetise
   Christianity, as all history shows, if you strike out the death on the
   Cross for a world's sin. What is left is not a magnet, but a bit of
   scrap iron. And you can take yourself away from the influence of the
   attraction if you will, some of us by active resistance, some of us by
   mere negligence, as a cord cast over some slippery body with the
   purpose of drawing it, may slip off, and the thing lie there unmoved.

   And so I come to you now, dear friends, with the plain question, What
   are you doing in response to Christ's drawing of you? He has died for
   you on the Cross; does that not draw? He lives to bless you; does that
   not draw? He loves you with love changeless as a God, with love warm
   and emotional as a man; does that not draw? He speaks to you, I venture
   to say, through my poor words, and says, Come unto Me, and I will give
   you rest'; does that not draw? We are all in the bog. He stands on firm
   ground, and puts out a hand. If you like to clutch it, by the pledge of
   the nail-prints on the palm, He will lift you from the horrible pit and
   the miry clay, and set your feet upon a rock.' God grant that all of us
   may say, Draw us, and we will run after Thee'!
     __________________________________________________________________

THE SON OF MAN

   . . . Who is this Son of Man?'--JOHN xii. 34.

   I have thought that a useful sermon may be devoted to the consideration
   of the remarkable name which our Lord gives to Himself--the Son of
   Man.' And I have selected this instance of its occurrence, rather than
   any other, because it brings out a point which is too frequently
   overlooked, viz. that the name was an entirely strange and enigmatical
   one to the people who heard it. This question of utter bewilderment
   distinctly shows us that, and negatives, as it seems to me, the
   supposition which is often made, that the name Son of Man,' upon the
   lips of Jesus Christ, was equivalent to Messiah. Obviously there is no
   such significance attached to it by those who put this question. As
   obviously, for another reason, the two names do not cover the same
   ground; for our Lord sedulously avoided calling Himself the Christ, and
   habitually called Himself the Son of Man.

   Now one thing to observe about this name is that it is never found upon
   the lips of any but Jesus Christ. No man ever called him the Son of Man
   whilst He was upon earth, and only once do we find it applied to Him in
   the rest of Scripture, and that is on the occasion on which the first
   martyr, Stephen, dying at the foot of the old wall, saw the heavens
   opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.' Two
   other apparent instances of the use of the expression occur, both of
   them in the Book of Revelation, both of them quotations from the Old
   Testament, and in both the more probable reading gives a Son of Man,'
   not the Son of Man.'

   One more preliminary remark and I will pass to the title itself. The
   name has been often supposed to be taken from the remarkable prophecy
   in the Book of Daniel, of one like a son of man,' who receives from the
   Ancient of Days an everlasting kingdom which triumphs over those
   kingdoms of brute force which the prophet had seen. No doubt there is a
   connection between the prophecy and our Lord's use of the name, but it
   is to be observed that what the prophet speaks of is not the Son,' but
   one like a son of man'; or in other words, that what the prophecy
   dwells upon is simply the manhood of the future King in
   contradistinction to the bestial forms of Lion and Leopard and Bear,
   whose kingdoms go down before him. Of course Christ fulfils that
   prediction, and is the One like a son of man,' but we cannot say that
   the title is derived from the prophecy, in which, strictly speaking, it
   does not occur.

   What, then, is the force of this name, as applied to Himself by our
   Lord?

   First, we have in it Christ putting out His hand, if I may say so, to
   draw us to Himself--identifying Himself with us. Then we have, just as
   distinctly, Christ, by the use of this name, in a very real sense
   distinguishing Himself from us, and claiming to hold a unique and
   solitary relation to mankind. And then we have Christ, by the use of
   this name in its connection with the ancient prophecy, pointing us
   onward to a wonderful future.

   I. First then, Christ thereby identifies Himself with us.

   The name Son of Man, whatever more it means, declares the historical
   fact of His Incarnation, and the reality and genuineness, the
   completeness and fullness, of His assumption of humanity. And so it is
   significant to notice that the name is employed continually in the
   places in the Gospels where especial emphasis is to be placed, for some
   reason or other, upon our Lord's manhood, as, for instance, when He
   would bring into view the depth of His humiliation. It is this name
   that He uses when He says: Foxes have holes and the birds of the air
   have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head.' The use
   of the term there is very significant and profound; He contrasts His
   homelessness, not with the homes of men that dwell in palaces, but with
   the homes of the inferior creatures. As if He would say, Not merely am
   I individually homeless and shelterless, but I am so because I am truly
   a man, the only creature that builds houses, and the only creature that
   has not a home. Foxes have holes, anywhere they can rest, the birds of
   the air have,' not as our Bible gives it, nests,' but roosting-places,
   any bough will do for them. All living creatures are at home in this
   material universe; I, as a Representative of humanity, wander a pilgrim
   and a sojourner.' We are all restless and homeless; the creatures
   correspond to their environment. We have desires and longings, wild
   yearnings, and deep-seated needs, that wander through eternity'; the
   Son of Man, the representative of manhood, hath not where to lay His
   head.'

   Then the same expression is employed on occasions when our Lord desires
   to emphasise the completeness of His participation in all our
   conditions. As, for instance, the Son of Man came eating and drinking,'
   knowing the ordinary limitations and necessities of corporeal humanity;
   having the ordinary dependence upon external things; nor unwilling to
   taste, with pure and thankful lip, whatever gladness may be found in
   man's path through the supply of natural appetites.

   And the name is employed habitually on occasions when He desires to
   emphasise His manhood as having truly taken upon itself the whole
   weight and weariness of man's sin, and the whole burden of man's guilt,
   and the whole tragicalness of the penalties thereof, as in the familiar
   passages, so numerous that I need only refer to them and need not
   attempt to quote them, in which we read of the Son of Man being
   betrayed into the hands of sinners'; or in those words, for instance,
   which so marvellously blend the lowliness of the Man and the lofty
   consciousness of the mysterious relation which He bears to the whole
   world; The Son of Man came, not to be ministered unto, but to minister,
   and to give His life a ransom for the many.'

   Now if we gather all these instances together (and they are only
   specimens culled almost at random), and meditate for a moment on the
   Name as illuminated by such words as these, they suggest to us, first,
   how truly and how blessedly He is bone of our bone, and flesh of our
   flesh.' All our human joys were His. He knew all human sorrow. The
   ordinary wants of human nature belonged to Him; He hungered, He
   thirsted, and was weary; He ate and drank and slept. The ordinary wants
   of the human heart He knew; He was hurt by hatred, stung by
   ingratitude, yearned for love; His spirit expanded amongst friends, and
   was pained when they fell away. He fought and toiled, and sorrowed and
   enjoyed. He had to pray, to trust, and to weep. He was a Son of Man, a
   true man among men. His life was brief; we have but fragmentary records
   of it for three short years. In outward form it covers but a narrow
   area of human experience, and large tracts of human life seem to be
   unrepresented in it. Yet all ages and classes of men, in all
   circumstances, however unlike those of the peasant Rabbi who died when
   he was just entering mature manhood, may feel that this man comes
   closer to them than all beside. Whether for stimulus for duty, or for
   grace and patience in sorrow, or for restraint in enjoyment, or for the
   hallowing of all circumstances and all tasks, the presence and example
   of the Son of Man are sufficient. Wherever we go, we may track His
   footsteps by the drops of His blood upon the sharp flints that we have
   to tread. In all narrow passes, where the briars tear the wool of the
   flock, we may see, left there on the thorns, what they rent from the
   pure fleece of the Lamb of God that went before. The Son of Man is our
   Brother and our Example.

   And is it not beautiful, and does it not speak to us touchingly and
   sweetly of our Lord's earnest desire to get very near us and to bring
   us very near to Him, that this name, which emphasises humiliation and
   weakness and the likeness to ourselves, should be the name that is
   always upon His lips? Just as, if I may compare great things with
   small, some teacher or philanthropist, that went away from civilised
   into savage life, might leave behind him the name by which he was known
   in Europe, and adopt some barbarous designation that was significant in
   the language of the savage tribe to whom he was sent, and say to them:
   That is my name now, call me by that,' so this great Leader of our
   souls, who has landed upon our coasts with His hands full of blessings,
   His heart full of love, has taken a name that makes Him one of
   ourselves, and is never wearied of speaking to our hearts, and telling
   us that it is that by which He chooses to be known. It is a touch of
   the same infinite condescension which prompted His coming, that makes
   Him choose as His favourite and habitual designation the name of
   weakness and identification, the name Son of Man.'

   II. But now turn to what is equally distinct and clear in this title.
   Here we have our Lord distinguishing Himself from us, and plainly
   claiming a unique relationship to the whole world.

   Just fancy how absurd it would be for one of us to be perpetually
   insisting on the fact that he was a man, to be taking that as his
   continual description of himself, and pressing it upon people's
   attention as if there was something strange about it. The idea is
   preposterous; and the very frequency and emphasis with which the name
   comes from our Lord's lips, lead one to suspect that there is something
   lying behind it more than appears on the surface. That impression is
   confirmed and made a conviction, if you mark the article which is
   prefixed, the Son of Man. A Son of man is a very different idea. When
   He says the Son of Man' He seems to declare that in Himself there are
   gathered up all the qualities that constitute humanity; that He is, to
   use modern language, the realised Ideal of manhood, the typical Man, in
   whom is everything that belongs to manhood, and who stands forth as
   complete and perfect. Appropriately, then, the name is continually used
   with suggestions of authority and dignity contrasting with those of
   humiliation. The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath,' The Son of Man
   hath power on earth to forgive sins' and the like. So that you cannot
   get away from this, that this Man whom the whole world has conspired to
   profess to admire for His gentleness, and His meekness, and His
   lowliness, and His religious sanity, stood forward and said: I am
   complete and perfect, and everything that belongs to manhood you will
   find in Me.'

   And it is very significant in this connection that the designation
   occurs more frequently in the first three Gospels than in the fourth;
   which is alleged to present higher notions of the nature and
   personality of Jesus Christ than are found in the other three. There
   are more instances in Matthew's Gospel in which our Lord calls Himself
   the Son of Man, with all the implication of uniqueness and completeness
   which that name carries; there are more even in the Gospel of the
   Servant, the Gospel according to Mark, than in the Gospel of the Word
   of God, the Gospel according to John. And so I think we are entitled to
   say that by this name, which the testimony of all our four Gospels
   makes it certain, even to the most suspicious reader, that Christ
   applied to Himself, He declared His humanity, His absolutely perfect
   and complete humanity.

   In substance He is claiming the same thing for Himself that Paul
   claimed for Him when he called Him the second Adam.' There have been
   two men in the world, says Paul, the fallen Adam, with his infantile
   and undeveloped perfections, and the Christ, with His full and complete
   humanity. All other men are fragments, He is the entire and perfect
   chrysolite.' As one of our epigrammatic seventeenth-century divines has
   it, Aristotle is but the rubbish of an Adam,' and Adam is but the dim
   outline sketch of a Jesus. Between these two there has been none. The
   one Man as God meant him, the type of man, the perfect humanity, the
   realised ideal, the home of all the powers of manhood, is He who
   Himself claimed that place for Himself, and stepped into it with the
   strange words upon His lips, I am meek and lowly of heart.'

   Who is this Son of Man?' Ah, brethren! who can bring a clean thing out
   of an unclean? Not one.' A perfect Son of Man, born of a woman, bone of
   our bone and flesh of our flesh,' must be more than a Son of Man. And
   that moral completeness and that ideal perfection in all the faculties
   and parts of His nature which drove the betrayer to clash down the
   thirty pieces of silver in the sanctuary in despair that he had
   betrayed innocent blood'; which made Pilate wash his hands of the blood
   of this just person'; which stopped the mouths of the adversaries when
   He challenged them to convince Him of sin, and which all the world ever
   since has recognised and honoured, ought surely to lead us to ask the
   question, Who is this Son of Man?' and to answer it, as I pray we all
   may answer it, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God!'

   This fact of His absolute completeness invests His work with an
   altogether unique relationship to the rest of mankind. And so we find
   the name employed upon His own lips in connections in which He desires
   to set Himself forth as the single and solitary medium of all blessing
   and salvation to the world--as, for instance, The Son of Man came to
   give His life a ransom for the many'; Ye shall see the heavens opened,
   and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.' He
   is what the ladder was in the vision to the patriarch, with his head
   upon the stone and the Syrian sky over him--the Medium of all
   communication between earth and heaven. And that ladder which joins
   heaven to earth, and brings all angels down on the solitary watchers,
   comes straight down, as the sunbeams do, to every man wherever he is.
   Each of us sees the shortest line from his own standing-place to the
   central light, and its beams come straight to the apple of each man's
   eye. So because Christ is more than a man, because He is the Man, His
   blessings come to each of us direct and straight, as if they had been
   launched from the throne with a purpose and a message to us alone. Thus
   He who is in Himself perfect manhood touches all men, and all men touch
   Him, and the Son of Man, whom God hath sealed, will give to every one
   of us the bread from heaven. The unique relationship which brings Him
   into connection with every soul of man upon earth, and makes Him the
   Saviour, Helper, and Friend of us all, is expressed when He calls
   Himself the Son of Man.

   III. And now one last word in regard to the predictive character of
   this designation.

   Even if we cannot regard it as being actually a quotation of the
   prophecy in the Book of Daniel, there is an evident allusion to that
   prophecy, and to the whole circle of ideas presented by it, of an
   everlasting dominion, which shall destroy all antagonistic power, and
   of a solemn coming for judgment of One like a Son of Man.

   We find, then, the name occurring on our Lord's lips very frequently in
   that class of passages with which we are so familiar, and which are so
   numerous that I need not quote them to you; in which He speaks of the
   second coming of the Son of Man; as, for instance, that one which
   connects itself most distinctly with the Book of Daniel, the words of
   high solemn import before the tribunal of the High Priest. Hereafter
   shall ye see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power, and
   coming in the glories of heaven'; or as when He says, He hath given Him
   authority to execute judgment also because He is the Son of Man'; or as
   when the proto-martyr, with his last words, declared in sudden burst of
   surprise and thrill of gladness, I see the heavens opened, and the Son
   of Man standing at the right hand of God.'

   Two thoughts are all that I can touch on here. The name carries with it
   a blessed message of the present activity and perpetual manhood of the
   risen Lord. Stephen does not see Him as all the rest of Scripture
   paints Him, sitting at the right hand of God, but standing there. The
   emblem of His sitting at the right hand of God represents triumphant
   calmness in the undisturbed confidence of victory. It declares the
   completeness of the work that He has done upon earth, and that all the
   history of the future is but the unfolding of the consequences of that
   work which by His own testimony waa finished when He bowed His head and
   died. But the dying martyr sees him standing, as if He had sprung to
   His feet in response to the cry of faith from the first of the long
   train of sufferers. It is as if the Emperor upon His seat, looking down
   upon the arena where the gladiators are contending to the death, could
   not sit quiet amongst the flashing axes of the lictors and the purple
   curtains of His throne, and see their death-struggles, but must spring
   to His feet to help them, or at least bend down with the look and with
   the reality of sympathy. So Christ, the Son of Man, bearing His manhood
   with Him,


     Still bends on earth a Brother's eye,'

   and is the ever-present Helper of all struggling souls that put their
   trust in Him.

   Then as to the other and main thought here in view--the second coming
   of that perfect Manhood to be our Judge. It is too solemn a subject for
   human lips to say much about. It has been vulgarised, and the power
   taken out of it by many well-meant attempts to impress it upon men's
   hearts. But that coming is certain. That manhood could not end its
   relationship to us with the Cross, nor yet with the slow, solemn,
   upward progress which bore Him, pouring down blessings, up into the
   same bright cloud that had dwelt between the cherubim and had received
   Him into its mysterious recesses at the Transfiguration. That He should
   come again is the only possible completion of His work.

   That Judge is our Brother. So in the deepest sense we are tried by our
   Peer. Man's knowledge at its highest cannot tell the moral desert of
   anything that any man does. You may judge action, you may sentence for
   breaches of law, you may declare a man clear of any blame for such, but
   for any one to read the secrets of another heart is beyond human power;
   and if He that is the Judge were only a man there would be wild work,
   and many a blunder in the sentences that were given. But when we think
   that it is the Son of Man that is our Judge, then we know that the
   Omniscience of divinity, that ponders the hearts and reads the motives,
   will be all blended with the tenderness and sympathy of humanity; that
   we shall be judged by One who knows all our frame, not only with the
   knowledge of a Maker, if I may so say, as from outside, but with the
   knowledge of a possessor, as from within; that we shall be judged by
   One who has fought and conquered in all temptations; and most blessed
   of all, that we shall be judged by One with whom we have only to plead
   His own work and His own love and His Cross that we may stand acquitted
   before His throne.

   So, brethren, in that one mighty Name all the past, present, and future
   are gathered and blended together. In the past His Cross fills the
   retrospect: for the future there rises up, white and solemn, His
   judgment throne. The Son of Man is come to give His life a ransom for
   the many'; that is the centre point of all history. The Son of Man
   shall come to judge the world; that is the one thought that fills the
   future. Let us lay hold by true faith on the mighty work which He has
   done on the Cross, then we shall rejoice to see our Brother on the
   throne, when the judgment is set and the books are opened.' Oh,
   friends, cleave to Him ever in trust and love, in communion and
   imitation, in obedience and confession, that ye may be accounted worthy
   to stand before the Son of Man' in that day!
     __________________________________________________________________

A PARTING WARNING

   Jesus therefore said unto them, Yet a little while is the light among
   you. Walk while ye have the light, that darkness overtake you not: and
   he that walketh in the darkness knoweth not whither he goeth. While ye
   have the light, believe on the light, that ye may become sons of
   light.'--JOHN xii. 35, 36 (R.V.).

   These are the last words of our Lord's public ministry. He afterwards
   spoke only to His followers in the sweet seclusion of the sympathetic
   home at Bethany, and amid the sanctities of the upper chamber. Yet a
   little while am I with you'; --the sun had all but set. Two days more,
   and the Cross was reared on Calvary, but there was yet time to turn to
   the light. And so His divine charity hoped all things,' and continued
   to plead with those who had so long rejected Him. As befits a last
   appeal, the words unveil the heart of Christ. They are solemn with
   warning, radiant with promise, almost beseeching in their earnestness.
   He loves too well not to warn, but He will not leave the bitterness of
   threatening as a last savour on the palate, and so the lips, into which
   grace is poured, bade farewell to His enemies with the promise and the
   hope that even they may become the sons of light.'

   The solemnity of the occasion, then, gives great force to the words;
   and the remembrance of it sets us on the right track for estimating
   their significance. Let us see what lessons for us there may be in
   Christ's last words to the world.

   I. There is, first, a self-revelation.

   It is no mere grammatical pedantry that draws attention to the fact
   that four times in this text does our Lord employ the definite article,
   and speak of the light.' And that that is no mere accident is obvious
   from the fact that, in the last clause of our text, where the general
   idea of light is all that is meant to be emphatic, the article is
   omitted. Yet a little while is the light with you; walk while ye have
   the light . . . . While ye have the light, believe in the light, that
   ye may be the children of light.'

   So then, most distinctly here, in His final appeal to the world, He
   draws back the curtain, as it were, takes away the shade that had
   covered the lamp, and lets one full beam stream out for the last
   impression that He leaves. Is it not profoundly significant and
   impressive that then, of all times, over and over again, in the compass
   of these short verses, this Galilean peasant makes the tremendous
   assertion that He is what none other can be, in a solitary and
   transcendent sense, the Light of Mankind? Undismayed by universal
   rejection, unfaltering in spite of the curling lips of incredulity and
   scorn, unbroken by the near approach of certain martyrdom, He presents
   Himself before the world as its Light. Nothing in the history of mad,
   fanatical claims to inspiration and divine authority is to be compared
   with these assertions of our Lord. He is the fontal Source, He says, of
   all illumination; He stands before the whole race, and claims to be the
   Master-Light of all our seeing.' Whatsoever ideas of clearness of
   knowledge, of rapture of joy, of whiteness of purity, are symbolised by
   that great emblem, He declares that He manifests them all to men.
   Others may shine; but they are, as He said, lights kindled,' and
   therefore burning.' Others may shine, but they have caught their
   radiance from Him. All teachers, all helpers, all thinkers draw their
   inspiration, if they have any, from Him, in whom was life, and the Life
   was the Light of men.

   There has been blazing in the heavens of late a new star, that burst
   upon astonished astronomers in a void spot; but its brilliancy, though
   far transcending that of our sun, soon began to wane, and before long,
   apparently, there will be blackness again where there was blackness
   before. So all lights but His are temporary as well as derived, and men
   willing for a season to rejoice' in the fleeting splendours, and to
   listen to the teacher of a day, lose the illumination of his presence
   and guidance of his thoughts as the ages roll on. But the Light is not
   for an age, but for all time.'

   Now, brethren, this is Christ's estimate of Himself. I dwell not on it
   for the purpose of seeking to exhaust its depth of significance. In it
   there lies the assertion that He, and He only, is the source of all
   valid knowledge of the deepest sort concerning God and men, and their
   mutual relations. In it lie the assertion that He, and He only, is the
   source of all true gladness that may blend with our else darkened
   lives, and the further assertion that from Him, and from Him alone, can
   flow to us the purity that shall make us pure. We have to turn to that
   Man close by His Cross, on whom while He spoke the penumbra of the
   eclipse of death was beginning to show itself, and to say to Him what
   the Psalmist said of old to the Jehovah whom he knew, and whom we
   recognise as indwelling in Jesus: With Thee is the fountain of life.
   Thou makest us to drink of the river of Thy pleasures. In Thy light
   shall we see light.'

   So Christ thought of Himself; so Christ would have as to think of Him.
   And it becomes a question for us how, if we refuse to accept that claim
   of a solitary, underived, eternal, and universal power of illuminating
   mankind, we can save His character for the veneration of the world. We
   cannot go picking and choosing amongst the Master's words, and say This
   is historical, and that mythical.' We cannot select some of them, and
   leave others on one side. You must take the whole Christ if you take
   any Christ. And the whole Christ is He who, within sight of Calvary,
   and in the face of all but universal rejection, lifted up His voice,
   and, as His valediction to the world, declared, I am the Light of the
   world.' So He says to us. Oh that we all might cast ourselves before
   Him, with the cry, Lighten our darkness, O Lord, we beseech Thee!'

   II. Secondly, we have here a double exhortation.

   Walk in the light; believe in the light.' These two sum up all our
   duties; or rather, unveil for us the whole fullness of the possible
   privileges and blessings of which our relation to that light is
   capable. It is obvious that the latter of them is the deeper in idea,
   and the prior in order of sequence. There must be the belief' in the
   light before there is the walk' in the light. Walking includes the
   ideas of external activity and of progress. And so, putting these two
   exhortations together, we get the whole of Christianity considered as
   subjective. Believe in the light; trust in the light,' and then walk'
   in it. A word, then, about each of these branches of this double
   exhortation.

   Trust in the light.' The figure seems to be dropped at first sight; for
   it wants little faith to believe in the sunshine at midday; and when
   the light is pouring out, how can a man but see it? But the apparent
   incongruity of the metaphor points to something very deep in regard to
   the spiritual side. We cannot but believe in the light that meets the
   eye when it meets it, but it is possible for a man to blind himself to
   the shining of this light. Therefore the exhortation is needed--Believe
   in the light,' for only by believing it can you see it. Just as the eye
   is the organ of sight, just as its nerves are sensitive to the
   mysterious finger of the beam, just as on its mirroring surface
   impinges the gentle but mighty force that has winged its way across all
   the space between us and the sun, and yet falls without hurting, so
   faith, the inward eye which makes the bliss' of the solitary soul, is
   the one organ by which you and I can see the light. Seeing is
   believing,' says the old proverb. That is true in regard to the
   physical. Believing is seeing, is much rather the way to put it in
   regard to the spiritual and divine.

   Only as we trust the light do we see the light. Unless you and I put
   our confidence in Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Son of Man, we have
   no adequate knowledge of Him and no clear vision of Him. We must know
   that we may love; but we must love that we may know. We must believe
   that we may see. True, we must see that we may believe, but the
   preliminary vision which precedes belief is slight and dim as compared
   with the solidity and the depth of assurance with which we apprehend
   the reality and know the lustre of Him whom our faith has grasped. You
   will never know the glory of the light, nor the sweetness with which it
   falls upon the gazing eye, until you turn your face to that Master, and
   so receive on your susceptible and waiting heart the warmth and the
   radiance which He only can bestow. Believe in the light.' Trust it; or
   rather, trust Him who is it. He cannot deceive. This light from heaven
   can never lead astray. Absolutely we may rely upon it; unconditionally
   we must follow it. Lean upon Him--to take another metaphor--with all
   your weight. His arm is strong to bear the burden of our weaknesses,
   sorrows, and, above all, our sins. While ye have light, trust the
   light.'

   But then that is not enough. Man, with his double relations, must have
   an active and external as well as an inward and contemplative life. And
   so our Lord, side by side with the exhortation on which I have been
   touching, puts the other one, Walk in the light.' Our inward emotions,
   however deep and precious, however real the affiance, however
   whole-hearted the love, are maimed and stunted, and not what the light
   requires, unless there follows upon them the activity of the walk. What
   do we get the daylight for? To sit and gaze at it? By no means; but
   that it may guide us upon our path and help us in all our work. And so
   all Christian people need ever to remember that Jesus Christ has
   indissolubly bound together these two phases of our relation to Him as
   the light of life-inward and blessed contemplation by faith and outward
   practical activity. To walk is, of course, the familiar metaphor for
   the external life of man, and all our deeds are to be in conformity
   with the Light, and in communion with Him. This is the deepest
   designation, perhaps, of the true character of a Christian life in its
   external aspect--that it walks in Christ, doing nothing but as His
   light shines, and ever bearing along with it conscious fellowship with
   Him who is thus the guiding and irradiating and gladdening and
   sanctifying life of our lives, Walk in the light as He is in the
   light.' Our days fleet and change; His are stable and the same. For,
   although these words which I have quoted, in their original application
   refer to God the Father, they are no less true about Him who rests at
   the right hand of God, and is one light with Him. He is in the light.
   We may approximate to that stable and calm radiance, even though our
   lives are passed through changing scenes, and effort and struggle are
   their characteristics. And oh! how blessed, brother, such a life will
   be, all gladdened by the unsetting and unclouded sunshine that even in
   the shadiest places shines, and turns the darkness of the valley of the
   shadow of death into solemn light; teaching gloom to glow with a hidden
   sun!

   But there is not only the idea of activity here, there is the further
   notion of progress. Unless Christian people to their faith add work,
   and have both their faith and their consequent work in a continual
   condition of progress and growth, there is little reason to believe
   that they apprehend the light at all. If you trust the light you will
   walk in it; and if your days are not in conformity nor in communion
   with Him, and are not advancing nearer and nearer to the central blaze,
   then it becomes you to ask yourselves whether you have verily seen at
   all, or trusted at all, the Light of life.'

   III. Thirdly, there is here a warning.

   Walk whilst ye have the light, lest the darkness come upon you.' That
   is the summing up of the whole history of that stiff-necked and
   marvellous people. For what has all the history of Israel been since
   that day but groping in the wilderness without any pillar of fire? But
   there is more than that in it. Christ gives us this one solemn warning
   of what falls on us if we turn away from Him. Rejected light is the
   parent of the densest darkness, and the man who, having the light, does
   not trust it, piles around himself thick clouds of obscurity and gloom,
   far more doleful and impenetrable than the twilight that glimmers round
   the men who have never known the daylight of revelation. The history of
   un-Christian and anti-Christian Christendom is a terrible commentary
   upon these words of the Master, and the cries that we hear all round us
   to-day from men who will not follow the light of Christ, and moan or
   boast that they dwell in agnostic darkness, tell us that, of all the
   eclipses that can fall upon heart and mind, there is none so dismal or
   thunderously dark as that of the men who, having seen the light of
   Christ in the sky, have turned from it and said, It is no light, it is
   only a mock sun.' Brethren, tempt not that fate.

   And if Christian men and women do not advance in their knowledge and
   their conformity, like clouds of darkness will fall upon them. None is
   so hopeless as the unprogressive Christian, none so far away as those
   who have been brought nigh and have never come any nigher. If you
   believe the light, see that you growingly trust and walk in it, else
   darkness will come upon you, and you will not know whither you go.

   IV. And lastly, there is here a hope and a promise.


     That ye may be the sons of light.'

   Faith and obedience turn a man into the likeness of that in which he
   trusts. If we trust Jesus we open our hearts to Him; and if we open our
   hearts to Him He will come in. If you are in a darkened room, what have
   you to do in order to have it filled with glad sunshine? Open the
   shutters and pull up the blinds, and the light will do all the rest. If
   you trust the light, it will rush in and fill every crevice and cranny
   of your hearts. Faith and obedience will mould us, by their natural
   effect, into the resemblance of that on which we lean. As one of the
   old German mystics said, What thou lovest, that thou dost become.' And
   it is blessedly true. The same principle makes Christians like Christ,
   and makes idolaters like their gods. They that make them are like unto
   them; so is every one that trusteth in them,' says one of the Psalms.
   They followed after vanity and are become vain,' says the chronicler of
   Israel's defections. We with unveiled faces beholding'--or
   mirroring--the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image.'
   Trust the light and you become sons of the light.'

   And so, dear friends, all of us may hope that by degrees, as the reward
   of faith and of walking, we still may bear the image of the heavenly,
   even here on earth. While as yet we only believe in the light, we may
   participate in its transforming power, like some far-off planet on the
   utmost bounds of some solar system, that receives faint and small
   supplies of light and warmth, through a thick atmosphere of vapour, and
   across immeasurable spaces. But we have the assurance that we shall be
   carried nearer our centre, and then, like the planets that are closer
   to the sun than our earth is, we shall feel the fuller power of the
   heat, and be saturated with the glory of the light. We shall see Him as
   He is'; and then we too shall blaze forth like the sun in the kingdom
   of our Father.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE LOVE OF THE DEPARTING CHRIST

   . . . When Jesus knew that His hour was come that He should depart out
   of this world unto the Father, having loved His own which were in the
   world, He loved them unto the end.'--JOHN xiii. 1.

   The latter half of St. John's Gospel, which begins with these words, is
   the Holy of Holies of the New Testament. Nowhere else do the blended
   lights of our Lord's superhuman dignity and human tenderness shine with
   such lambent brightness. Nowhere else is His speech at once so simple
   and so deep. Nowhere else have we the heart of God so unveiled to us.
   On no other page, even of the Bible, have so many eyes, glistening with
   tears, looked and had the tears dried. The immortal words which Christ
   spoke in that upper chamber are His highest self-revelation in speech,
   even as the Cross to which they led up is His most perfect
   self-revelation in act.

   To this most sacred part of the New Testament my text is the
   introduction. It unveils to us gleams of Christ's heart, and does what
   the Evangelists very seldom venture to do, viz. gives us some sort of
   analysis of the influences which then determined the flow and the shape
   of our Lord's love.

   Many good commentators prefer to read the last words of my text, He
   loved them unto the uttermost' rather than unto the end'--so taking
   them to express the depth and degree rather than the permanence and
   perpetuity of our Lord's love. And that seems to me to be by far the
   worthier and the nobler meaning, as well as the one which is borne out
   by the usual signification of the expression in other Greek authors. It
   is much to know that the emotions of these last moments did not
   interrupt Christ's love. It is even more to know that in some sense
   they perfected it, giving even a greater vitality to its tenderness,
   and a more precious sweetness to its manifestations. So understood, the
   words explain for us why it was that in the sanctity of the upper
   chamber there ensued the marvellous act of the foot-washing, the
   marvellous discourses which follow, and the climax of all, that
   High-priestly prayer. They give utterance to a love which Christ's
   consciousness at that solemn hour tended to shapen and to deepen.

   So, under the Evangelist's guidance, we may venture to gaze at least a
   little way into these depths, and with all reverence to try and see
   something at all events of the fringe and surface of the love which
   passeth knowledge.' Jesus, knowing that His hour was come, that He
   should depart out of the world unto the Father, having loved His own
   which were in the world, loved them then unto the uttermost.'

   My object will be best accomplished by simply following the guidance of
   the words before us, and asking you to look first at that love as a
   love which was not interrupted, but perfected by the prospect of
   separation.

   I. It would take us much too far away, however interesting the
   contemplation might be, to dwell with any particularity upon our Lord's
   consciousness as it is here set forth in that He knew that His hour was
   come, that He should depart out of the world unto the Father.' But I
   can scarcely avoid noticing, though only in a few sentences, the
   salient points of that Christ-consciousness as it is set forth here.

   He knew that His hour was come.' All His life was passed under the
   consciousness of a divine necessity laid upon Him, to which He lovingly
   and cheerfully yielded Himself. On His lips there are no words more
   significant, and few more frequent, than that divine I must!' It
   behoves the Son of Man' to do this, that, and the other--yielding to
   the necessity imposed by the Father's will, and sealed by His own
   loving resolve to be the Saviour of the world. And in like manner, all
   through His life He declares Himself conscious of the hours which mark
   the several crises and stages of His mission. They come to Him and He
   discerns them. No external power can coerce Him to any act till the
   hour come. No external power can hinder Him from the act when it comes.
   When the hour strikes He hears the phantom sound of the bell; and,
   hearing, He obeys. And thus, at the last and supreme moment, to Him it
   dawned unquestionable and irrevocable. How did He meet it? Whilst on
   the one hand there was the shrinking of which we have such pathetic
   testimony in the broken prayer that He Himself amended--Father! save Me
   from this hour . . . . Yet for this cause came I unto this
   hour,'--there is a strange, triumphant joy, blending with the
   shrinking, that the decisive hour is at last come.

   Mark, too, the form which the consciousness took--not that now the hour
   had come for suffering or death or bearing the sins of the world--all
   which aspects of it were nevertheless present to Him, as we know; but
   that now He was soon to leave all the world beneath Him and to return
   to the Father.

   The terror, the agony, the shame, the mysterious burden of a world's
   sins were now to be laid upon Him--all these elements are submerged, as
   it were, and become less conspicuous than the one thought of leaving
   behind all the limitations, and the humiliations, and the compelled
   association with evil which, like a burning brand laid upon a tender
   skin, was an hourly and momentary agony to Him, and soaring above them
   all, unto His own calm home, His habitation from eternity with the
   Father, as He had been before the world was. How strange this blending
   of shrinking and of eagerness, of sorrow and of joy, of human trembling
   consciousness of impending death, and of triumphant consciousness of
   the approach of the hour when the Son of Man, even in His bitterest
   agony and deepest humiliation, should, paradoxically, be glorified, and
   should leave the world to go unto the Father'!

   We cannot enter with any particularity or depth into this marvellous
   and unique consciousness, but it is set forth here--and that is the
   point to which especially I desire to turn your attention--as the basis
   and the reason for a special tenderness softening His voice, and taking
   possession of His heart, as He thought of the impending separation.

   And is that not beautiful? And does it not help us to realise how truly
   bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh,' and bearing a heart thrilling
   with all innocent human emotions that divine Saviour was? We, too, have
   known what it is to feel, because of approaching separation from dear
   ones, the need for a tenderer tenderness. At such moments the masks of
   use and wont drop away, and we are eager to find some word, to put our
   whole souls into some look, our whole strength into one clinging
   embrace that may express all our love, and may be a joy to two hearts
   for ever after to remember. The Master knew that longing, and felt the
   pain of separation; and He, too, yielded to the human impulse which
   makes the thought of parting the key to unlock the hidden chambers of
   the most jealously guarded heart, and let the shyest of its emotions
   come out for once into the daylight. So, knowing that His hour was
   come, He loved them unto the uttermost.'

   But there is not only in this a wonderful expression of the true
   humanity of the Christ, but along with that a suggestion of something
   more sacred and deeper still. For surely amidst all the parting scenes
   that the world's literature has enshrined, amidst all the examples of
   self-oblivion at the last moment, when a martyr has been the comforter
   of his weeping friends, there are none that without degradation to this
   can be set by the side of this supreme and unique instance of
   self-oblivion. Did not Christ, for the sake of that handful of poor
   people, first and directly, and for the rest of us afterwards, of
   course, secondarily and indirectly, so suppress all the natural
   emotions of these last moments as that their absolute absence is unique
   and singular, and points onwards to something more, viz. that this Man
   who was susceptible of all human affections, and loved us with a love
   which is not merely high above our grasp, absolute, perfect, changeless
   and divine, but with a love like our own human affection, had also more
   than a man's heart to give us, and gave us more, when, that He might
   comfort and sustain, He crushed down Himself and went to the Cross with
   words of tenderness and consolation and encouragement for others upon
   His lips? Knowing all that was lying before Him, He was neither
   absorbed nor confounded, but carried a heart at leisure to love even
   then unto the uttermost.'

   And if the prospect only sharpened and perfected, nor interrupted for
   one instant the flow of His love, the reality has no power to do aught
   else. In the glory, when He reached it, He poured out the same loving
   heart; and to-day He looks down upon us with the same Face that bent
   over the table in the upper room, and the same tenderness flows to us.
   When John saw his Master next, after His Ascension, amidst the glories
   of the vision in his rocky Patmos, though His face was as the sun
   shineth in his strength, it was the old face. Though His hand bore the
   stars in a cluster, it was the hand that had been pierced with the
   nails. Though the breast was girded with the golden girdle of
   sovereignty and of priesthood, it was the breast on which John's happy
   head had lain; and though the Voice was as the sound of many waters,'
   it soothed itself to a murmur, gentle as that with which the tideless
   sea about him rippled upon the silvery sand when He said, Fear not
   . . . I am the First and the Last.' Knowing that He goes to the Father,
   He loves to the uttermost, and being with the Father, He still so
   loves.

   II. And now I must, with somewhat less of detail, dwell upon the other
   points which this text brings out for us. It suggests to us next that
   we have in the love of Jesus Christ a love which is faithful to the
   obligations of its own past.

   Having loved, He loves. Because He had been a certain thing, therefore
   He is and He shall be that same. That is an argument that implies
   divinity. About nothing human can we say that because it has been
   therefore it shall be. Alas! about much that is human we have to say
   the converse, that because it has been, therefore it will cease to be.
   And though, blessed be God! they are few and they are poor who have had
   no experience in their lives of human hearts whose love in the past has
   been such that it manifestly is for ever, yet we cannot with the same
   absolute confidence say about one another, even about the dearest,
   Having loved, he loves.' But we can say so about Christ. There is no
   exhaustion in that great stream that pours out from His heart; no
   diminution in its flow.

   They tell us that the central light of our system, that great sun
   itself, pouring out its rays exhausts its warmth, and were it not
   continually replenished, must gradually, and even though continually
   replenished, will ultimately cease to blaze, and be a dead, cold mass
   of ashes. But this central Light, this heart of Christ, which is the
   Sun of the World, will endure like the sun, and after the sun is cold,
   His love will last for ever. He pours it out and has none the less to
   give. There is no bankruptcy in His expenditure, no exhaustion in His
   effort, no diminution in His stores. Thy mercy endureth for ever'; Thou
   hast loved, therefore Thou wilt love' is an inference for time and for
   eternity, on which we may build and rest secure.

   III. Then, still further, we have here this love suggested as being a
   love which has special tenderness towards its own. Having loved His
   own, He loved them to the uttermost.'

   These poor men who, with all their errors, did cleave to Him; who, in
   some dim way, understood somewhat of His greatness and His
   sweetness--and do you and I do more?--who, with all their sins, yet
   were true to Him in the main; who had surrendered very much to follow
   Him, and had identified themselves with Him, were they to have no
   special place in His heart because in that heart the whole world lay?
   Is there any reason why we should be afraid of saying that the
   universal love of Jesus Christ, which gathers into His bosom all
   mankind, does fall with special tenderness and sweetness upon those who
   have made Him theirs and have surrendered themselves to be His? Surely
   it must be that He has special nearness to those who love Him; surely
   it is reasonable that He should have special delight in those who try
   to resemble Him; surely it is only what one might expect of Him that He
   should in a special manner honour the drafts, so to speak, of those who
   have confidence in Him, and are building their whole lives upon Him.
   Surely, because the sun shines down upon dunghills and all impurities,
   that is no reason why it should not lie with special brightness on the
   polished mirror that reflects its lustre. Surely, because Jesus Christ
   loves--Blessed be His name!--the publicans and the harlots and the
   outcasts and the sinners, that is no reason why He should not bend with
   special tenderness over those who, loving Him, try to serve Him, and
   have set their whole hopes upon Him. The rainbow strides across the
   sky, but there is a rainbow in every little dewdrop that hangs
   glistening on the blades of grass. There is nothing limited, nothing
   sectional, nothing narrow in the proclamation of a special tenderness
   of Christ towards His own, when you accompany with that truth this
   other, that all men are besought by Him to come into that circle of His
   own,' and that only they themselves shut any out therefrom. Blessed be
   His name! the whole world dwells in His love, but there is an inner
   chamber in which He discovers all His heart to those who find in that
   heart their Heaven and their all. He came to His own,' in the wider
   sense of the word, and His own received Him not'; but also, having
   loved His own He loved them unto the end.' There are textures and lives
   which can only absorb some of the rays of light in the spectrum; some
   that are only capable of taking, so to speak, the violet rays of
   judgment and of wrath, and some who open their hearts for the ruddy
   brightness at the other end of the line. Do you see to it, brethren,
   that you are of that inner circle who receive the whole Christ into
   their hearts, and to whom He can unfold the fullness of His love.

   IV. And, lastly, my text suggests that love of Christ as being made
   specially tender by the necessities and the dangers of His friends. He
   loved His own which were in the world,' and so loving them, loved them
   to the uttermost.'

   We have, running through these precious discourses which follow my
   text, many allusions to the separation which was to ensue, and to His
   leaving His followers in circumstances of peculiar peril, defenceless
   and solitary. I come unto Thee, and am no more in the world,' says He
   in the final High-priestly prayer, but these are in the world. Holy
   Father, keep them through Thine own name.' The same contrast between
   the certain security of the Shepherd and the troubled perils of the
   scattered flock seems to be in the words of my text, and suggests a
   sweet and blessed reason for the special tenderness with which He
   looked upon them. As a dying father on his deathbed may yearn over
   orphans that he is leaving defenceless, so Christ is here represented
   as conscious of an accession even to the tender longings of His heart,
   when He thought of the loneliness and the dangers to which His
   followers were to be exposed.

   Ah! It seems a harsh contrast between the Emperor, sitting throned
   there between the purple curtains, and the poor athletes wrestling in
   the arena below. It seems strange to think that a loving Master has
   gone up into the mountain, and has left His disciples to toil in rowing
   on the stormy sea of life; but the contrast is only apparent. For you
   and I, if we love and trust Him, are with Him in the heavenly places'
   even whilst we toil here, and He is with us, working with us, even
   whilst He sitteth at the right hand of God.'

   We may be sure of this, brethren, that that love ever increases its
   manifestations according to our deepening necessities. The darker the
   night the more lustrous the stars. The deeper, the narrower, the
   savager, the Alpine gorge, usually the fuller and the swifter the
   stream that runs through it. And the more that enemies and fears gather
   round about us, the sweeter will be the accents of our Comforter's
   voice, and the fuller will be the gifts of tenderness and grace with
   which He draws near to us. Our sorrows, dangers, necessities, are doors
   through which His love can come nigh.

   So, dear friends, we have had experience of sweet and transient human
   love; we have had experience of changeful and ineffectual love; turn
   away from them all to this immortal, deep heart of Christ's, welling
   over with a love which no change can affect, which no separation can
   diminish, which no sin can provoke, which becomes greater and tenderer
   as our necessities increase, and ask Him to fill your hearts with that,
   that you may know the length and breadth and depth and height of that
   love which passeth knowledge,' and so be filled with all the fullness
   of God.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE SERVANT-MASTER

   Jesus knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and
   that He was come from God, and went to God; He riseth from supper, and
   laid aside His garments; and took a towel, and girded Himself. After
   that He poureth water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples'
   feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith He was girded.'--JOHN
   xiii. 3-5.

   It has been suggested that the dispute as to which was the greatest,'
   which broke the sanctities of the upper chamber, was connected with the
   unwillingness of each of the Apostles to perform the menial office of
   washing the feet of his companions. They had come in from Bethany, and
   needed the service. But apparently it was omitted, and although we can
   scarcely suppose that the transcendent act which is recorded in my text
   was performed at the beginning of the meal, yet I think we shall not be
   wrong if we see in it a reference to the neglected service.

   The Evangelist who tells us of the dispute, and does not tell us of the
   foot-washing, preserves a sentence which finds its true meaning only in
   this incident, I am among you as He that serveth.' And although John is
   the only recorder of this pathetic incident, there are allusions in
   other parts of Scripture which seem to hint at it. As, for instance,
   when Paul speaks of taking upon Him the form of a servant'; and still
   more strikingly when Peter employs the remarkable word, which he does
   employ in his exhortation, Be ye clothed with humility.' For the word
   rendered there clothed' occurs only in that one place in Scripture, and
   means literally the putting on of a slave's costume. One can scarcely
   help, then, seeing in these three passages to which I have referred
   echoes of this incident which John alone preserves to us. And so we get
   at once a hint of the harmony and of the incompleteness of the Gospel
   records.

   I. Consider the motives of this act.

   Now that is ground upon which the Evangelists very seldom enter. They
   tell us what Christ did, but very rarely do they give us any glimpses
   into why He did it. But this section of the Gospel is remarkable for
   its full and careful analysis of what Christ's impelling motives were
   in the final acts of His life. How did John find out why Christ did
   this deed? Perhaps he who had leaned upon His bosom at supper,' and was
   evidently very closely associated with Him, may, in some unrecorded
   hour of intimate communion during the forty days between the
   Resurrection and the Ascension, have heard from the Master the
   exposition of His motives. But more probably, I think, the long years
   of growing likeness to his Lord, and of meditation upon the depth of
   meaning in the smallest events that his faithful memory recalled,
   taught him to understand Christ's purpose and motives. The secret of
   the Lord is with them that fear Him,' and the liker we get to our
   Master and the more we are filled with His Spirit, the more easy will
   it be for us to divine the purpose and the motives of His actions,
   whether as they are recorded in the Scripture or as they come to us in
   the experience of daily life.

   But, passing that point, I desire for a moment to fix your attention on
   the twofold key to our Lord's action which is given in this context.
   There is, first of all, in the first verse of the chapter, a general
   exposition of what was uppermost in His mind and heart during the whole
   of the period in the upper room. The act in our text, and the wonderful
   words which follow in the subsequent chapters, crowned by that great
   intercessory prayer, seem to me to be all explained for us by this
   first unveiling of His motives. When Jesus knew that His hour was come
   that He should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved
   His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end.'

   And then the words of my text, which apply more specifically to the
   single incident with which they are brought into connection, tell us in
   addition why this one manifestation of Christ's love was given. Knowing
   that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He was
   come from God, and went to God.' There, then, are two explanations of
   motive, the one covering a wider area than the other, but both
   converging on the incident before us.

   The first of these is just this--the consciousness of impending
   separation moved Christ to a more than ordinarily tender manifestation
   of His love. For the rendering which you will find in the margin of the
   Revised Version, He loved them to the uttermost,' seems to me to be
   truer to the Evangelist's meaning than the other, He loved them unto
   the end.' For it was more to John's purpose to tell us that the shadow
   of the Cross only brought to the surface in more blessed and wonderful
   representation the deep love of His heart, than simply to tell us that
   that shadow did not stop its flow. It is much to know that all through
   His sorrow He continued to love; it is far more to know that the sorrow
   sharpened its poignancy, and deepened its depth, and made more tender
   its tenderness.

   How near to the man Christ that thought brings us! Do we not all know
   the impulse to make parting moments tender moments? The masks of use
   and wont drop off; the reticence which we, perhaps wisely, ordinarily
   cultivate in regard to our deepest feelings melts away. We yearn to
   condense all our unspoken love into some one word, act, look, or
   embrace, which it may afterwards be life to two hearts to remember. And
   Jesus Christ felt this. Because He was going away He could not but pour
   out Himself yet more completely than in the ordinary tenor of His life.
   The earthquake lays bare hidden veins of gold, and the heart opens
   itself out when separation impends. We shall never understand the works
   of Jesus Christ if we do as we are all apt to do, think of them as
   having only a didactic and doctrinal purpose. We must remember that
   there is in Him the true play of a human heart, and that it was to
   relieve His own love, as well as to teach these men their duty, that he
   rose from the supper, and prepared Himself to wash the disciples' feet.

   Then, on the other hand, the other motive which is brought by the
   Evangelists more immediately into connection with this incident is,
   knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that
   He was come from God, and went to God.'

   The consciousness of the highest dignity impels to the lowliest
   submission. All things given into His hands,' means universal and
   absolute dominion. That He was come from God,' means pre-existence,
   voluntary incarnation, an eternal divine nature, and unbroken communion
   with the Father. That He went to God,' means a voluntary departure from
   this low world, and a return to His own calm home, His habitation from
   eternity.'

   And, gathered all together, the phrases imply His absolute
   consciousness of His divine nature. It was that that sent Him with the
   towel round His loins to wash the foul feet of the pedestrians who had
   come by the dusty and hot way from Bethany, and through all the
   abominations of an Eastern city, into the upper chamber.

   This was He who from the beginning was with God, and was God.' This was
   He who was the Lord of Death, Victor over the grave. This was He who by
   His own power ascended up on high, and reigns on the throne of the
   universe to-day. This was He whose breast the same Evangelist had seen
   before he wrote his Gospel, girded with the golden girdle' of
   priesthood and of sovereignty; and holding, in the hands that had laid
   the towel on the disciples' feet, the seven stars.

   Oh, brethren! if we believed our creeds, how our hearts would melt with
   wonder and awe that He who was so high stooped so low! Knowing that He
   came from God, and went to God,' and that even when He was kneeling
   there before these men, the Father had given all things into His
   hands,' what did He do? Triumph? Show His majesty? Flash His power?
   Demand service? Girded Himself with a towel and washed His disciples'
   feet'!

   The consciousness of loftiness does not alone avail to explain the
   transcendent lowliness. You need the former motive to be joined with
   it, because it is only love which bends loftiness to service, and turns
   the consciousness of superiority into yearning to divest oneself of the
   superiorities that separate, and to emphasise the emotions which unite.

   II. The detailed completeness of the act.

   The remarkable particularity of the account of the stages of the
   humiliation suggests the eye-witness. John carried them all in his mind
   ineffaceably, and long, long years after that memorable hour we hear
   him recalling each detail of the scene. We can see the little group
   startled by the disturbance of the order of the meal as He rose from
   the table, and the hushed wonder and the open-lipped expectation with
   which they watched to see what the next step would be. He rises from
   the table and divests Himself of the upper garments which impeded
   movement. What will He do next?' He takes the basin, standing there to
   be ready for washing the apostles' feet, but unused, and not even
   filled with water. He fills it Himself, asking none to help Him. He
   girds the towel round Him; and then, perhaps, begins with the betrayer;
   at any rate, not with Peter.

   Cannot you see them, as they look? Do not you feel the solemnity of the
   detailed particular account of each step?

   And may we not also say that all is a parable, or illustration, on a
   lower level, of the very same principles which were at work in the
   mightier fact of the greater condescension of His becoming flesh and
   dwelling among us'? He rose from the table,' as He rose from His place
   in the bosom of the Father.' He disturbed the meal as He broke the
   festivities of the heavens. He divested Himself of His garments, as He
   thought not equality with God a thing to be worn eagerly'; and He
   girded Himself with the towel,' as He put on the weakness of flesh.
   Himself He filled the basin, by His own work providing the means of
   cleansing; and Himself applied the cleansing to the feet of those who
   were with Him. It is all a working out of the same double motive which
   drew Him downwards to our earth. The reason why He stooped, with His
   hands to wash the disciples' feet, is the same as the reason why He had
   hands to wash with--viz., that knowing Himself to be high over all, and
   loving all, He chose to become one with us, that we might become like
   unto Him. So the details of the act are a parable of His incarnation
   and death.

   III. And then, still further, note the purpose of the deed.

   Now although I have said that we never rightly understand our Lord's
   actions if we are always looking for dogmatic or doctrinal purposes,
   and thinking of them rather as being lectures, and sometimes rebukes in
   act, than as being the outgush of His emotions and His human-divine
   nature, yet we have also to take into account their moral and spiritual
   lessons. His acts are words and His words are acts. And although the
   main and primary purpose of this incident, in so far as it had any
   other purpose than to relieve Christ's own love by manifesting itself,
   and to comfort the disciples' hearts by the tender manifestation, was
   to teach them their duty, as we shall presently see, yet the special
   aspect of cleansing, which comes out so emphatically and prominently in
   the episode of Peter's refusal, is to be carried all along through the
   interpretation of the incident. This was the reason why Jesus Christ
   came from heaven and assumed flesh, and this was the reason why Jesus
   Christ, assuming flesh, bowed Himself to this menial office--to make
   men clean.

   I venture to say that we never understand Jesus Christ and His work
   until we recognise this as its prominent purpose, to cleanse us from
   sin. An inadequate conception of what we need, shallow, superficial
   views of the gravity and universality and obstinacy of the fact of sin,
   are an impenetrable veil between us and all real understanding of Jesus
   Christ. There is no adequate motive for such an astounding fact as the
   incarnation and sacrifice of the Son of God, except the purpose of
   redeeming the world. If you do not believe that you--you individually,
   and all of us your brethren--need to be cleansed, you will find it hard
   to believe in the divinity and atonement of Jesus Christ. If you have
   been down into the depths of your own heart, and found out what
   tremendous, diabolic power your own evil nature and sin have upon you,
   then you will not be content with anything less than the incarnate God
   who stoops from heaven to bear the burden of your sin, and to take it
   all away. If you want to understand why He laid aside His garments and
   took the servile form of our manhood, the appeal of man's sin to His
   love and the answer of His Divine condescension are the only
   explanation.

   Again, let me remind you that there is no cleansing without Christ. Can
   you do it for yourselves, do you think? There is an old proverb, One
   hand washes the other.' That is true about stains on the flesh. It is
   not true about stains on our spirits. Nobody can do it for us but Jesus
   Christ alone. He kneels before us, having the right and the power to
   wash us because He has died for us. Kings of England used to touch for
   the king's evil,' and lay their pure fingers upon feculent masses of
   corruption. Our King's touch is sovereign for the corruption and
   incipient putrefaction of our sin; and there is no power in heaven or
   earth that will make a man clean except the power of Jesus Christ. It
   is either Jesus Christ or filthiness.

   If I might pass from my text for one moment, I would remind you of the
   episode which immediately follows, and suggest that if Jesus Christ is
   not cleansing us He is nothing to us. If I wash thee not, thou hast no
   part in Me.' I know, of course, that it is possible to have partial,
   rudimentary, and sometimes reverent conceptions of that Lord without
   recognising in Him the great Fountain opened for sin and for
   uncleanness.' But I am sure of this, that there is no real, living
   possession of Jesus Christ such as men's souls need, and such as will
   outlast the disintegrating influences of death, unless it be such a
   possession of Him as appropriates for its own, primarily, His cleansing
   power. First of all He must cleanse, and then all other aspects of His
   glory, and gifts of His grace, will pour into our hearts.

   No understanding of Christ, then, without the recognition that
   cleansing is the purpose and the vindication of His incarnation and
   sacrifice; no cleansing without Christ; no Christ worth calling by the
   name without cleansing.

   IV. And so, lastly, note the pattern in this act.

   You will remember that it is followed by solemn words spoken after He
   had taken His garments and resumed His place at the table, in which
   there blended, in the most wonderful fashion, the consciousness of
   authority, both as Teacher of truth and as Guide of life, and the
   sweetest and most loving lowliness. In them Jesus prescribed the
   wonderful act of His condescending love and cleansing power as the law
   of the Christian life. There are too many of us who profess to be quite
   willing to trust to Jesus Christ as the Cleanser of our souls who are
   not nearly so willing to accept His Example as the pattern for our
   lives; and I would have you note, as an extremely remarkable point,
   that all the New Testament references to our Lord as being our Example
   are given in immediate connection with His passion. The very part of
   His life which we generally regard as being most absolutely unique and
   inimitable is the fact in His life which Apostles and Evangelists
   select as the one to set before us for our example.

   Do you ask if any man can copy the sufferings of Jesus Christ? In
   regard to their virtue and efficacy, No. In regard to their motive--in
   one aspect, No; in another aspect, Yes. In regard to the spirit that
   impelled Him we may copy Him. The smallest trickle of water down a city
   gutter will carve out of the mud at its side little banks and cliffs,
   and exhibit all the phenomena of erosion on the largest scale, as the
   Mississippi does over half a continent, and the tiniest little wave in
   a basin will fall into the same curves as the billows of mid-ocean. You
   and I, in our little lives, may even aspire to do as I have done to
   you.'

   The true use of superiority is service. Noblesse oblige! Bank, wealth,
   capacity, talents, all things are given to us that we may use them to
   the last particle for our fellows. Only when the world and society have
   awakened to that great truth which the towel-girded, kneeling Christ
   has taught us, will society be organised on the principles that God
   meant.

   But, further, the highest form of service is to cleanse. Cleansing is
   always dirty work for the cleaners, as every housemaid knows. You
   cannot make people clean by scolding them, by lecturing them, by
   patronising them. You have to go down into the filth if you mean to
   lift them out of it; and leave your smelling-bottles behind; and think
   nothing repulsive if your stooping to it may save a brother.

   The only way by which we can imitate that example is by, first of all,
   participating in it for ourselves. We must, first of all, have the
   Cross as our trust, before it can become our pattern and our law. We
   must first say, Lord! not my feet only, but also my hands and my head,'
   and then, in the measure in which we ourselves have received the
   cleansing benediction, we shall be impelled and able to lay our gentle
   hands on foulness and leprosy; and to say to all the impure, Jesus
   Christ, who hath cleansed me, makes thee clean.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE DISMISSAL OF JUDAS

   . . . Then said Jesus unto Judas, That thou doest, do quickly.'--JOHN
   xiii. 27.

   When our Lord gave the morsel, dipped in the dish, to Judas, only John
   knew the significance of the act. But if we supplement the narrative
   here with that given by Matthew, we shall find that, accompanying the
   gift of the sop, was a brief dialogue in which the betrayer, with
   unabashed front, hypocritically said, Lord! Is it I?' and heard the
   solemn, sad answer, Thou sayest!' Two things, then, appealed to him at
   the moment: one, the conviction that he was discovered; the other, the
   wonderful assurance that he was still loved, for the gift of the morsel
   was a token of friendliness. He shut his heart against them both; and
   as he shut his heart against Christ he opened it to the devil. So after
   the sop Satan entered into him.' At that moment a soul committed
   suicide; and none of those that sat by, with the exception of Christ
   and the disciple whom He loved,' so much as dreamed of the tragedy
   going on before their eyes.

   I know not that there are anywhere words more weighty and wonderful
   than those of our text. And I desire to try if I can at all make you
   feel as I feel, their solemn signification and force. That thou doest,
   do quickly.'

   I. I hear in them, first, the voice of despairing love abandoning the
   conflict.

   If I have rightly construed the meaning of the incident, this is the
   plain meaning of it. And you will observe that the Revised Version,
   more accurately and closely rendering the words of our text, begins
   with a Therefore.' Therefore said Jesus unto him,' because the die was
   cast; because the will of Judas had conclusively welcomed Satan, and
   conclusively rejected Christ; therefore, knowing that remonstrance was
   vain, knowing that the deed was, in effect, done, Jesus Christ, that
   Incarnate Charity which believeth all things, and hopeth all things,'
   abandoned the man to himself, and said, There, then, if thou wilt thou
   must. I have done all I can; my last arrow is shot, and it has missed
   the target. That then doest, do quickly.'

   There is a world of solemn meaning in that one little word doest.' It
   teaches us the old lesson, which sense is so apt to forget, that the
   true actor in man's deeds is the hidden man of the heart,' and that
   when it has acted, it matters comparatively little whether the mere
   tool and instrument of the hands or of the other organs have carried
   out the behest. The thing is done before it is done when the man has
   resolved, with a fixed will, to do it. The betrayal was as good as in
   process, though no step beyond the introductory ones, which could
   easily have been cancelled, had yet been accomplished. Because there
   was a fixed purpose which could not be altered by anything now,
   therefore Jesus Christ regards the act as completed. It is what we
   think in our hearts that we are; and our fixed determinations, our
   inclinations of will, are far more truly our doings than the mere
   consequences of these, embodied in actuality. It is but a poor estimate
   of a man that judges him by the test of what he has done. What he has
   wanted to do is the true man; what he has attempted to do. It was well
   that it was in thine heart!' saith God to the king who thought of
   building the Temple which he was never allowed to rear. It is ill that
   is in thine heart,' says He by whom actions are weighed, to the sinner
   in purpose, though his clean hands lie idly in his lap. These hidden
   movements of desire and will that never come to the surface are our
   true selves. Look after them, and the deeds will take care of
   themselves. Serpent's eggs have serpents in them. And he that has
   determined upon a sin has done the sin, whether his hands have been put
   to it or no.

   But, then, turn for a moment to the other thought that is suggested
   here--that solemn picture of a soul left to do as it will, because
   divine love has no other restraints which it can impose, and is
   bankrupt of motives that it can adduce to prevent it from its madness.
   Now I do not believe, for my part, that any man in this world is so
   all-round sold unto sin' as that the seeking love of God gives him up
   as irreclaimable. I do not believe that there are any people concerning
   whom it is true that it is impossible for the grace of God to find some
   chink and cranny in their souls through which it can enter and change
   them. There are no hopeless cases as long as men are here. But, then,
   though there may not be so, in regard to the whole sweep of the man's
   nature, yet every one of us, over and over again, has known what it is
   to come exactly into that position in regard to some single evil or
   other, concerning which we have so set our teeth and planted our feet
   at such an angle of resistance as that God gives up dealing with us and
   leaves us, as He did with Balaam when He opposed his covetous
   inclinations to all the remonstrances of Heaven. God said at last to
   him Go!' because it was the best way to teach him what a fool he had
   been in wanting to go. Thus, when we determine to set ourselves against
   the pleadings and the beseechings of divine love, the truest kindness
   is to fling the reins upon our necks, and let us gallop ourselves into
   a sweat and weariness, and then we shall be more amenable to the touch
   of the rein thereafter.

   Are there any people whom God is teaching obedience to His light touch,
   by letting them run their course after some one specific sin? Perhaps
   there are. At all events, let us remember that that position of being
   allowed to do as we like is one to which we all tend, in the measure in
   which we indulge our inclinations, and shut our hearts against God's
   pleadings. There is such a thing as a conscience seared as with a hot
   iron. They used to say that there were witches' marks on the body,
   places where, if you stuck a pin in, there was no feeling. Men cover
   themselves all over with marks of that sort, which are not sensitive
   even to the prick of a divine remonstrance, rebuke, or retribution.
   They wipe their mouths and say I have done no harm.' You can tie up the
   clapper of the bell that swings on the black rock, on which, if you
   drift, you go to pieces. You can silence the Voice by the simple
   process of neglecting it. Judas set his teeth against two things, the
   solemn conviction that Jesus Christ knew his sin, and the saving
   assurance that Jesus Christ loved him still. And whosoever resists
   either of these two is getting perilously near to the point where, not
   in petulance but in pity, God will say, Very well, I have called and ye
   have refused. Now go, and do what you want to do, and see how you like
   it when it is done. What thou doest, do quickly.' Do you remember the
   other word, If twere done when tis done, then twere well it were done
   quickly'? But since consequences last when deeds are past, perhaps you
   had better halt before you determine to do them.

   II. Now, secondly, I hear in these words the voice of strangely blended
   majesty and humiliation.

   What thou doest, do!' Judas thought he had got possession of Christ's
   person, and was His master in a very real sense. When lo! all at once
   the victim assumes the position of the Lord and commands, showing the
   traitor that instead of thwarting and counterworking, he was but
   carrying out the designs of his fancied victim; and that he was an
   instrument in Christ's hands for the execution of His will. And these
   two thoughts, how, in effect, all antagonism, all malicious hatred, all
   violent opposition of every sort but work in with Christ's purpose, and
   carry out His intention; and how, at the moments of deepest apparent
   degradation, He towers, in manifest Majesty and Masterhood, seem to me
   to be plainly taught in the word before us.

   He uses his foes for the furtherance of His purpose. That has been the
   history of the world ever since. The floods, O Lord, have lifted up
   their voice.' And what have they done? Smashing against the breakwater,
   they but consolidate its mighty blocks, and prove that the Lord on high
   is mightier than the noise of many waters.' It has been so in the past,
   it is so to-day; it will be so till the end. Every Judas is
   unconsciously the servant of Him whom he seeks to betray; and finds out
   to his bewilderment that what he meant for a death-blow is fulfilling
   the very purpose and will of the Lord against whom he has turned.

   Again, the combination here, in such remarkable juxtaposition, of the
   two things, a willing submission to the utmost extremity of shame,
   which the treasonous heart can froth out in its malice and, at the same
   time, a rising up in conscious majesty and lordship, are suggested to
   us by the words before us. That combination of utter lowliness and
   transcendent loftiness runs through the whole life and history of our
   Lord. Did you ever think how strong an argument that strange
   combination, brought out so inartificially throughout the whole of the
   Gospels, is for their historical veracity? Suppose the problem had been
   given to poets to create and to set in a series of appropriate scenes a
   character with these two opposites stamped equally upon it, neither of
   them impinging upon the domain of the other--viz., utter humility and
   humiliation in circumstance, and majestic sovereignty and elevation
   above all circumstances--do you think that any of them could have
   solved the problem, though-- Aeschylus and Shakespeare had been amongst
   them, as these four men that wrote these four little tracts that we
   call Gospels have done? How comes it that this most difficult of
   literary problems has been so triumphantly solved by these men? I think
   there is only one answer, Because they were reporters, and imagined
   nothing, but observed everything, and repeated what had happened.' He
   reconciled these opposites who was the Man of Sorrows and acquainted
   with grief, and yet the Eternal Son of the Father; and the Gospels have
   solved the problem only because they are simple records of its solution
   by Him.

   Wherever in His history there is some trait of lowliness there is by
   the side of it a flash of majesty. Wherever in His history there is
   some gleaming out from the veil of flesh of the hidden glory of
   divinity, there is immediately some drawing of the veil across the
   glory. And the two things do not contradict nor confuse, but we stand
   before that double picture of a Christ betrayed and of a Christ
   commanding His betrayer, and using his treason, and we say, The Word
   was made flesh, and dwelt among us.'

   III. Again, I hear the voice of instinctive human weakness.

   That thou doest, do quickly.' It may be doubtful, and some of you
   perhaps may not be disposed to follow me in my remark, but to my ear
   that sounds just like the utterance of that instinctive dislike of
   suspense and of the long hanging over us of the sword by a hair, which
   we all know so well. Better to suffer than to wait for suffering. The
   loudest thunder-crash is not so awe-inspiring as the dread silence of
   nature when the sky is black before the peal rolls through the clouds.
   Many a martyr has prayed for a swift ending of his troubles. Many a
   sorrowing heart, that has been sitting cowering under the anticipation
   of coming evils, has wished that the string could be pulled, as it
   were, and they could all come down in one cold flood, and be done with,
   rather than trickle drop by drop. They tell us that the bravest
   soldiers dislike the five minutes when they stand in rank before the
   first shot is fired. And with all reverence I venture to think that He
   who knew all our weaknesses in so far as weakness was not sin, is here
   letting us see how He, too, desired that the evil which was coming
   might come quickly, and that the painful tension of expectation might
   be as brief as possible. That may be doubtful; I do not dwell upon it,
   but I suggest it for your consideration.

   IV. And then I pass on to the last of the tones that I hear in these
   utterances--the voice of the willing Sacrifice for the sins of the
   world.

   That thou doest, do quickly.' There is nothing more obvious throughout
   the whole of the latter portion of the Gospel narrative than the way in
   which, increasingly towards its close, Jesus seemed to hasten to the
   Cross. You remember His own sayings: I have a baptism to be baptized
   with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished. I am come to
   cast fire on the earth; would it were already kindled!' You remember
   with what a strange air--I was going to use an inappropriate word, and
   say, of alacrity; but, at all events, of fixed resolve--He journeyed
   from Galilee, in that last solemn march to Jerusalem, and how the
   disciples followed, astonished at the unwonted look of decision and
   absorption that was printed upon His countenance. If we consider His
   doings in that last week in Jerusalem, how he courted publicity, how He
   avoided no encounter with His official enemies, how He sharpened His
   tones, not exactly so as to provoke, but certainly so as by no means to
   conciliate, we shall see, I think, in it all, His consciousness that
   the hour had come, and His absolute readiness and willingness to be
   offered for the world's sin. He stretches out His hands, as it were, to
   draw the Cross nearer to Himself, not with any share in the weakness of
   a fanatical aspiration after martyrdom, but under a far deeper and more
   wonderful impulse.

   Why was Christ so willing, so eager, if I may use the word, that His
   death should be accomplished? Two reasons, which at the bottom are one,
   answer the question. He thus hastened to His Cross because He would
   obey the Father's will, and because He loved the whole world--you and
   me and all our fellows. We were each in His heart. It was because He
   wanted to save thee that He said to Judas, Do it quickly, that the
   world's salvation and that man's salvation may be accomplished.' These
   were the cords that bound Him to the altar. Let us never forget that
   Judas with his treachery, and rulers with their hostility, and Pilate
   with his authority, and the soldiers with their nails, and centurions
   with their lances, and the grim figure of Death itself with its shaft,
   would have been all equally powerless against Christ if it had not been
   his loving will to die on the Cross for each of us.

   Therefore, brethren, as we hear this voice, let us discern in it the
   tones which warn us of the danger of yielding to inclination and
   stifling His rebukes, till He abandons us for the moment in despair;
   let us hear in it the pathetic voice of a Brother, who knows all our
   weaknesses and has felt our emotions; let us hear the voice of
   Sovereign Authority which uses its enemies for its purposes, and is
   never loftier than when it is most lowly, whose Cross is His throne of
   glory, whose exaltation is His deepest humiliation, and let us hear a
   love which, discerning each of us through all the ages and the crowds,
   went willingly to the Cross because He willed that He should be our
   Saviour.

   And seeing that time is short, and the future precarious, and delay may
   darken into loss and rejection, let us take these words as spoken to us
   in another sense, and hear in them the warning that to-day, if we will
   hear His voice, we harden not our hearts,' and when He says to us, in
   regard to repentance and faith, and Christian consecration and service,
   That thou doest, do quickly,' let us answer, I made haste and delayed
   not, but made haste to keep Thy commandments.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE GLORY OF THE CROSS

   Therefore, when he was gone out, Jesus said, Now is the Son of Man
   glorified, and God is glorified in Him. If God he glorified in Him, God
   shall also glorify Him in Himself, and shall straightway glorify
   Him.'--JOHN xiii. 31, 32.

   There is something very weird and awful in the brief note of time with
   which the Evangelist sends Judas on his dark errand. He . . . went
   immediately out, and it was night.' Into the darkness that dark soul
   went. That hour was the power of darkness,' the very keystone of the
   black arch of man's sin, and some shadow of it fell upon the soul of
   Christ Himself.

   In immediate connection with the departure of the traitor comes this
   singular burst of triumph in our text. The Evangelist emphasises the
   connection by that: Therefore, when he was gone out, Jesus said.' There
   is a wonderful touch of truth and naturalness in that connection. The
   traitor was gone. His presence had been a restraint; and now that that
   spot in their feast of charity' had disappeared, the Master felt at
   ease; and like some stream, out of the bed of which a black rock has
   been taken, His words flow more freely. How intensely real and human
   the narrative becomes when we see that Christ, too, felt the oppression
   of an uncongenial presence, and was relieved and glad at its removal!
   The departure of the traitor evoked these words of triumph in another
   way, too. At his going away, we may say, the match was lit that was to
   be applied to the train. He had gone out on his dark errand, and that
   brought the Cross within measurable distance of our Lord. Out of a new
   sense of its nearness He speaks here. So the note of time not only
   explains to us why our Lord spoke, but puts us on the right track for
   understanding His words, and makes any other interpretation of them
   than one impossible. What Judas went to do was the beginning of
   Christ's glorifying. We have here, then, a triple glorification--the
   Son of Man glorified in His Cross; God glorified in the Son of Man; and
   the Son of Man glorified in God. Let us look at these three thoughts
   for a few moments now.

   I. First, we have here the Son of Man glorified in His Cross.

   The words are a paradox. Strange, that at such a moment, when there
   rose up before Christ all the vision of the shame and the suffering,
   the pain and the death, and the mysterious sense of abandonment, which
   was worse than them all, He should seem to stretch out His hands to
   bring the Cross nearer to Himself, and that His soul should fill with
   triumph!

   There is a double aspect under which our Lord regarded His sufferings.
   On the one hand we mark in Him an unmistakable shrinking from the
   Cross, the innocent shrinking of His manhood expressed in such words as
   I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it
   be accomplished'; and in such incidents as the agony in Gethsemane. And
   yet, side by side with that, not overcome by it, but not overcoming it,
   there is the opposite feeling, the reaching out almost with eagerness
   to bring the Cross nearer to Himself. These two lie close by each other
   in His heart. Like the pellucid waters of the Rhine and the turbid
   stream of the Moselle, that flow side by side over a long space,
   neither of them blending discernibly with the other, so the shrinking
   and the desire were contemporaneous in Christ's mind. Here we have the
   triumphant anticipation rising to the surface, and conquering for a
   time the shrinking.

   Why did Christ think of His Cross as a glorifying? The New Testament
   generally represents it as the very lowest point of His degradation;
   John's Gospel always represents it as the very highest point of His
   glory. And the two things are both true; just as the zenith of our sky
   is the nadir of the sky for those on the other side of the world. The
   same fact which in one aspect sounds the very lowest depth of Christ's
   humiliation, in another aspect is the very highest culminating point of
   His glory.

   How did the Cross glorify Christ? In two ways. It was the revelation of
   His heart; it was the throne of His sovereign power.

   It was the revelation of His heart. All his life long He had been
   trying to tell the world how much He loved it. His love had been, as it
   were, filtered by drops through His words, through His deeds, through
   His whole demeanour and bearing; but in His death it comes in a flood,
   and pours itself upon the world. All His life long he had been
   revealing His heart, through the narrow rifts of His deeds, like some
   slender lancet windows; but in His death all the barriers are thrown
   down, and the brightness blazes out upon men. All through His life He
   had been trying to communicate His love to the world, and the fragrance
   came from the box of ointment exceeding precious, but when the box was
   broken the house was filled with the odour.

   For Him to be known was to be glorified. So pure and perfect was He,
   that revelation of His character and glorification of Himself were one
   and the same thing. Because His Cross reveals to the world for all
   time, and for eternity, too, a love which shrinks from no sacrifice, a
   love which is capable of the most entire abandonment, a love which is
   diffused over the whole surface of humanity and through all the ages, a
   love which comes laden with the richest and the highest gifts, even the
   turning of selfish and sinful hearts into its own pure and perfect
   likeness, therefore does He say, in contemplation of that Cross which
   was to reveal Him for what He was to the world, and to bring His love
   to every one of us, Now is the Son of Man glorified.'

   We can fancy a mother, for instance, in the anticipation of shame, and
   ignominy, and suffering, and sorrow, and death which she encounters for
   the sake of some prodigal child, forgetting all the ignominy, and the
   shame, and the suffering, and the sorrow, and the death, because all
   these are absorbed in the one thought: If I bear them, my poor,
   wandering, rebellious child will know at last how much I loved him.' So
   Christ yearns to impart the knowledge of Himself to us, because by that
   knowledge we may be won to His love and service; and hence when He
   looks forward to the agony, and contumely, and sorrow of the close,
   every other thought is swallowed up in this one: They will be the means
   by which the whole world will find out how deep my heart of love to it
   was.' Therefore does He triumph and say, Now is the Son of Man
   glorified.'

   Still further, He regards His Cross as the means of His glorifying,
   because it is His throne of saving power. The paradoxical words of our
   text rest upon His profound conviction that in His death He was about
   to put forth a mightier and diviner power than ever He had manifested
   in His life. They are the same in effect and in tone as the great
   words: I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me.' Now I want you
   to ask yourselves one question: In what sense is Christ's Cross
   Christ's glorifying, unless His Cross bears an altogether different
   relation to His life from what the death of a great teacher or
   benefactor ordinarily bears to his? It is impossible that Christ could
   have spoken such words as these of my text if He had simply thought of
   His death as a Plato or a John Howard might have thought of his, as
   being the close of his activity for the welfare of his fellows. Unless
   Christ's death has in it some substantive value, unless it is something
   more than the mere termination of His work for the world, I see not how
   the words before us can be interpreted. If His death is His glorifying,
   it must be because in that death something is done which was not
   completed by the life, however fair; by the words, however wise and
   tender; by the works of power, however restorative and healing. Here is
   something more than these present. What more? This more, that His Cross
   is the propitiation for the sins of the whole world.' He is glorified
   therein, not as a Socrates might be glorified by his calm and noble
   death; not because nothing in His life became Him better than the
   leaving of it; not because the page that tells the story of His passion
   is turned to by us as the tenderest and most sacred in the world's
   records; but because in that death He wrestled with and overcame our
   foes, and because, like the Jewish hero of old, dying, He pulled down
   the house which our tyrants had built, and overwhelmed them in its
   ruins. Now is the Son of Man glorified.'

   And so, brethren, there blend, in that last act of our Lord's--for His
   death was His act--in strange fashion, the two contradictory ideas of
   glory and shame; like some sky, all full of dark thunderclouds, and yet
   between them the brightest blue and the blazing sunshine. In the Cross,
   Death crowns Him the Prince of Life, and His Cross is His throne. All
   His life long He was the Light of the World, but the very noontide hour
   of His glory was that hour when the shadow of eclipse lay over all the
   land, and He hung on the Cross dying in the dark. At His eventide it
   was light.' He endured the Cross, despising the shame'; and lo! the
   shame flashed up into the very brightness of glory, and the ignominy
   and the suffering became the jewels of His crown. Now is the Son of Man
   glorified.'

   II. Now let us turn for a moment to the second of the threefold
   glorifications that are set forth here: God glorified in the Son of
   Man.

   The mystery deepens as we advance. That God should be glorified in a
   man is not strange, but that He should be so glorified in the eminent
   and special fashion which Jesus contemplates here, is strange; and
   stranger still when we think that the act in which He was to be
   glorified was the death of an innocent Man. If God, in any special and
   eminent manner, is glorified in the Cross of Jesus Christ, that
   implies, as it seems to me, two things at all events--many more which I
   have not time to touch upon, but two things very plainly. One is that
   God was in Christ,' in some singular and eminent manner. If all His
   life was a continual manifestation of the divine character, if Christ's
   words were the divine wisdom, if Christ's compassion was the divine
   pity, if Christ's lowliness was the divine gentleness, if His whole
   human life and nature were the brightest and clearest manifestation to
   the world of what God is, we can understand that the Cross was the
   highest point of the revelation of the divine nature to the world, and
   so was the glorifying of God in Him. But if we take any lower view of
   the relation between God and Christ, I know not how we can acquit these
   words of our Master of the charge of being a world too wide for the
   facts of the case.

   The words involve, as it seems to me, not only that idea of a close,
   unique union and indwelling of God in Christ, but they involve also
   this other: that these sufferings bore no relation to the deserts of
   the person who endured them. If Christ, with His pure and perfect
   character--the innocency and nobleness of which all that read the
   Gospels admit--if Christ suffered so; if the highest virtue that was
   ever seen in this world brought no better wages than shame and spitting
   and the Cross; if Christ's life and Christ's death are simply a typical
   example of the world's treatment of its greatest benefactors; then, if
   they have any bearing at all on the character of God, they cast a
   shadow rather than a light upon the divine government, and become not
   the least formidable of the difficulties and knots that will have to be
   untied hereafter before it shall be clear that God did everything well.
   But if we can say, He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows';
   if we can say, God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself'; if
   we can say, that His death was the death of Him whom God had appointed
   to live and die for us, and to bear our sins in His own body on the
   tree,' then, though deep mysteries come with the thought, still we can
   see that, in a very unique manner, God is glorified and exalted in His
   death.

   For if the dying Christ be the Son of God dying for us, then the Cross
   glorifies God, because it teaches us that the glory of the divine
   character is the divine love. Of wisdom, or of power, or of any of the
   more majestic' attributes of the divine nature, that weak Man, hanging
   dying on the Cross, was a strange embodiment; but if the very heart of
   the divine brightness be the pure white fire of love; if there be
   nothing diviner in God than His giving of Himself to His creatures; if
   the highest glory of the divine nature be to pity and to bestow, then
   the Cross upon which Christ died towers above all other revelations as
   the most awful, the most sacred, the most tender, the most complete,
   the most heart-touching, the most soul-subduing manifestation of the
   divine nature; and stars and worlds, and angels and mighty creatures,
   and things in the heights and things in the depths, to each of which
   have been entrusted some broken syllables of the divine character to
   make known to the world, dwindle and fade before the brightness, the
   lambent, gentle brightness that beams out from the Cross of Christ,
   which proclaims--God is love, is pity, is pardon.

   And is it not so--is it not so? Is not the thought that has flowed from
   Christ's Cross through Christendom of what our Father in Heaven is, the
   highest and the most blessed that the world has ever had? Has it not
   scattered doubts that lay like mountains of ice upon man's heart? Has
   it not swept the heavens clear of clouds that wrapped it in darkness?
   Has it not delivered men from the dreams of gods angry, gods
   capricious, gods vengeful, gods indifferent, gods simply mighty and
   vast and awful and unspeakable? Has it not taught us that love is God,
   and God is love; and so brought to the whole world the true Gospel, the
   Gospel of the grace of God? In that Cross the Father is glorified.

   III. Now, lastly, we have here the Son of Man glorified in the Father.

   The mysteries and the paradoxes seem to deepen as we advance. If God be
   glorified in Him, God shall also glorify Him in Himself, and shall
   straightway glorify Him.' Do these words sound to you as if they
   expressed no more than the confidence of a good man, who, when he was
   dying, believed that he would be accepted of a loving Father, and would
   be at rest from his sufferings? To me they seem to say infinitely more
   than that. He shall also glorify Him in Himself.' Mark that in
   Himself.' That is the obvious antithesis to what has been spoken about
   in the previous clause, a glorifying which consisted in a manifestation
   to the external universe, whereas this is a glorifying within the
   depths of the divine nature. And the best commentary upon it is our
   Lord's own words: Father! glorify Thou Me with the glory which I had
   with Thee before the world was.' We get a glimpse, as it were, into the
   very centre of the brightness of God; and there, walking in that
   beneficent furnace, we see One like unto the Son of Man.' Christ
   anticipates that, in some profound and unspeakable sense, He shall, as
   it were, be caught up into the divinity, and shall dwell, as indeed He
   did dwell from the beginning, in the bosom of the Father.' He shall
   glorify Him in Himself.'

   But then mark, still further, that this reception into the bosom of the
   Father is given to the Son of Man. That is to say, the Man Christ
   Jesus, the Son of Mary, the Brother of us all, bone of our bone and
   flesh of our flesh,' the very Person that walked upon earth and dwelt
   amongst us is taken up into the heart of God, and in His manhood enters
   into that same glory, which, from the beginning, the Eternal Word had
   with God.

   And still further, not only have we here set forth, in most wondrous
   language, the reception and incorporation, if we may use such words,
   into the very centre of divinity, as granted to the Son of Man, but we
   have that glorifying set forth as commencing immediately upon the
   completion of God's glorifying by Christ upon the Cross. He shall
   straightway glorify Him.' At the instant then, that He said, It is
   finished,' and all that the Cross could do to glorify God was done, at
   that instant there began, with not a pin-point of interval between
   them, God's glorifying of the Son in Himself. It began in that Paradise
   into which we know that upon that day He entered. It was manifested to
   the world when He raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory.' It
   reached a still higher point when they brought Him near unto the
   Ancient of Days,' and ascending up on high, a dominion and a throne and
   a glory were given to Him which last now, whilst the Son of Man sits in
   the heavens on the throne of His glory, wielding the attributes of
   divinity, and administering the laws of the universe and the mysteries
   of providence. It shall rise to its highest manifestation before an
   assembled world, when He shall come in His glory, and before Him shall
   be gathered all nations.'

   This, then, was the vision that lay before the Christ in that upper
   room, the vision of Himself glorified in His extreme shame, because His
   Cross manifested His love and His saving power; of God glorified in Him
   above all other of His acts of manifestation when He died on the Cross,
   and revealed the very heart of God; and of Himself glorified in the
   Father when, exalted high above all creatures, He sitteth upon the
   Father's throne and rules the Father's realm.

   And yet from that high, and, to us, inaccessible and all but
   inconceivable summit of His elevation, He looks down ready to bless
   each poor creature here, toiling and moiling amidst sufferings, and
   meannesses, and commonplaces, and monotony, if we will only put our
   trust in Him, and love Him, and see the brightness of the Father's face
   in Him. He cares for us all; and if we will but take Him as our
   Saviour, His all-prevalent prayer, presented within the veil for us,
   will certainly be fulfilled at last: Father, I will that they also whom
   Thou hast given Me may be with Me where I am, that they may behold My
   glory.'
     __________________________________________________________________

CANNOT AND CAN

   Little children, yet a little while I am with you. Ye shall seek Me:
   and as I said unto the Jews, Whither I go ye cannot come; so now I say
   to you.'--JOHN xiii. 33.

   The preceding context shows how large and black the Cross loomed before
   Jesus now, and how radiant the glory beyond shone out to Him. But it
   was only for a moment that either of these two absorbed His thoughts;
   and with wonderful self-forgetfulness and self-command, He turned away
   at once from the consideration of how the near future was to affect
   Him, to the thought of how it was to affect the handful of helpless
   disciples who had to be left alone. Impending separation breaks up the
   fountains of the heart, and we all know the instinct that desires to
   crowd all the often hidden love into some one last token. So here our
   Lord addresses His disciples by a name that is never used except this
   once, little children,' a fond diminutive that not only reveals an
   unusual depth of tender emotion, but also breathes a pitying sense of
   their defencelessness when they are to be left alone. So might a dying
   mother look at her little ones.

   But the words that follow, at first sight, are dark with the sense of a
   final and complete separation. Ye shall seek Me'--and not only so, but
   He seems to put back His humble friends into the same place as had been
   occupied by His bitter foes--as I said to the Jews, whither I go ye
   cannot come; so now I say to you.' There was something that prevented
   both classes alike from keeping Him company; and He had to walk His
   path both into the darkness and into the glory, alone.

   The words apply in their fullness only to the parenthesis of time
   whilst He lay in the grave, and the disciples despairingly thought that
   all was ended. It was a brief period: it was a revolutionary moment;
   and though it was soon to end, they needed to be guarded against it.
   But though the words do not apply to the permanent relation between the
   glorified Christ and us, His disciples, yet partly by similarity, and
   still more by contrast, they do suggest great Christian blessedness and
   imperative Christian duties. These gather themselves mainly round two
   contrasts, a transitory cannot' soon to be changed into a permanent
   can'; and a momentary seeking, soon to be converted into a blessed
   seeking which finds. I now deal only with the former.

   We have here a transitory cannot' soon to be changed into a permanent
   can.'

   Whither I go ye cannot come.' Does not one hear a tone of personal
   sorrow in that saying? Jesus had always hungered for understanding and
   sympathetic companions, and one of His lifelong sorrows had been His
   utter loneliness; but He had never, in all the time that He had been
   with them, so put out His hand, feeling for some warm clasp of a human
   hand to help Him in His struggle, as He did during the hours
   terminating with Gethsemane. And perhaps we may venture to say that we
   hear in this utterance an expression of Christ's sorrow for Himself
   that He had to tread the dark way, and to pass into the brightness
   beyond, all alone. He yearned for the impossible human companionship,
   as well as sorrowed for the imperfections which made it impossible.

   Why was it that they could not follow Him now'? The answer to that
   question is found in the consideration of whither it was that He went.
   When that bright Shekinah-cloud at the Ascension received Him into its
   radiant folds, it showed why they could not follow Him, because it
   revealed that He went unto the Father, when He left the world. So we
   are brought face to face with the old, solemn thought that character
   makes capacity for heaven. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord,
   or who shall stand in His holy place?' asked the Psalmist; and a
   prophet put the question in a still sharper form, and by the very form
   of the question suggested a negative answer--Who among us shall dwell
   with the devouring fire; who among us shall dwell with everlasting
   burnings?' Who can pass into that Presence, and stand near God, without
   being, like the maiden in the old legend, shrivelled into ashes by the
   contact of the celestial fire? Holiness' is that without which no man
   shall see the Lord.' And we, all of us, in the depths of our own
   hearts, if we rightly understand the voices that ever echo there, must
   feel that the condition which is, obviously and without any need for
   arguing it, required for abiding with God, and so going into the glory
   where Christ is, is a condition which none of us can fulfil. In that
   respect the imperfect and immature friends, the little children, the
   babes who loved and yet knew not Him whom they loved, and the scowling
   enemies, were at one. For they had all of them the one human heart, and
   in that heart the deep-lying alienation and contrariety to God.
   Therefore Christ trod the winepress alone, and alone ascended up where
   He was before.'

   But let us remember that this cannot' was only a transitory cannot. For
   we must underscore very deeply that word in my text so now I say to
   you,' and a moment afterwards, when one of the Apostles puts the
   question: Why cannot I follow Thee now?' the answer is: Thou canst not
   follow Me now; but thou shalt follow Me afterwards.' The text, too, is
   succeeded immediately by the wonderful parting consolations and
   counsels spoken to the disciples, through all of which there gleams the
   promise that they will be with Him where He is, and behold His glory.
   Set side by side with these sad words of our Lord in the text, by which
   He unloosed their clasping hands from Him, and turned His face to His
   solitary path, the triumphant language in which habitually the rest of
   the New Testament speaks of the Christian man's relation to Christ.
   Think of that great passage: Ye are come unto the city of the living
   God, the heavenly Jerusalem, . . . and to God the Judge of all, . . .
   and to Jesus the Mediator of the new Covenant.' What has become of the
   impossibility? Vanished. Where is the cannot'? Turned into a blessed
   can.' And so Apostles have no scruple in saying, Our citizenship is in
   Heaven,' nor in saying, We sit together with Him in heavenly places in
   Christ Jesus.' The path that was blocked is open. The impossibility
   that towered up like a great black wall has melted away; and the path
   into the Holiest of all is made patent by the blood of Christ. For in
   that death there lies the power that sweeps away all the impediments of
   man's sin, and in that life of the risen, glorified, indwelling Christ
   there lies the power which cleanses the inmost heart from all
   filthiness of flesh and spirit,' and makes it possible for our mortal
   feet to walk on the immortal path, and for us, with all our
   unworthiness, with all our shrinking, to stand in His presence and not
   be ashamed or consumed. Ye cannot come' was true for a few days. Ye can
   come' is true for ever; and for all Christian men.

   But let us not forget that the one attitude of heart and mind, by which
   a poor, sinful man, who dare not draw near to God, receives into
   himself the merit and power of the death, and the indwelling power of
   the life, of Jesus Christ, is personal faith in Jesus Christ. To trust
   Him is to come to Him, and it is represented in Scripture as conferring
   an instantaneous fitness for access to God. People pray sometimes that
   they may be made meet for the inheritance of the saints in light,' and
   the prayer is, in a sense, wise and true. But they too often forget
   that the Apostle says, in the original connection of the words which
   they so quote: He hath translated us from the tyranny of the darkness,
   and hath made us meet for the inheritance of the saints in light.' That
   is to say, whenever a poor soul, compassed and laden with its infirmity
   and sin, turns itself to that Lord whose Cross conquers sin, and whose
   blood infused into our veins--the Spirit of whose life granted to
   us--gives us to partake of His own righteousness, that moment that soul
   can tread the path that brings into the presence of God, and has access
   with confidence by the faith of Him.' So, brethren, seeing that thus
   the incapacity may all be swept away, and that instead of a cannot,'
   which relegates us to darkness, we may receive a can' which leads us
   into the light, let us see to it that this communion, which is possible
   for all Christian men, is real in our cases, and that we use the access
   which is given to us, and dwell for ever in, and with, the Lord.

   I have said that the act of faith, by associating a man with Jesus
   Christ in the power of His death and of His life, makes any who
   exercise it capable of passing into the presence of God. But I would
   remind you, too, that to make us more fit for more full and habitual
   communion is the very purpose for which all the discipline of our
   earthly life, its sorrows and its joys, its tasks and its repose, is
   exercised upon us--He for our profit, that we might be partakers of His
   holiness.' Surely if we habitually took that point of view in reference
   to our work, in reference to our joys, in reference to our trials,
   everything would be different. We are being prepared with sedulous
   love, with patient reiteration of line upon line, precept upon
   precept,' with singularly varied methods but a uniform purpose, by all
   that meets us in life, to be more capable of treading the eternal path
   into the eternal light. Is that how we daily think of our own
   circumstances? Do we bring that great thought to bear upon all that we,
   sometimes faithlessly, call mysterious or murmuringly think of--if we
   dare not speak our thought--as being cruel and hard? What does it
   matter if some precious things be lifted off our shoulders, and out of
   our hearts, if their being taken away makes it more possible for us to
   tread with a lighter step the path of peace? What matters it though
   many things that we would fain keep are withdrawn from us, if by the
   withdrawal we are sent a little further forward on the road that leads
   to God? As George Herbert says, sorrows and joys are like battledores
   that drive a shuttlecock, and they may all toss us to His breast.' In
   faith, however infantile it may be, there is an undeveloped capacity, a
   germ of fitness, for dwelling with God. But that capacity is meant to
   be increased, and the little children are meant to be helped to grow up
   into full-grown men, the measure of the stature of the fullness of
   Christ,' by all that comes here to them on earth. Do you not think we
   should understand life better, do you not think it would all be flashed
   up into new radiance, do you not think we should more seldom stand
   bewildered at what we choose to call the inscrutable dispensations of
   Providence, if this were the point of view from which we looked at them
   all--that they were fitting us for perpetual abiding with our Father
   God?

   Nor let us forget that there was a transient cannot' of another sort.
   For flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.' So, as life is
   changed when we think of it as helping us toward Him, death is changed
   when we think of it as being, if I may so say, the usher in attendance
   on the Presence-chamber, who draws back the thin curtain that separates
   us from the throne, and takes us by the hands and leads us into the
   Presence. Surely if we habitually thought thus of that otherwise grim
   chamberlain, we should be willing to put our hands into His, as a
   little child will, when straying, into the hands of a stranger who
   says, Come with me and I will take you home to your father.' As I said
   unto the Jews . . . so now I say to you, whither I go, ye cannot come.'

   Let us press on you and on myself the one thought that comes out of all
   that I have been saying, the blessed possibility, which, because it is
   a possibility, is an obligation, to use far more than most of us do,
   the right of access to the King who is our Father. There are nobles and
   corporate bodies, who regard it as one of their chief distinctions that
   they have always the right of entree to the court of the sovereign.
   Every Christian man has that. And in old days, when a baron did not
   show himself at court, suspicion naturally arose, and he was in danger
   of being thought disaffected, if not traitorous. Ah! if you and I were
   judged according to that law, what would become of us? We can go when
   we like. How seldom we do go! We can live in the heavens whilst our
   work lies down here. We prefer the low earth to the lofty sky. We are
   come'--ideally, and in the depths of our nature, our affinities are
   there--unto God, the Judge of all, and to Jesus the Mediator of the new
   Covenant.' Are we come? Are we day by day, in all the pettiness of our
   ordinary lives, when compassed by hard duties, weighed upon by sore
   distress--still keeping our hearts in heaven, and our feet familiar
   with the path that leads us to God? Set your affection on things above,
   where Jesus is, sitting at the right hand of God.' For there is no
   cannot' for His servants in regard to their access to any place where
   He is.
     __________________________________________________________________

SEEKING JESUS

   . . . Ye shall seek Me.'--JOHN xiii. 33.

   In the former sermon on this verse I pointed out that it, in its
   fullness, applies only to the brief period between the crucifixion and
   the resurrection, but that, partly by contrast and partly by analogy,
   it suggests permanent relations between Christ and His disciples. These
   relations were mainly--as I pointed out then--two: there was that one
   expressed by the subsequent words of the verse, Whither I go, ye cannot
   come'--a brief cannot,' soon to be changed into a permanent can'; and
   there was a second, a brief, sad, and vain seeking, soon to be changed
   into a seeking which finds. It is to the latter that I wish to turn
   now.

   Ye shall seek Me' fell, like the clods on a coffin-lid, with a hollow
   sound on the hearts of the Apostles. It comes to us as a permission and
   a command and a promise. I do not dwell on that sad seeking, which was
   so brief but so bitter. We all know what it is to put out an empty hand
   into the darkness and the void, and to grope for a touch which we know,
   whilst we grope, that we shall not find. And these poor, helpless
   disciples, by their forlorn sense of separation, by their yearning that
   brought no satisfaction, by their very listless despair, were saying,
   during these hours of agony into which an eternity of pain was
   condensed, Oh! that He were beside us again!'

   That sad seeking ended when He came to them, and then were the
   disciples glad when they saw the Lord.' But another kind of seeking
   began, when the cloud received Him out of their sight'; as joyful as
   the other was laden with sorrow, as sure to find the object of its
   quest as the other was certain to be disappointed. What He said in the
   darkness to them, He says in the light to us: What I say unto you I say
   unto all,' Seek! So now we have to deal with that joyful search which
   is sure of finding its object, and is only a little, if at all, less
   blessed than the finding itself.

   I. Every Christian is, by his very name, a seeker after Christ.

   There are two kinds of seeking, one like that of a bird whose young
   have been stolen away, which flutters here and there, because it knows
   not where that is which it seeks; another, like the flight of the same
   bird, when the migrating instinct rises in its little breast, and
   straight as an arrow it goes, not because it knows not its goal, but
   because it knows it, yonder where the sun is warm and the sky is blue,
   and winter is left behind in the cold north. Ye shall seek Me' is the
   word of promise, which changes the vain search that is ignorant of
   where the object of its quest is, into a blessed going out of the heart
   towards that which it knows to be the home of its homelessness. Thus
   the text brings out the very central blessedness and peculiarity of the
   Christian life, that it has no uncertainty in its aims, and that,
   instead of seeking for things which may or may not be found, or if
   found may or may not prove to be what we dreamt them to be. It seeks
   for a Person whom it knows where to find, and of whom it knows that all
   its desires will be met in Him. We have, then, on the one side the
   multifarious, divergent searchings of man; and on the other side the
   one quest in which all these others are gathered up, and translated
   into blessedness--the seeking after Jesus Christ.

   Men know that they need, if I may so put it, four things: truth for the
   understanding, love round which the heart may coil, authority for the
   will which may direct and restrain, and energy for the practical life.
   But, apart from the quest after Christ, men for the most part seek
   these necessary goods in divers objects, and fragmentarily look for the
   completion of their desires. But fragments will never satisfy a man's
   soul, and they who have to go to one place for truth, and to another
   for love, and to another for authority, and to another for energy, are
   wofully likely never to find what they search for. They are seeking in
   the manifold what can be found only in the One. It is as if some
   vessel, full of precious stones, were thrown down before men, and
   whilst they are racing after the diamonds, they lose the emeralds and
   the sapphires. But the wise concentrate their seekings on the one Pearl
   of great price,' in whom is truth for the brain, love for the heart,
   authority for the will, power for the life, and all summed in that
   which is more blessed than all, the Person of the Brother who died for
   us, the Christ who lives to fill our hearts for ever. One sun dims all
   the stars; and the one entire and perfect Chrysolite' beggars and
   reduces to fragments all the precious things that thou canst desire.'

   To seek Him is the very hall-mark of a Christian, and that seeking
   comes to be an earnest desire and effort after more conscious communion
   with Him, and a more entire possession of His imparted life which is
   righteousness and peace and joy and power. According to the Rabbis, the
   manna tasted to each man what each man most desired. The manifoldness
   of the one Christ is far more manifold than the manifoldness of the
   multiplicity of fragmentary and partial aims which foolish men
   perceive.

   The ways of seeking are very plain. First of all, we seek if, and in
   proportion as, we make the effort to occupy our thoughts and minds, not
   with theological dogmas, but with the living Christ Himself. Ah!
   brethren, it is hard to do, and I daresay a great many of you are
   thinking that it is far harder for you, in the distractions and rush
   and conflict of business and daily life, than it is for people like me,
   whom you imagine as sitting in a study, with nothing to distract us. I
   do not know about that; I fancy it is about equally hard for us all;
   but it is possible. I have been in Alpine villages where, at the end of
   every squalid alley, there towered up a great, pure, silent, white
   peak. That is what our lives may be; however noisome, crowded, petty
   the little lane in which we live, the Alp is at the end of it there, if
   we only choose to lift our eyes and look. It is possible that not only
   into the sessions of sweet silent thought,' but into the rush and
   bustle of the workshop or the exchange, there may come, like some
   sweet, beguiling melody, so sweet we know not we are listening to it,'
   the thought that changes pettiness into greatness, that makes all
   things go smoothly and easily, that is a test and a charm to discover
   and to destroy temptation, the thought of a present Christ, the Lover
   of my soul, and the Helper of my life.

   Again, we seek Him when, by aspiration and desire, we bring Him--as He
   is always brought thereby--into our hearts and into our lives. The
   measure of our desire is the measure of our possession. Wishing is the
   opening of our hearts, but, alas, often we wish and desire, and the
   heart opens and nothing enters. Wishes are like the tentacles of some
   marine organism waving about in a waste ocean, feeling for the food
   that they do not find. But if we open our hearts for Him, that is
   simultaneous with the coming of Him to us. Ye have not, because ye ask
   not.' Do not forget, dear friends, that desire, if it is genuine, will
   take a very concrete form and will be prayer. And it is prayer--by
   which I do not mean the utterance of words without desire, any more
   than I mean desire without the direct casting of it into the form of
   supplication--it is prayer that brings Christ into any, and it is
   prayer that will bring Him into every, life.

   Nor let us forget that there is another way of seeking besides these
   two, of looking up to Him through, and in the midst of, all the shows
   and trifles of this low life, and the reaching out of our desires
   towards Him, as the roots of a tree beneath the soil go straight for
   the river. That other way is imitation and obedience. It is vain to
   think of Him, and it is unreal to pretend to desire Him, if we are not
   seeking Him by treading in the path that He has trod, and which leads
   to Him. Imitation and obedience--these are the steps by which we go
   straight through all the trivialities of life into the presence of the
   Lord Himself. The smallest deflection from the path that leads to Him
   will carry us away into doleful wastes. The least invisible cloud that
   steals across the sky will blot out half a hemisphere of stars; and we
   seek not Christ unless, thinking of Him, and desiring Him, we also walk
   in the path in which He has walked, and so come where He is. He Himself
   has said that if His servant follows Him, where He is there shall also
   His servant be. These things make up the seeking which ought to mark us
   all.

   I note that--

   II. The Christian seeker always finds.

   I pointed out in my last sermon the strange identity of our Lord's
   words to His humble friends, with those which on another occasion He
   used to His bitter enemies. He reminds the disciples of that identity
   in the verse from which my text comes: As I said to the Jews . . . so
   now I say to you.' But there was one thing that He said to the Jews
   that He did not say to them. To the former He said, Ye shall seek Me,
   and shall not find Me'; and He did not say that--even for the sad hours
   it was not quite true--He did not say that to His followers, and He
   does not say it to us.

   If we seek we shall find. There is no disappointment in the Christian
   life. Anything is possible rather than that a man should desire Christ
   and not have Him. That has never been the experience of any seeking
   soul. And so I urge upon you what has already been suggested, that
   inasmuch as, by reason of His infinite longing to give truth and love
   and guidance and energy and His whole Self, to all of us, the amount of
   our possession of the power and life of Jesus Christ depends on
   ourselves. If you take to the fountain a tiny cup, you will only bring
   away a tiny cupful. If you take a great vessel you will bring it away
   full. As long as the woman in the old story held out her vessels to the
   miraculous flow of the oil, the flow continued. When she had no more
   vessels to take, the flow stopped. If a man holds a flagon beneath a
   spigot with an unsteady hand, half of the precious liquor will be spilt
   on the ground. Those who fulfil the conditions, of which I have already
   been speaking, may make quite sure that according to their faith will
   it be unto them. And if you, dear friend, have not in your experience
   the conscious presence of a Christ who is all that you need, there is
   no one in heaven or earth or hell to blame for it but only your own
   self. I have never said to any of the seed of Jacob, Seek ye My face in
   vain'; and when the Lord said, Ye shall seek Me,' He was implicitly
   binding Himself to meet the seeking soul, and give Himself to the
   desiring heart.

   Remember, too, that this seeking, which is always crowned with finding,
   is the only search in which failure is impossible. There is only one
   course of life that has no disappointments. We all know how frequently
   we are foiled in our quests; we all know how often a prize won is a
   bitterer disappointment than a prize unattained. Like a jelly-fish in
   the water, as long as it is there its tenuous substance is lovely,
   expanded, tinged with delicate violets and blues, and its long
   filaments float in lines of beauty. Lay it on the beach, and it is a
   shapeless lump, and it poisons and stings. You fish your prize out of
   the great ocean, and when you have it, does it disappoint, or does it
   fulfil, the raised expectations of the quest? There is One who does not
   disappoint. There is one gold mine that comes up to the prospectus.
   There is one spring that never runs dry. The more deep our Christian
   experience is, the more we shall take the rapturous exclamation of the
   Arabian queen to ourselves: The half was not told us!'

   And so, lastly, I suggest that--

   III. The finding impels to fresh seeking.

   The object of the Christian man's quest is Jesus Christ. He is
   Incarnate Infinitude; and that cannot be exhausted. The seeker after
   Jesus Christ is the Christian soul. That soul is the incarnate
   possibility of indefinite expansion and approximation and assimilation;
   and that cannot be exhausted. And so, with a Christ who is infinite,
   and a seeker whose capacities may be indefinitely expanded, there can
   be no satiety, there can be no limit, there can be no end to the
   process. This wine-skin will not burst when the new wine is put into
   it. Rather like some elastic vessel, as you pour it will fill out and
   expand. Possession enlarges, and the more of Christ's fullness is
   poured into a human heart, the more is that heart widened out to
   receive a greater blessing.

   Dear brethren, there is one course of life, and I believe but one, on
   which we may all enter with the sure confidence that in the nature of
   things, in the nature of Christ, and in the nature of ourselves, there
   is no end to growth and progress. Think of the freshness and
   blessedness and energy that puts into a life. To have an unattained and
   unattainable object, a goal to which we can never come, but to which we
   may ever be approximating, seems to me to be the secret of perpetual
   joy and of perpetual youthfulness. To say, forgetting the things that
   are behind, I reach forward unto the things that are before,' is a
   charm and an amulet that repels monotony and weariness, and goes with a
   man to the very end, and when all other aims and objects have died down
   into grey ashes, that flame, like the fabled lamp in Virgil's tomb,
   burns clear in the grave, and lights us to the eternity beyond.

   For certainly, if there be neither satiety nor limit to Christian
   progress here, there can be no better and stronger evidence that
   Christian progress here is but the first lap' of the race, the first
   stadium of the course, and that beyond that narrow, dark line which
   lies across the path, it runs on, rising higher, and will run on for
   ever.


     On earth the broken arc; in heaven the perfect round.'

   Seek for what you are sure to find; seek for what will never disappoint
   you; seek for what will abide with you for ever. The very first word of
   Christ's recorded in Scripture is a question which He puts to us all:
   What seek ye?' Well for us, if like the two to whom it was originally
   addressed, we answer, We are not seeking a What; we are seeking a
   Whom.--Master, where dwellest Thou?' And if we have that answer in our
   hearts, we shall receive the invitation which they received, Come and
   see,'--come and seek. Ye shall seek Me' is a gracious invitation, an
   imperative command, and a faithful promise that if we seek we shall
   find. Whoso findeth Him findeth life; whoso misseth Him'--whatever else
   he has sought and found--wrongeth his own soul.'
     __________________________________________________________________

AS I HAVE LOVED'

   A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another: as I have
   loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know
   that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another.'--JOHN xiii.
   34, 35.

   Wishes from dying lips are sacred. They sink deep into memories and
   mould faithful lives. The sense of impending separation had added an
   unwonted tenderness to our Lord's address, and He had designated His
   disciples by the fond name of little children.' The same sense here
   gives authority to His words, and moulds them into the shape of a
   command. The disciples had held together because He was in their midst.
   Will the arch stand when the keystone is struck out? Will not the
   spokes fall asunder when the nave of the wheel is taken away? He would
   guard them from the disintegrating tendencies that were sure to set in
   when He was gone; and He would point them to a solace for His absence,
   and to a kind of substitute for His presence. For to love the brethren
   whom they see would be, in some sense, a continuing to love the Christ
   whom they had ceased to see. And so, immediately after He said: Whither
   I go ye cannot come,' He goes on to say: Love one another as I have
   loved you.'

   He called this a new commandment,' though to love one's neighbour as
   one's self was a familiar commonplace amongst the Jews, and had a
   recognised position in Rabbinical teaching. But His commandment
   proposed a new object of love, it set forth a new measure of love, so
   greatly different from all that had preceded it as to become almost a
   new kind of love, and it suggested and supplied a new motive power for
   love. This commandment could give life' and fulfil itself. Therefore it
   comes to us as a new commandment'--even to us--and, unlike the words
   which preceded it, which we were considering in former sermons, it is
   wholly and freshly applicable to-day as in the ages that are passed. I
   ask you, first, to consider--

   I. The new scope of the new commandment.

   Love one another.' The newness of the precept is realised, if we think
   for a moment of the new phenomenon which obedience to it produced. When
   the words were spoken, the then-known civilised Western world was cleft
   by great, deep gulfs of separation, like the crevasses in a glacier, by
   the side of which our racial animosities and class differences are
   merely superficial cracks on the surface. Language, religion, national
   animosities, differences of condition, and saddest of all, difference
   of sex, split the world up into alien fragments. A stranger' and an
   enemy' were expressed in one language, by the same word. The learned
   and the unlearned, the slave and his master, the barbarian and the
   Greek, the man and the woman, stood on opposite sides of the gulfs,
   flinging hostility across. A Jewish peasant wandered up and down for
   three years in His own little country, which was the very focus of
   narrowness and separation and hostility, as the Roman historian felt
   when he called the Jews the haters of the human race'; He gathered a
   few disciples, and He was crucified by a contemptuous Roman governor,
   who thought that the life of one fanatical Jew was a small price to pay
   for popularity with his troublesome subjects, and in a generation
   after, the clefts were being bridged and all over the Empire a strange
   new sense of unity was being breathed, and Barbarian, Scythian, bond
   and free,' male and female, Jew and Greek, learned and ignorant,
   clasped hands and sat down at one table, and felt themselves all one in
   Christ Jesus.' They were ready to break all other bonds, and to yield
   to the uniting forces that streamed out from His Cross. There never had
   been anything like it. No wonder that the world began to babble about
   sorcery, and conspiracies, and complicity in unnameable vices. It was
   only that the disciples were obeying the new commandment,' and a new
   thing had come into the world--a community held together by love and
   not by geographical accidents or linguistic affinities, or the iron
   fetters of the conqueror. You sow the seed in furrows separated by
   ridges, and the ground is seamed, but when the seed springs the ridges
   are hidden, no division appears, and as far as the eye can reach, the
   cornfield stretches, rippling in unbroken waves of gold. The new
   commandment made a new thing, and the world wondered.

   Now then, brethren, do not let us forget that, although to obey this
   commandment is in some respects a great deal harder to-day than it was
   then, the diverse circumstances in which Christian individuals and
   Christian communities are this day placed may modify the form of our
   obedience, but do not in the smallest degree weaken the obligation, for
   the individual Christian and for societies of Christians, to follow
   this commandment. The multiplication of numbers, the cessation of the
   armed hostility of the world, the great varieties in intellectual
   position in regard to the truths of Christianity, divergencies of
   culture, and many other things, are separating forces, But our
   Christianity is worth very little, if it cannot master these separating
   tendencies, even as in the early days of freshness, the Christianity
   that sprang in these new converts' minds mastered the far more powerful
   separating tendencies with which they had to contend.

   Every Christian man is under the obligation to recognise his kindred
   with every other Christian man--his kindred in the deep foundations of
   his spiritual being, which are far deeper, and ought to be far more
   operative in drawing together, than the superficial differences of
   culture or opinion or the like, which may part us. The bond that holds
   Christian men together is their common relation to the one Lord, and
   that ought to influence their attitude to one another. You say I am
   talking commonplaces. Yes; and the condition of Christianity this day
   is the sad and tragical sign that the commonplaces need to be talked
   about, till they are rubbed into the conscience of the Church as they
   never have been before.

   Do not let us suppose that Christian love is mere sentiment. I shall
   have to speak a word or two about that presently, but I would fain lift
   the whole subject, if I can, out of the region of mere unctuous words
   and gush of half-feigned emotion, which mean nothing, and would make
   you feel that it is a very practical commandment, gripping us hard,
   when our Lord says to us, Love one another.'

   I have spoken about the accidental conditions which make obedience to
   this commandment difficult. The real reason which makes the obedience
   to it difficult is the slackness of our own hold on the Centre. In the
   measure in which we are filled with Jesus Christ, in that measure will
   that expression of His spirit and His life become natural to us. Every
   Christian has affinities with every other Christian, in the depths of
   his being, so as that he is a great deal more like his brother, who is
   possessor of like precious faith,' however unlike the two may be in
   outlook, in idiosyncrasy, and culture and in creed, than he is to
   another man with whom he may have a far closer sympathy in all these
   matters than he has with the brother in question, but from whom he is
   parted by this, that the one trusts and loves and obeys Jesus Christ,
   and the other does not. So, for individuals and for churches, the
   commandment takes this shape--Go down to the depths and you will find
   that you are closer to the Christian man or community which seems
   furthest from you, than you are to the non-Christian who seems nearest
   to you. Therefore, let your love follow your kinship, and your heart
   recognise the oneness that knits you together. That is a revolutionary
   commandment; what would become of our present organisations of
   Christianity if it were obeyed? That is a revolutionary commandment;
   what would become of our individual relations to the whole family who,
   in every place, and in many tongues, and with many creeds, call on
   Jesus as on their Lord, their Lord and ours, if it were obeyed? I leave
   you to answer the question. Only I say the commandment has for its
   first scope all who, in every place, love the Lord Jesus Christ.

   But there is more than that involved in it. The very same principle
   which makes this love to one another imperative upon all disciples,
   makes it equally imperative upon every follower of Jesus Christ to
   embrace in a real affection all whom Jesus so loved as to die for them.
   If I am to love a Christian man because he and I love Christ, I am to
   love everybody, because Christ loves me and everybody, and because He
   died on the Cross for me and for all men. And so one of the other
   Apostles, or, at least, the letter which goes by his name, laid hold on
   the true connection when, instead of concentrating Christian affection
   on the Church, and letting the world go to the devil as an alien thing,
   he said: Add to your faith,' this, that, and the other, and brotherly
   kindness, and to brotherly kindness, charity.' The particular does not
   exclude the general, it leads to the general. The fire kindled upon the
   hearth gives warmth to all the chamber. The circles are concentric, and
   the widest sweep is struck from the same middle point as the narrow. So
   the new commandment does not cut humanity into two halves, but gathers
   all diversity into one, and spreads the great reconciling of Christian
   love over all the antagonisms and oppositions of earth. Let me ask you
   to notice--

   II. The example of the new commandment, As I have loved you.'

   That solemn as' lifts itself up before us, shines far ahead of us,
   ought to draw us to itself in hope, and not to repel us from itself in
   despair. As I have loved'--what a tremendous thing for a man to stand
   up before his fellows, and say, Take Me as the perfect example of
   perfect love; and let My example--un-dimmed by the mists of gathering
   centuries, and un-weakened by the change of condition, and
   circumstance, fresh as ever after ages have passed, and closely-fitting
   as ever all varieties of human character and condition--stand before
   you; the ideal that I have realised, and you will be blessed in the
   proportion in which you seek, though you fail, to realise it!' There
   is, I venture to believe, only one aspect of Jesus Christ in which such
   a setting forth of Himself as the perfect Incarnation of perfect love
   is warrantable; and that is found in the old belief that His very birth
   was the result of His love, and that His death was the climax of that
   love. And if so, we have to turn to Bethlehem, and the whole life, and
   the Cross at its end, as being the Christ-given example and model for
   our love to our brethren.

   What do we see there? I have said that there is too much of mere sickly
   sentimentality about the ordinary treatment of this great commandment,
   and that I desired to lift it out of that region into a far nobler,
   more strenuous, and difficult one. This is what we see in that life and
   in that death:--First of all--the activity of love--Let us not love in
   words, but in deed and in truth'; then we see the self-forgetfulness of
   love--Even Christ pleased not Himself'; then we see the self-sacrifice
   of love--Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his
   life for his friends.' And in these three points, on which I would fain
   enlarge if I might, active love, self-oblivious love, self-sacrificing
   love, you have the pattern set for us all. Christian love is no mere
   sickly maiden, full of sentimental emotions and honeyed words. She is a
   strenuous virgin, girt for service, a heroine ready for dangers, and
   prepared to be a martyr if it be needful. Love's language is sacrifice.
   I give thee myself,' is its motto. And that is the pattern that is set
   before us all--as I have loved you.'

   I have tried to show you how the commandment was new in many
   particulars, and it is for ever new in this particular, that it is for
   ever before us, unattained, and drawing faithful hearts to itself, and
   ever opening out into new heroisms and, therefore, blessedness, of
   self-sacrifice, and ever leading us to confess the differences, deep,
   tragic, sinful, between us and Him who--we sometimes think too
   presumptuously--we venture to say is our Lord and Master.

   Did you ever see in some great picture gallery a copyist sitting in
   front of a Raffaelle, and comparing his poor feeble daub, all out of
   drawing, and with little of the divine beauty that the master had
   breathed over his canvas, even if it preserved the mere mechanical
   outline? That is what you and I should do with our lives: take them and
   put them down side by side with the original. We shall have to do it
   some day. Had we better not do it now, and try to bring the copy a
   little nearer to the masterpiece; and let that as I have loved you'
   shine before us and draw us on to unattainable heights?

   And now, lastly, we have here--

   III. The motive power for obedience to the commandment.

   That is as new as all the rest. That as' expresses the manner of the
   love, but it also expresses the motive and the power. It might be
   translated into the equivalent in the fashion in which,' or it might be
   translated into the equivalent since--' I have loved you.' The original
   might bear the rendering, that ye also may love one another.' That is
   to say, what keeps men from obeying this commandment is the instinctive
   self-regard which is natural to us all. There are muscles in the body
   which are so constructed that they close tightly; and the heart is
   something like one of these sphincter muscles--it shuts by nature,
   especially if there has been anything put inside it over which it can
   shut and keep it all to itself. But there is one thing that dethrones
   Self, and enthrones the angel Love in a heart, and that is, that into
   that heart there shall come surging the sense of the great love
   wherewith I have loved you.' That melts the iceberg; nothing else will.

   That love of Christ to us, received into our hearts, and there
   producing an answering love to Him, will make us, in the measure in
   which we live in it and let it rule us, love everything and every
   person that He loves. That love of Jesus Christ, stealing into our
   hearts and there sweetening the ever-springing issues of life,' will
   make them flow out in glad obedience to any commandment of His. That
   love of Jesus Christ, received into our hearts, and responded to by our
   answering love, will work, as love always does, a magical
   transformation. A great monastic teacher wrote his precious book about
   The Imitation of Christ. Imitation' is a great word, Transformation' is
   a greater. We all,' receiving on the mirror of our loving hearts the
   love of Jesus Christ, are changed into the same likeness.' Thus, then,
   the love, which is our pattern, is also our motive and our power for
   obedience, and the more we bring ourselves under its influences, the
   more we shall love all those who are beloved by, and lovers of, Jesus.

   That is the one foundation for a world knit together in the bonds of
   amity and concord. There have been attempts at brotherhood, and the
   guillotine has ended what was begun in the name of fraternity.' Men
   build towers, but there is no cement between the bricks, unless the
   love of Christ holds them together, and therefore Babel after Babel
   comes down about the ears of its builders. But notwithstanding all that
   is dark to-day, and though the war-clouds are lowering, and the hearts
   of men are inflamed with fierce passions, Christ's commandment is
   Christ's promise; and though the vision tarry, it will surely come. So
   even to-day Christian men ought to stand for Christ's peace, and for
   Christ's love. The old commandment which we have had from the
   beginning, is the new commandment that fits to-day as it fits all the
   ages. It is a dream, say some. Yes, a dream; but a morning dream which
   comes true. Let us do the little we can to make it true, and to bring
   about the day when the flock of men will gather round the one Shepherd,
   who loved them to the death, and who has bid them and helped them to
   love one another as'--and since--He has loved them.'
     __________________________________________________________________

QUO VADIS?

   Peter said unto Him, Lord, why cannot I follow Thee now! I will lay
   down my life for Thy sake. Jesus answered him, Wilt thou lay down thy
   life for My sake? Verily, verily, I say unto thee, The cock shall not
   crow, till thou hast denied Me thrice.'--JOHN xiii. 37, 38.

   Peter's main characteristics are all in operation here; his eagerness
   to be in the front, his habit of blurting out his thoughts and
   feelings, his passionate love for his Master, and withal his inability
   to understand Him, and his self-confident arrogance. He has broken in
   upon Christ's solemn words, entirely deaf to their deep meaning, but
   blindly and blunderingly laying hold of one thought only, that Jesus is
   departing, and that he is to be left alone. So he asks the question,
   Lord! thither goest Thou?'--not so much caring about that, as meaning
   by his question--tell me where, and then I will come too'; pledging
   himself to follow faithfully, as a dog behind his master, wherever He
   went.

   Our Lord answered the underlying meaning of the words, repeating with a
   personal application what He had just before said as a general
   principle--Whither I go thou canst not follow Me now, but thou shall
   follow Me afterwards.' Then followed this noteworthy dialogue.

   The whole significance of the incident is preserved for us in the
   beautiful legend which tells us how, near the city of Rome, on the
   Appian Way, as Peter was flying for his life, he met the Lord, and
   again said to Him: Lord, whither goest Thou?' The words of the
   question, as given in the Vulgate, are the name of the site of the
   supposed interview, and of the little church which stands on it. The
   Master answered: I go to Rome, to be crucified again.' The answer smote
   the heart of the Apostle, and turned the cowardly fugitive into a hero;
   and he followed his Lord, and went gladly to his death. For it was that
   death which had to be accomplished before Peter was able to follow his
   Lord.

   Now, as to the words before us, I think we shall best gather their
   significance, and lay it upon our own hearts, if we simply follow the
   windings of the dialogue. There are three points: the audacious
   question, the rash vow, and the sad forecast.

   I. The audacious question.

   As Peter's first question, Lord, whither goest Thou?' meant not so much
   what it said, as I will follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest; tell me,
   that I may'; so the second question, in like manner, is really not so
   much a question, Why cannot I follow Thee now?' as the nearest possible
   approach to a flat contradiction of our Lord. Peter puts his words into
   the shape of an interrogation; what he means is, Yes, I can follow
   Thee; and in proof thereof, I will lay down my life for Thy sake.' The
   man's persistence, the man's love leading him to lack of reverence,
   came out in this (as I have ventured to call it) audacious question.
   Its underlying meaning was a refusal to believe the Master's word. But
   yet there was in it a nobility of resolution--broken afterwards, but
   never mind about that--to endure anything rather than to be separate
   from the Lord. Yet, though it was noble in its motive, but lacking in
   reverence in its form, there was a deeper error than that in it. Peter
   did not know what following' meant, and he had to be taught that first.
   One of the main reasons why he could not follow was because he did not
   understand what was involved. It was something more than marching
   behind his Master, even to a Cross. There was a deeper discipline and a
   more strenuous effort needed than would have availed for such a kind of
   following.

   Let us look a little onwards into his life. Recall that scene on the
   morning of the day by the banks of the lake, when he waded through the
   shallow water, and cast himself, dripping, at his Master's feet, and,
   having by his threefold confession obliterated his threefold denial,
   was taken back to his Lord's love, and received the permission for
   which he had hungered, and which he had been told, in the upper room,
   could not now' be given: Jesus said to him, Follow thou Me.' What a
   flood of remembrances must then have rushed over the penitent Peter!
   how he must have thought to himself, So soon, so soon is the "canst
   not" changed into a canst! So soon has the "afterwards" come to be the
   present!'

   And long years after that, when he was an old man, and experience had
   taught him what following meant, he shared his privilege with all the
   dispersed strangers to whom he wrote, and said to them, with a definite
   reference to this incident, and to the other after the Resurrection,
   leaving us an example, that we (not only, as I used to think, in my
   exuberant days of ignorance) should follow in His steps.'

   So, brethren, this blundering, loving, audacious question suggests to
   us that to follow Jesus Christ is the supreme direction for all
   conduct. Men of all creeds, men of no creed, admit that. The


     Loveliness of perfect deeds,

     More strong than all poetic thought,'

   which is set forth in that life constitutes the living law to which all
   conduct is to be conformed, and will be noble in proportion as it is
   conformed.

   There is the great blessing, and solemn obligation, and lofty
   prerogative of Christian morality, that for obedience to a precept it
   substitutes following a Person, and instead of saying to men Be good'
   it says to them Be Christlike.' It brings the conception of duty out of
   the region of abstractions into the region of living realities. For the
   cold statuesque ideal of perfection it substitutes a living Man, with a
   heart to love, and a hand to help us. Thereby the whole aspect of
   striving after the right is changed; for the work is made easier, and
   companionship comes in to aid morality, when Jesus Christ says to us,
   Be like Me; and then you will be good and blessed.' Effort will be all
   but as blessed as attainment, and the sense of pressing hard after Him
   will be only less restful than the consciousness of having attained. To
   follow Him is bliss, to reach Him is heaven.

   But in order that this following should be possible, there must be
   something done that had not been done when Peter asked, Why cannot I
   follow Thee now?' One reason why he could not was, as I said, because
   he did not know yet what following' meant, and because he was yet unfit
   for this assimilation of his character and of his conduct to the
   likeness of his Lord. And another reason was because the Cross still
   lay before the Lord, and until that death of infinite love and utter
   self-sacrifice for others had been accomplished, the pattern was not
   yet complete, nor the highest ideal of human life realised in life.
   Therefore the following' was impossible. Christ must die before He has
   completed the example that we are to follow, and Christ must die before
   the impulse shall be given to us, which shall make us able to tread,
   however falteringly and far behind, in His footsteps.

   The essence of His life and of His death lies in the two things, entire
   suppression of personal will in obedience to the will of the Father,
   and entire self-sacrifice for the sake of humanity. And however there
   is--and God forbid that I should ever forget in my preaching that there
   is--a uniqueness in that sacrifice, in that life, and in that death,
   which beggars all imitation, and needs and tolerates no repetition
   whilst the world lasts, still along with this, there is that which is
   imitable in the life and imitable in the death of the Master. To follow
   Jesus is to live denying self for God, and to live sacrificing self for
   men. Nothing less than these are included in the solemn words, leaving
   us'--even in the act and article of death when He suffered for us'--an
   example that we should follow His steps.'

   The word rendered example' refers to the headline which the
   writing-master gives his pupils to copy, line by line. We all know how
   clumsy the pothooks and hangers are, how blurred the page with many a
   blot. And yet there, at the top of it, stands the Master's fair
   writing, and though even the last line on the page will be blotted and
   blurred, when we turn it over and begin on the new leaf, the copy will
   be like the original, and we shall he like Him, for we shall see Him as
   He is.' Thou shalt follow Me afterwards' is a commandment; blessed be
   God, it is also a promise. For let us not forget that the following'
   ends in an attaining; even as the Lord Himself has said in another
   connection, when He spake: If any man serve Me, let him follow Me, and
   where I am, there shall also My servant be.' Of course, if we follow,
   we shall come to the same place one day. And so the great promise will
   be fulfilled; they shall follow the Lamb,' in that higher life,
   whithersoever He goeth'; and not as here imperfectly, and far behind,
   but close beside Him, and keeping step for step, being with Him first,
   and following Him afterwards.

   But let us remember that with regard to that future following and its
   completeness, the same present incapacity applies, as clogs and mars
   the following,' which is conforming our lives to His. For, as He
   Himself has said to us, I go to prepare a place for you,' and until He
   had passed through death and into His glory, there was no
   standing-ground for human feet on the golden pavements, and heaven was
   inaccessible to man until Christ had died. Thus, as all life is changed
   when it is looked upon as being a following of Jesus, so death becomes
   altogether other when it is so regarded. The first martyr outside the
   city wall, bruised and battered by the cruel stones, remembered his
   Master's death, and shaped his own to be like it. As Jesus, when He
   died, had said: Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit,' Stephen,
   dying, said: Lord Jesus, receive My spirit.' As the Master had given
   His last breath to the prayer, Father, forgive them; they know not what
   they do,' so Stephen shaped his last utterance to a conformity with his
   Lord's, in which the difference is as significant as the likeness, and
   said, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.' And then, as the record
   beautifully says, amidst all that wild hubbub and cruel assault, he
   fell on sleep,' as a child on its mother's breast. Death is changed
   when it becomes the following of Christ.

   II. We have here a rash vow.

   I will lay down my life for Thy sake.' What a strange inversion of
   parts is here! Lay down thy life for My sake'--with Calvary less than
   four-and-twenty hours off, when Christ laid down His life for Peter's
   sake. Peter was guilty of an anachronism in the words, for the time did
   not come for the disciple to die for his Lord till after the Lord had
   died for His disciple. But he was right in feeling, though he felt it
   only in regard to an external and physical act, that to follow Jesus,
   it was necessary to be ready to die for Him. And that is the great
   truth which underlies and half redeems the rashness of this vow, and
   needs to be laid upon our hearts, if we are ever to be the true
   followers of the Master. Death for Christ is necessary if we are to
   follow Him. There is nothing that a man can do deeply and truly, in a
   manner worthy of a Christian, which has not underlying it, either the
   death of self-will and all the godless nature, or if need be the actual
   physical death, which is a much smaller matter. You cannot follow
   Christ except you die daily. No man has ever yet trodden in His
   footsteps except on condition of, moment by moment, slaying self,
   suppressing self, abjuring self, breaking the connection of self with
   the material world, and yielding up himself as a living sacrifice, in a
   living death, to the Lord of life and death. Do not think that
   following Christ' is a mere sentimental expression for so much morality
   as we can conveniently get into our daily life. But remember that here,
   with all his rashness, with all his ignorance, with all his
   superficiality, the Apostle has laid hold upon the great permanent, but
   alas! much-forgotten principle, that to die is essential to following
   Jesus.

   This daily dying, which is a far harder thing to do than to go to a
   cross once, and have done with it--was impossible for Peter then,
   though he did not know it. His vow was a rash one, because the laying
   down of Christ's life, for Peter's sake and for ours, had not yet been
   accomplished. There is the motive-power by which, and by which alone,
   drawn in gratitude, and melted down from all our selfishness, we, too,
   in our measure and our turn, are able to yield ourselves, in daily
   crucifixion of our evil, and daily abnegation of self-trust, and
   self-pleasing, and self-will, to the Lord that has died for us. He must
   lay down His life for our sakes, and we must know He has done it, and
   rest upon Him as our great Sacrifice and our atoning Priest, or else we
   shall never be so loosed from the tyranny of self as to be ready to
   live by dying, and to die that we may live for His sake. I go to Rome
   to be crucified again' were the words in which the old legend braced
   the fugitive and made a hero of him, and sent him back to be crucified
   like his Lord and to offer up his physical life, as he had long since
   offered up his self-will and his arrogance to the Lord that had died
   for him.

   O Lord our Father! help us, we beseech Thee, that we may be of the
   sheep that hear the Shepherd's voice and follow Him. Strengthen our
   faith in that dear Lord who has laid down His life for us, that we may
   daily, by self-denial and self-sacrifice, lay down our lives for Him,
   and follow Him here in all the footsteps of His love.
     __________________________________________________________________

A RASH VOW

   Jesus answered him, Wilt them lay down thy life for My sake? Verily,
   verily I say unto thee, The cock shall not crow, till thou hast denied
   Me thrice.'--JOHN xiii. 38.

   In the last sermon I partly considered the dialogue of which this is
   the concluding portion, and found that it consisted of an audacious
   question: Why cannot I follow Thee now?' which really meant a
   contradiction of our Lord; of a rash vow; I will lay down my life for
   Thy sake'--and of a sad forecast: The cock shall not crow till thou
   hast denied Me thrice.' I paused in the middle of considering the
   second of these three stages, the rash vow. I then pointed out that,
   however ignorant the Apostle was of what following Christ' meant, he
   had hit the mark, and stumbled unknowingly upon the very essence of the
   Christian life, and an eternal truth, when he recognised that, somehow
   or other, to follow Christ' meant to die for Him. That is so, and is so
   always, for there is no following Christ which is not a dying daily,'
   by self-immolation and detachment from the world, and from the life of
   sense and self. But this rash vow has to be looked at from a somewhat
   different point of view, and we have to consider not only the strangely
   blended right and wrong, error and deep truth, that lie in its
   substance, but the strangely blended right and wrong in the state of
   feeling and thought, on the part of the Apostle, which it represents.
   And taking up the dropped thread, I first deal with that, and then with
   the sad forecast which follows.

   So then, looking at these words as being like all our words, even the
   best of them, strangely mingled of right and wrong, good and evil, I
   find in them--

   I. A noble, sincere, but transient emotion and impulse.

   I will lay down my life for Thy sake.' Peter meant it, every word of
   it; and he would have done it too, if only a gibbet or cross could have
   been set up then and there in the upper room. But unfortunately the
   moments of elevation and high-wrought enthusiasm, and the calls to
   martyrdom, do not always coincide. In the upper room, with its sacred
   atmosphere, it was easy to feel, and would have been easy to do, nobly.
   But it was not so easy, lying drowsily in Gethsemane, in the cold
   spring night, waiting for the Master's coming out from beneath the
   trembling shadows of the olive trees, or huddled up by the fire at the
   lower end of the hall in the grey morning, when vitality is at its
   lowest.

   So the sincere, noble utterance was but the expression of impulse and
   emotion which lifted Peter for a moment, and did him good, but which
   likewise, running through him, left him dry, and all the weaker because
   of the gush of feeling which had foamed itself away in empty words. For
   let us never forget that however high, noble, or divinely inspired
   emotion may be, in its nature it is transient and is sure to be
   followed by reaction. Like the winter torrents in some parched land,
   the more they foam, the more speedily does the bed of them dry up
   again, and the more they carry down the very soil in which growth and
   fertility would be possible. A rush of feeling is apt to leave behind
   hard, insensitive rock. There is a close connection between a
   predominantly emotional Christianity and a very imperfect life. Feeling
   is apt to be a substitute for action. Is it not a very remarkable thing
   that the word benevolence,' which means kindly feeling,' has come to
   take on the meaning rightly belonging to beneficence,' which means
   kindly doing'? The emotional man blinds and hoodwinks himself, by
   thinking that his quick sensibility and lofty enthusiasm and warmth of
   emotion are action or as good as action. Be thou warmed and filled,' he
   says to his brother, and, in a lazy expansion of heart, forgets that he
   has never lifted a finger to help.

   God forbid that I should seem to deprecate emotional religion or
   religious emotion! that is the last thing that needs to be done in this
   generation. If the Churches want one thing more than another, it is
   that their Christianity should become far more emotional than it is,
   and their impulses stronger, swifter, more spontaneous, more
   overmastering, and that they should be urged by these, and not merely
   by the reluctant recognition that such and such a piece of sacrifice or
   effort is a debt that they are obliged to clear off. Their service will
   be glad service, only when it is impulsive service and emotional
   service. Dear brethren, a Christian man whose life is not influenced by
   the deepest and most fervid emotion of love to the great Love that died
   for him, is a monster. The Lord's fire is in Jerusalem, and His furnace
   in Zion'--is that a description of the fervour of this Church, or of
   any Church in Christendom? A furnace? An ice-house! Think of some
   deserted cottage, with the roof fallen in, and in the cold
   chimney-place a rusty grate with some dead embers in it, and the snow
   lying upon the top of it--that is a truer description of a great many
   of our churches than the Lord's furnace.'

   But the lesson to be taken from this incident before us is not the
   danger of emotion; it is rather the necessity of emotion, but with two
   provisoes, that it shall be emotion based upon a clear recognition of
   the great truth that He has laid down His life for me; and that it
   shall be emotion harnessed to work, and not wasted in words. The
   mightier the plunge of the fall, the more electrical energy you can get
   out of it, and set that to work to drive the wheels of life. Do not be
   afraid of emotion; you will make little of your Christianity unless you
   have it. But be sure that it is under the guidance of a clear
   perception of the truth that evokes it, and that it is all used to turn
   the wheels of life. Better is it that thou shouldest not vow, than that
   thou shouldest vow and not pay.' Better is it that emotion should be
   reticent and active than that it should be voluble and idle. It is a
   good servant, but a bad master. A man that trusts to impulse and
   emotion to further his Christian course, is like a ship in that belt of
   variable winds that lies near the Equator, where there will be a fine
   ten-knot breeze for an hour or two, and then a sickly, stagnating calm.
   Push further south, and get into the steady trades,' where the wind
   blows with equable and persistent force all the year round in the same
   direction. Convert impulses and emotions into steadfast principle,
   warmed by emotion and borne on by impulse.

   II. Again, this rash vow is an illustration of a confidence, also
   strangely blended of good and evil.

   I will lay down my life for Thy sake.' As I have said, Peter meant it.
   His words are paralleled by other words, in which two of the Lord's
   disciples answered His solemn question: Are ye able to drink of the cup
   that I drink of?' with the unhesitating answer, We are able.' A great
   teacher has regarded that saying as one of the ventures of faith.'
   Perhaps it was. Perhaps there was as much self-confidence as faith in
   it. Certainly there was more self-confidence than faith in Peter's
   answer, and his self-confidence collapsed when the trial came.

   The world and the Church hold entirely antagonistic notions about the
   value of self-reliance. The world says that it is a condition of power.
   The Church says that it is the root of weakness. Self-confidence shuts
   a man out from the help of God, and so shuts him out from the source of
   power. For if you will think for a moment, you will see that the faith
   which the New Testament, in conformity with all wise knowledge of one's
   self, preaches as the one secret of power, has for its obverse--its
   other side--diffidence and self-distrust. No man trusts God as God
   ought to be trusted, who does not distrust himself as himself ought to
   be distrusted. To level a mountain is the only way to carry the water
   across where it stood. You can, by mechanism and locks, take a canal up
   to the top of a hill, but you cannot take a river up to the top, and
   the river of God's help flows through the valley and seeks the lowest
   levels. Faith and self-despair are the upper and the under sides of the
   same thing, like some cunningly-woven cloth, the one side bearing a
   different pattern from the other, and yet made of the same yarn, and
   the same threads passing from the upper to the under sides. So faith
   and self-distrust are but two names for one composite whole.

   I was once shown an old Jewish coin which had on the one side the words
   sackcloth and ashes,' and on the other side the words a crown of gold.'
   The coin meant to contrast what Israel had been with what Israel then
   was. The crown had come first; the sackcloth and ashes last. But we may
   use it for illustrating this point, on which I am now dwelling.
   Wherever, and only where, there are the sackcloth and ashes of
   self-despair there will be the crown of gold of an answering faith.
   When thus, as Wesley has it, in his great hymn: Confident in
   self-despair,' we cling to God, then we can say: When I am weak then am
   I strong,' Behold! we have no might, but our eyes are upon Thee.' If
   Peter had only said, By Thy help I will lay down my life for Thy sake,'
   his confidence would have been reasonable and blessed self-confidence,
   because it would have been confidence in a self inspired by divine
   power.

   And so, brethren, whilst utter diffidence is right for us, and is the
   condition of all our reception of energy according to our need, the
   most absolute confidence--a confidence which, to the eye of the man
   that measures only visible things, will seem sheer insanity--is
   sobriety for a Christian. The world is perfectly right when it says: If
   you believe you can do a thing, you have gone a long way towards doing
   it.' The expectation of success has often the knack of fulfilling
   itself. But the world does not know our secret, and our secret is that
   our humble faith brings into the field the reserves with the Captain of
   our salvation at their head. Therefore a self-distrusting Christian can
   say, and say without exaggeration or presumption, I can do all things
   in Christ, strengthening me from within.'

   The Church's ideals are possibilities, when you bring God into the
   account, and they look like insanity when you do not. Take, for
   instance, missions. What an absurdity to talk about a handful of
   Christian people--for we are only a handful as compared with the whole
   world--carrying their Gospel into every corner of the earth, and
   finding everywhere a response to it. Yes; it is absurd; but, wise Mr.
   Calculator, counter of heads, you have forgotten God in your estimate
   of whether it is reasonable or unreasonable. Again, take the Christian
   ideal of absolute perfection of character. What nonsense to talk as if
   any man could ever come to that.' Yes!--as if any man could come to
   that, I grant you. But if God is with him, the nonsense is to suppose
   that he will not come to it. Here is a row of cyphers as long as your
   arm. They mean nothing. Put a 1 at the left-hand end of the row; and
   what does it mean then? So the faith that brings Christ into the life,
   and into the Church, makes nobodies' into mighty men--laughs at
   impossibilities, and cries, It shall be done!'

   Still further, here, in this rash vow, we have an underestimate of
   difficulties. There was another incident in the life of the Apostle, a
   strange replica of this one, into which he pushed himself, just as he
   did into the high priest's hall, partly out of curiosity and a wish to
   be prominent; partly out of love to his Master. Without a moment's
   consideration of the peril into which he was thrusting himself, he sat
   in the boat, and said, Bid me come to Thee on the water.' He forgot
   that He was heavy, and that water was not solid, and that the wind was
   high and the lake rough, and when he put his foot over the side and
   felt the cold waves creeping up his knees, his courage ebbed out with
   his faith, and he began to sink. Then he cried, Lord! help me!' If he
   had thought for a moment of the reality of the case, he would have sat
   still in the boat. If he had thought of what would be in his way in
   following Jesus to death, he would have hesitated to vow. But it is so
   much easier to resolve heroisms in a quiet corner than to do them when
   the strain comes, and it is so much easier to do some one great thing
   that has in it enthusiasm and nobility, and conspicuousness of
   sacrifice, especially if it can be got over in a moment, like having
   one's head cut off with an axe, than it is to die daily.' Ah! brethren,
   it is the little difficulties that make the difficulty. You read in the
   newspapers in the autumn, every now and then, of trains, in that
   wonderful country across the water, being stopped by caterpillars. The
   Christian train is stopped by an army of caterpillars, far oftener than
   it is by some solid and towering barrier. Our Christian lives are a
   great deal likelier to come to failure, because we do not take into
   account the multiplied small antagonisms than because we are not ready
   to face the greater ones. What would you think of a bridge builder, who
   built a bridge across some mountain torrent and made no allowance for
   freshets and floods when the ice melted? His bridge and his piers would
   be gone the first winter. You remember who it was that said that he
   went into the Franco-German War with a light heart,' and in seven weeks
   came Sedan and the dethronement of an Emperor, and the surrender of an
   army. Blessed is he that feareth always.' There is no more fatal error
   than an underestimate of our difficulties.

   III. Let me say a word about the sad forecast here.


     Thou shalt deny me thrice.'

   We cannot say that poor Peter's fall was at all an anomalous or
   uncommon thing. He did exactly what a great many of us are doing. He
   could--and I have no doubt he would--have gone to the death for Jesus
   Christ; but he could not stand being laughed at for Him. He would have
   been ready to meet the executioner's sharp sword, but the
   servant-girl's sharp tongue was more than he could bear. And so he
   denied Jesus, not because he was afraid of his skin--for I do not
   suppose that the servants had any notion of doing anything more than
   amusing themselves with a few clumsy gibes at his expense--but because
   he could not bear to be made sport of.

   Now, dear brethren, I suppose we are all of us more or less movers in
   circles in which it sometimes is not considered good form' to show that
   we are Christian people. You young men in your warehouses, you students
   at the University, where it is a sign of being fossils' and behind the
   times' and not up to date' to say I am a Christian,' and all of us in
   our several places have sometimes to gather our courage together, and
   not be afraid to declare whose we are. No doubt life is a better
   witness than words, but no doubt also life is not so good a witness as
   it might be, unless it sometimes has the commentary of words as well.
   Thus, to confess Christ means two things; to say sometimes--in the face
   of a smile of scorn, which is often harder to bear than something much
   more dangerous--I am His,' and to live Christ, and to say by conduct I
   am His,' Whosoever shall confess Me before men, him will I also confess
   before My Father, and whosoever shall deny Me, him will I also deny.'
   Do not button your coats over your uniform. Do not take the cockade out
   of your hats when you go amongst the other side.' Live Jesus, and, when
   advisable, preach Jesus.

   But Peter's fall, which is typical of what we are all tempted to do,
   has in it a gracious message; for it proclaims the possibility of
   recovery from any depth of descent, and of coming back again from any
   distance of wandering. Did you ever notice how Peter's fall was burnt
   in upon his memory, so as that when he began to preach after Pentecost,
   the shape that his indictment of his hearers takes is, Ye denied the
   Holy One and the Just,' and how, long after--if the second Epistle
   which goes by his name is his--in summing up the crimes of the heretics
   whom he is branding, he speaks of their denying the Lord that bought
   them.' He never forgot his denial, and it remained with him as the
   expression for all that was wrong in a man's relation to Jesus Christ.
   And I suppose not only was it burnt in upon his memory, but it burnt
   out all his self-confidence.

   It is beautiful to see how, in his letter, he speaks over and over
   again of fear' as being a wise temper of mind for a Christian. As
   George Herbert has it, A sad, wise valour is the true complexion.' Thus
   the man that had been so confident in himself learned to say Be ready
   to give to every man that asketh you a reason for the hope that is in
   you, with meekness and fear.'

   And do you not think that his fall drew him closer to Jesus Christ than
   ever he had been before, as he learned more of His pardoning love and
   mercy? Was he not nearer the Lord on that morning when the two
   together, alone, talked after the Resurrection? Was he not nearer Him
   when he struggled to his feet from the boat on the lake, on that
   morning when he was received back into his office as Christ's Apostle?
   Did he ever forget how he had sinned? Did he ever forget how Christ had
   pardoned? Did he ever forget how Christ loved and would keep him? Ah,
   no! The rope that is broken is strongest where it is spliced, not
   because it was broken, but because a cunning hand has strengthened it.
   We may be the stronger for our sins, not because sin strengthens, for
   it weakens, but because God restores. It is possible that we may build
   a fairer structure on the ruins of our old selves. It is possible that
   we may turn every field of defeat into a field of victory. It is
   possible that we may


     Fall to rise; be beaten, to fight better.'

   If only we cling to the Lord our Strength, the promise shall be
   ours--whatever our failures, denials, backslidings, inconsistencies--
   though he fall he shall not be utterly cast down, for the Lord
   upholdeth him with His hand.'
     __________________________________________________________________

FAITH IN GOD AND CHRIST

   Let not your heart be troubled . . . believe in God, believe also in
   Me.'--JOHN xiv. 1.

   The twelve were sitting in the upper chamber, stupefied with the
   dreary, half-understood prospect of Christ's departure. He, forgetting
   His own burden, turns to comfort and encourage them. These sweet and
   great words most singularly blend gentleness and dignity. Who can
   reproduce the cadence of soothing tenderness, soft as a mother's hand,
   in that Let not your heart be troubled'? And who can fail to feel the
   tone of majesty in that Believe in God, believe also in Me'?

   The Greek presents an ambiguity in the latter half of the verse, for
   the verb may be either indicative or imperative, and so we may read
   four different ways, according as we render each of the two believes'
   in either of these two fashions. Our Authorised and Revised Versions
   concur in adopting the indicative Ye believe' in the former clause and
   the imperative in the latter. But I venture to think that we get a more
   true and appropriate meaning if we keep both clauses in the same mood,
   and read them both as imperatives: Believe in God, believe also in Me.'
   It would be harsh, I think, to take one as an affirmation and the other
   as a command. It would be irrelevant, I think, to remind the disciples
   of their belief in God. It would break the unity of the verse and
   destroy the relation of the latter half to the former, the former being
   a negative precept: Let not your heart be troubled'; and the latter
   being a positive one: Instead of being troubled, believe in God, and
   believe in Me.' So, for all these reasons, I venture to adopt the
   reading I have indicated.

   I. Now in these words the first thing that strikes me is that Christ
   here points to Himself as the object of precisely the same religious
   trust which is to be given to God.

   It is only our familiarity with these words that blinds us to their
   wonderfulness and their greatness. Try to hear them for the first time,
   and to bring into remembrance the circumstances in which they were
   spoken. Here is a man sitting among a handful of His friends, who is
   within four-and-twenty hours of a shameful death, which to all
   appearance was the utter annihilation of all His claims and hopes, and
   He says, Trust in God, and trust in Me'! I think that if we had heard
   that for the first time, we should have understood a little better than
   some of us do the depth of its meaning.

   What is it that Christ asks for here? Or rather let me say, What is it
   that Christ offers to us here? For we must not look at the words as a
   demand or as a command, but rather as a merciful invitation to do what
   it is life and blessing to do. It is a very low and inadequate
   interpretation of these words which takes them as meaning little more
   than Believe in God, believe that He is; believe in Me, believe that I
   am.' But it is scarcely less so to suppose that the mere assent of the
   understanding to His teaching is all that Christ is asking for here. By
   no means; what He invites us to goes a great deal deeper than that. The
   essence of it is an act of the will and of the heart, not of the
   understanding at all. A man may believe in Him as a historical person,
   may accept all that is said about Him here, and yet not be within sight
   of the trust in Him of which He here speaks. For the essence of the
   whole is not the intellectual process of assent to a proposition, but
   the intensely personal act of yielding up will and heart to a living
   person. Faith does not grasp a doctrine, but a heart. The trust which
   Christ requires is the bond that unites souls with Him; and the very
   life of it is entire committal of myself to Him in all my relations and
   for all my needs, and absolute utter confidence in Him as
   all-sufficient for everything that I can require. Let us get away from
   the cold intellectualism of belief' into the warm atmosphere of trust,'
   and we shall understand better than by many volumes what Christ here
   means and the sphere and the power and the blessedness of that faith
   which Christ requires.

   Further, note that, whatever may be this believing in Him which He asks
   from us or invites us to render, it is precisely the same thing which
   He bids us render to God. The two clauses in the original bring out
   that idea even more vividly than in our version, because the order of
   the words in the latter clause is inverted; and they read literally
   thus: Believe in God, in Me also believe.' The purpose of the inversion
   is to put these two, God and Christ, as close together as possible; and
   to put the two identical emotions at the beginning and at the end, at
   the two extremes and outsides of the whole sentence. Could language be
   more deliberately adopted and moulded, even in its consecution and
   arrangement, to enforce this thought, that whatever it is that we give
   to Christ, it is the very same thing that we give to God? And so He
   here proposes Himself as the worthy and adequate recipient of all these
   emotions of confidence, submission, resignation, which make up religion
   in its deepest sense.

   That tone is by no means singular in this place. It is the uniform tone
   and characteristic of our Lord's teaching. Let me remind you just in a
   sentence of one or two instances. What did He think of Himself who
   stood up before the world and, with arms outstretched, like that great
   white Christ in Thorwaldsen's lovely statue, said to all the troop of
   languid and burdened and fatigued ones crowding at His feet: Come unto
   Me all ye that are weary and are heavy laden, and I will give you
   rest'? That surely is a divine prerogative. What did He think of
   Himself who said, All men should honour the Son even as they honour the
   Father'? What did He think of Himself who, in that very Sermon on the
   Mount (to which the advocates of a maimed and mutilated Christianity
   tell us they pin their faith, instead of to mystical doctrines)
   declared that He Himself was the Judge of humanity, and that all men
   should stand at His bar and receive from Him according to the deeds
   done in their body'? Upon any honest principle of interpreting these
   Gospels, and unless you avowedly go picking and choosing amongst His
   words, accepting this and rejecting that, you cannot eliminate from the
   scriptural representation of Jesus Christ the fact that He claimed as
   His own the emotions of the heart to which only God has a right and
   only God can satisfy.

   I do not dwell upon that point, but I say, in one sentence, we have to
   take that into account if we would estimate the character of Jesus
   Christ as a Teacher and as a Man. I would not turn away from Him any
   imperfect conceptions, as they seem to me, of His nature and His
   work--rather would I foster them, and lead them on to a fuller
   recognition of the full Christ--but this I am bound to say, that for my
   part I believe that nothing but the wildest caprice, dealing with the
   Gospels according to one's own subjective fancies, irrespective
   altogether of the evidence, can strike out from the teaching of Christ
   this its characteristic difference. What signalises Him, and separates
   Him from all other religious teachers, is not the clearness or the
   tenderness with which He reiterated the truths about the divine
   Father's love, or about morality, and justice, and truth, and goodness;
   but the peculiarity of His call to the world is, Believe in Me.' And if
   He said that, or anything like it, and if the representations of His
   teaching in these four Gospels, which are the only source from which we
   get any notion of Him at all, are to be accepted, why, then, one of two
   things follows. Either He was wrong, and then He was a crazy
   enthusiast, only acquitted of blasphemy because convicted of insanity;
   or else--or else--He was God, manifest in the flesh.' It is vain to bow
   down before a fancy portrait of a bit of Christ, and to exalt the
   humble sage of Nazareth, and to leave out the very thing that makes the
   difference between Him and all others, namely, these either audacious
   or most true claims to be the Son of God, the worthy Recipient and the
   adequate Object of man's religious emotions. Believe in God, in Me also
   believe.'

   II. Now, secondly, notice that faith in Christ and faith in God are not
   two, but one.

   These two clauses on the surface present juxtaposition. Looked at more
   closely they present interpenetration and identity. Jesus Christ does
   not merely set Himself up by the side of God, nor are we worshippers of
   two Gods when we bow before Jesus and bow before the Father; but faith
   in Christ is faith in God, and faith in God which is not faith in
   Christ is imperfect, incomplete, and will not long last. To trust in
   Him is to trust in the Father; to trust in the Father is to trust in
   Him.

   What is the underlying truth that is here? How comes it that these two
   objects blend into one, like two figures in a stereoscope; and that the
   faith which flows to Jesus Christ rests upon God? This is the
   underlying truth, that Jesus Christ, Himself divine, is the divine
   Revealer of God. I need not dwell upon the latter of these two
   thoughts: how there is no real knowledge of the real God in the depth
   of His love, the tenderness of His nature or the lustrousness of His
   holiness; how there is no certitude; how the God that we see outside of
   Jesus Christ is sometimes doubt, sometimes hope, sometimes fear, always
   far-off and vague, an abstraction rather than a person, a stream of
   tendency' without us, that which is unnameable, and the like. I need
   not dwell upon the thought that Jesus Christ has showed us a Father,
   has brought a God to our hearts whom we can love, whom we can know
   really though not fully, of whom we can be sure with a certitude which
   is as deep as the certitude of our own personal being; that He has
   brought to us a God before whom we do not need to crouch far off, that
   He has brought to us a God whom we can trust. Very significant is it
   that Christianity alone puts the very heart of religion in the act of
   trust. Other religions put it in dread, worship, service, and the like.
   Jesus Christ alone says, the bond between men and God is that blessed
   one of trust. And He says so because He alone brings us a God whom it
   is not ridiculous to tell men to trust.

   And, on the other hand, the truth that underlies this is not only that
   Jesus Christ is the Revealer of God, but that He Himself is divine.
   Light shines through a window, but the light and the glass that makes
   it visible have nothing in common with one another. The Godhead shines
   through Christ, but He is not a mere transparent medium. It is Himself
   that He is showing us when He is showing us God. He that hath seen Me
   hath seen'--not the light that streams through Me--but hath seen,' in
   Me, the Father.' And because He is Himself divine and the divine
   Revealer, therefore the faith that grasps Him is inseparably one with
   the faith that grasps God. Men could look upon a Moses, an Isaiah, or a
   Paul, and in them recognise the eradiation of the divinity that
   imparted itself through them, but the medium was forgotten in
   proportion as that which it revealed was beheld. You cannot forget
   Christ in order to see God more clearly, but to behold Him is to behold
   God.

   And if that be true, these two things follow. One is that all imperfect
   revelation of God is prophetic of, and leads up towards, the perfect
   revelation in Jesus Christ. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews
   gives that truth in a very striking fashion. He compares all other
   means of knowing God to fragmentary syllables of a great word, of which
   one was given to one man and another to another. God spoke at sundry
   times and in manifold portions to the fathers by the prophets'; but the
   whole word is articulately uttered by the Son, in whom He has spoken
   unto us in these last times.' The imperfect revelation, by means of
   those who were merely mediums for the revelation leads up to Him who is
   Himself the Revelation, the Revealer, and the Revealed.

   And in like manner, all the imperfect faith that, laying hold of other
   fragmentary means of knowing God, has tremulously tried to trust Him,
   finds its climax and consummate flower in the full-blossomed faith that
   lays hold upon Jesus Christ. The unconscious prophecies of heathendom;
   the trust that select souls up and down the world have put in One whom
   they dimly apprehended; the faith of the Old Testament saints; the
   rudimentary beginnings of a knowledge of God and of a trust in Him
   which are found in men to-day, and amongst us, outside of the circle of
   Christianity--all these things are as manifestly incomplete as a
   building reared half its height, and waiting for the corner-stone to be
   brought forth, the full revelation of God in Jesus Christ, and the
   intelligent and full acceptance of Him and faith in Him.

   And another thing is true, that without faith in Christ such faith in
   God as is possible is feeble, incomplete, and will not long last.
   Historically a pure theism is all but impotent. There is only one
   example of it on a large scale in the world, and that is a kind of
   bastard Christianity--Mohammedanism; and we all know what good that is
   as a religion. There are plenty of people amongst us nowadays who claim
   to be very advanced thinkers, and who call themselves Theists, and not
   Christians. Well, I venture to say that that is a phase that will not
   last. There is little substance in it. The God whom men know outside of
   Jesus Christ is a poor, nebulous thing; an idea, not a reality. He, or
   rather It, is a film of cloud shaped into a vague form, through which
   you can see the stars. It has little power to restrain. It has less to
   inspire and impel. It has still less to comfort; it has least of all to
   satisfy the heart. You will have to get something more substantial than
   the far-off god of an unchristian Theism if you mean to sway the world
   and to satisfy men's hearts.

   And so, dear brethren, I come to this--perhaps the word may be fitting
   for some that listen to me--Believe in God,' and that you may, believe
   also in Christ.' For sure I am that when the stress comes, and you want
   a god, unless your god is the God revealed in Jesus Christ, he will be
   a powerless deity. If you have not faith in Christ, you will not long
   have faith in God that is vital and worth anything.

   III. Lastly, this trust in Christ is the secret of a quiet heart.

   It is of no use to say to men, Let not your hearts be troubled,' unless
   you finish the verse and say, Believe in God, believe also in Christ.'
   For unless we trust we shall certainly be troubled. The state of man in
   this world is like that of some of those sunny islands in southern
   seas, around which there often rave the wildest cyclones, and which
   carry in their bosoms, beneath all their riotous luxuriance of verdant
   beauty, hidden fires, which ever and anon shake the solid earth and
   spread destruction. Storms without and earthquakes within--that is the
   condition of humanity. And where is the rest' to come from? All other
   defences are weak and poor. We have heard about pills against
   earthquakes.' That is what the comforts and tranquillising which the
   world supplies may fairly be likened to. Unless we trust we are, and we
   shall be, and should be, troubled.'

   If we trust we may be quiet. Trust is always tranquillity. To cast a
   burden off myself on others' shoulders is always a rest. But trust in
   Jesus Christ brings infinitude on my side. Submission is repose. When
   we cease to kick against the pricks they cease to prick and wound us.
   Trust opens the heart, like the windows of the Ark tossing upon the
   black and fatal flood, for the entrance of the peaceful dove with the
   olive branch in its mouth. Trust brings Christ to my side in all His
   tenderness and greatness and sweetness. If I trust, all is right that
   seems most wrong.' If I trust, conscience is quiet. If I trust, life
   becomes a solemn scorn of ills.' If I trust, inward unrest is changed
   into tranquillity, and mad passions are cast out from him that sits
   clothed and in his right mind' at the feet of Jesus.

   The wicked is like the troubled sea which cannot rest.' But if I trust,
   my soul will become like the glassy ocean when all the storms sleep,
   and birds of peace sit brooding on the charmed wave.' Peace I leave
   with you.' Let not your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in
   Me.'

   Help us, O Lord! to yield our hearts to Thy dear Son, and in Him to
   find Thyself and eternal rest.
     __________________________________________________________________

MANY MANSIONS'

   In My Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have
   told you.'--JOHN xiv. 2.

   Sorrow needs simple words for its consolation; and simple words are the
   best clothing for the largest truths. These eleven poor men were
   crushed and desolate at the thought of Christ's going; they fancied
   that if He left them they lost Him. And so, in simple, childlike words,
   which the weakest could grasp, and in which the most troubled could
   find peace, He said to them, after having encouraged their trust in
   Him, There is plenty of room for you as well as for Me where I am
   going; and the frankness of our intercourse in the past might make you
   sure that if I were going to leave you I would have told you all about
   it. Did I ever hide from you anything that was painful? Did I ever
   allure you to follow Me by false promises? Should I have kept silence
   about it if our separation was to be eternal?' So, simply, as a mother
   might hush her babe upon her breast, He soothes their sorrow. And yet,
   in the quiet words, so level to the lowest apprehension, there lie
   great truths, far deeper than we yet have appreciated, and which will
   enfold themselves in their majesty and their greatness through
   eternity. In My Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I
   would have told you.'

   I. Now note in these words, first, the Father's house,' and its ample
   room.

   There is only one other occasion recorded in which our Lord used this
   expression, and it occurs in this same Gospel near the beginning; where
   in the narrative of the first cleansing of the Temple we read that He
   said, Make not My Father's house a house of merchandise.' The earlier
   use of the words may help to throw light upon one aspect of this latter
   employment of it, for there blend in the image the two ideas of what I
   may call domestic familiarity, and of that great future as being the
   reality of which the earthly Temple was intended to be the dim prophecy
   and shadow. Its courts, its many chambers, its ample porches with room
   for thronging worshippers, represented in some poor way the wide sweep
   and space of that higher house; and the sense of Sonship, which drew
   the Boy to His Father's house in the earliest hours of conscious
   childhood, speaks here.

   Think for a moment of how sweet and familiar the conception of heaven
   as the Father's house makes it to us. There is something awful, even to
   the best and holiest souls, in the thought of even the glories beyond.
   The circumstances of death, which is its portal, our utter
   unacquaintance with all that lies behind the veil, the terrible silence
   and distance which falls upon our dearest ones as they are sucked into
   the cloud, all tend to make us feel that there is much that is solemn
   and awful even in the thought of eternal future blessedness. But how it
   is all softened when we say, My Father's house.' Most of us have long
   since left behind us the sweet security, the sense of the absence of
   all responsibility, the assurance of defence and provision, which used
   to be ours when we lived as children in a father's house here. But we
   may all look forward to the renewal, in far nobler form, of these early
   days, when the father's house meant the inexpugnable fortress where no
   evil could befall us, the abundant home where all wants were supplied,
   and where the shyest and timidest child could feel at ease and secure.
   It is all coming again, brother, and amidst the august and unimaginable
   glories of that future the old feeling of being little children,
   nestling safe in the Father's house, will fill our quiet hearts once
   more.

   And then consider how the conception of that Future as the Father's
   house suggests answers to so many of our questions about the
   relationship of the inmates to one another. Are they to dwell isolated
   in their several mansions? Is that the way in which children in a home
   dwell with each other? Surely if He be the Father, and heaven be His
   house, the relation of the redeemed to one another must have in it more
   than all the sweet familiarity and unrestrained frankness which
   subsists in the families of earth. A solitary heaven would be but half
   a heaven, and would ill correspond with the hopes that inevitably
   spring from the representation of it as my Father's house.'

   But consider further that this great and tender name for heaven has its
   deepest meaning in the conception of it as a spiritual state of which
   the essential elements are the loving manifestation and presence of God
   as Father, the perfect consciousness of sonship, the happy union of all
   the children in one great family, and the derivation of all their
   blessedness from their Elder Brother.

   The earthly Temple, to which there is some allusion in this great
   metaphor, was the place in which the divine glory was manifested to
   seeking souls, though in symbol, yet also in reality, and the
   representation of our text blends the two ideas of the free, frank
   intercourse of the home and of the magnificent revelations of the Holy
   of holies. Under either aspect of the phrase, whether we think of my
   Father's house' as temple or as home, it sets before us, as the main
   blessedness and glory of heaven, the vision of the Father, the
   consciousness of sonship, and the complete union with Him. There are
   many subsidiary and more outward blessednesses and glories which shine
   dimly through the haze of metaphors and negations, by which alone a
   state of which we have no experience can be revealed to us; but these
   are secondary. The heaven of heaven is the possession of God the Father
   through the Son in the expanding spirits of His sons. The sovereign and
   filial position which Jesus Christ in His manhood occupies in that
   higher house, and which He shares with all those who by Him have
   received the adoption of sons, is the very heart and nerve of this
   great metaphor.

   But I think we must go a step further than that, and recognise that in
   the image there is inherent the teaching that that glorious future is
   not merely a state, but also a place. Local associations are not to be
   divorced from the words; and although we can say but little about such
   a matter, yet everything in the teaching of Scripture points to the
   thought that howsoever true it may be that the essence of heaven is
   condition, yet that also heaven has a local habitation, and is a place
   in the great universe of God. Jesus Christ has at this moment a human
   body, glorified. That body, as Scripture teaches us, is somewhere, and
   where He is there shall also His servant be. In the context He goes on
   to tell us that He goes to prepare a place for us,' and though I would
   not insist upon the literal interpretation of such words, yet
   distinctly the drift of the representation is in the direction of
   localising, though not of materialising, the abode of the blessed. So I
   think we can say, not merely that what He is that shall also His
   servants be, but that where He is there shall also His servants be. And
   from the representation of my text, though we cannot fathom all its
   depths, we can at least grasp this, which gives solidity and reality to
   our contemplations of the future, that heaven is a place, full of all
   sweet security and homelike repose, where God is made known in every
   heart and to every consciousness as a loving Father, and of which all
   the inhabitants are knit together in the frankest fraternal
   intercourse, conscious of the Father's love, and rejoicing in the
   abundant provisions of His royal House.

   And then there is a second thought to be suggested from these words,
   and that is of the ample room in this great house. The original purpose
   of the words of my text, as I have already reminded you, was simply to
   soothe the fears of a handful of disciples.

   There was room where Christ went for eleven poor men. Yes, room enough
   for them! but Christ's prescient eye looked down the ages, and saw all
   the unborn millions that would yet be drawn to Him uplifted on the
   Cross, and some glow of satisfaction flitted across His sorrow, as He
   saw from afar the result of the impending travail of His soul in the
   multitudes by whom God's heavenly house should yet be filled. Many
   mansions!' the thought widens out far beyond our grasp. Perhaps that
   upper room, like most of the roof-chambers in Jewish houses, was open
   to the skies, and whilst He spoke, the innumerable lights that blaze in
   that clear heaven shone down upon them, and He may have pointed to
   these. The better Abraham perhaps looked forth, like His prototype, on
   the starry heavens, and saw in the vision of the future those who
   through Him should receive the adoption of sons' and dwell for ever in
   the house of the Lord, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude,
   and as the sand which is by the seashore innumerable.'

   Ah! brethren, if we could only widen our measurement of the walls of
   the New Jerusalem to the measurement of that golden rod which the man,
   that is the angel,' as John says, applied to it, we should understand
   how much bigger it is than any of these poor sects and communities of
   ours here on earth. If we would lay to heart, as we ought to do, the
   deep meaning of that indefinite many' in my text, it would rebuke our
   narrowness. There will be a great many occupants of the mansions in
   heaven that Christian men here on earth--the most Catholic of
   them--will be very much surprised to see there, and thousands will find
   their entrance there that never found their entrance into any
   communities of so-called Christians here on earth.

   That one word many' should deepen our confidence in the triumphs of
   Christ's Cross, and it may be used to heighten our own confidence as to
   our own poor selves. A chamber in the great Temple waits for each of
   us, and the question is, Shall we occupy it, or shall we not? The old
   Rabbis had a tradition which, like a great many of their apparently
   foolish sayings, covers in picturesque guise a very deep truth. They
   said that, however many the throngs of worshippers who came up to
   Jerusalem at the passover, the streets of the city and the courts of
   the sanctuary were never crowded. And so it is with that great city.
   There is room for all. There are throngs, but no crowds. Each finds a
   place in the ample sweep of the Father's house, like some of the great
   palaces that barbaric Eastern kings used to build, in whose courts
   armies might encamp, and the chambers of which were counted by the
   thousand. And surely in all that ample accommodation, you and I may
   find some corner where we, if we will, may lodge for evermore.

   I do not dwell upon subsidiary ideas that may be drawn from the
   expressions. Mansions' means places of permanent abode, and suggests
   the two thoughts, so sweet to travellers and toilers in this fleeting,
   labouring life, of unchangeableness and of repose. Some have supposed
   that the variety in the attainments of the redeemed, which is
   reasonable and scriptural, might be deduced from our text, but that
   does not seem to be relevant to our Lord's purpose.

   One other suggestion may be made without enlarging upon it. There is
   only one other occasion in this Gospel in which the word here
   translated mansions' is employed, and it is this: We will come and make
   our abode with him.' Our mansion is in God; God's dwelling-place is in
   us. So ask yourselves, Have you a place in that heavenly home? When
   prodigal children go away from the father's house, sometimes a
   broken-hearted parent will keep the boy's room just as it used to be
   when he was young and pure, and will hope and weary through long days
   for him to come back and occupy it again. God is keeping a room for you
   in His house; do you see that you fill it.

   II. In the next place, note here the sufficiency of Christ's revelation
   for our needs.

   If it were not so I would have told you.' He sets Himself forward in
   very august fashion as being the Revealer and Opener of that house for
   us. There is a singular tone about all our Lord's few references to the
   future--a tone of decisiveness; not as if He were speaking, as a man
   might do, that which he had thought out, or which had come to him, but
   as if He was speaking of what he had Himself beheld, We speak that we
   do know, and testify that we have seen.' He stands like one on a
   mountain top, looking down into the valleys beyond, and telling His
   comrades in the plain behind Him what He sees. He speaks of that unseen
   world always as One who had been in it, and who was reporting
   experiences, and not giving forth opinions. His knowledge was the
   knowledge of One who dwelt with the Father, and left the house in order
   to find and bring back His wandering brethren. It was His own calm
   home, His habitation from eternity,' and therefore He could tell us
   with decisiveness, with simplicity, with assurance, all which we need
   to know about the geography of that unknown land--the plan of that, by
   us unvisited, house. Very remarkable, therefore, is it, that with this
   tone there should be such reticence in Christ's references to the
   future. The text implies the rationale of such reticence. If it were
   not so I would have told you.' I tell you all that you need, though I
   tell you a great deal less than you sometimes wish.

   The gaps in our knowledge of the future, seeing that we have such a
   Revealer as we have in Christ, are remarkable. But my text suggests
   this to us--we have as much as we need. I know, and many of you know,
   by bitter experience, how many questions, the answers to which would
   seem to us to be such a lightening of our burdens, our desolated and
   troubled hearts suggest about that future, and how vainly we ply heaven
   with questions and interrogate the unreplying Oracle. But we know as
   much as we need. We know that God is there. We know that it is the
   Father's house. We know that Christ is in it. We know that the dwellers
   there are a family. We know that sweet security and ample provision are
   there; and, for the rest, if we I needed to have heard more, He would
   have told us.


     My knowledge of that life is small,

     The eye of faith is dim;

     But tis enough that Christ knows all;

     And I shall be with Him.'

   Let the gaps remain. The gaps are part of the revelation, and we know
   enough for faith and hope.

   May we not widen the application of that thought to other matters than
   to our bounded and fragmentary conceptions of a future life? In times
   like the present, of doubt and unrest, it is a great piece of Christian
   wisdom to recognise the limitations of our knowledge and the
   sufficiency of the fragments that we have. What do we get a revelation
   for? To solve theological puzzles and dogmatic difficulties? to inflate
   us with the pride of quasi-omniscience? or to present to us God in
   Christ for faith, for love, for obedience, for imitation? Surely the
   latter, and for such purposes we have enough.

   So let us recognise that our knowledge is very partial. A great stretch
   of wall is blank, and there is not a window in it. If there had been
   need for one, it would have been struck out. He has been pleased to
   leave many things obscure, not arbitrarily, so as to try our faith--for
   the implication of the words before us is that the relation between Him
   and us binds Him to the utmost possible frankness, and that all which
   we need and He can tell us He does tell--but for high reasons, and
   because of the very conditions of our present environment, which forbid
   the more complete and all-round knowledge.

   So let us recognise our limitations. We know in part, and we are wise
   if we affirm in part. Hold by the Central Light, which is Jesus Christ.
   Many things did Jesus which are not written in this book,' and many
   gaps and deficiencies from a human point of view exist in the
   contexture of revelation. But these are written that ye may believe
   that Jesus is the Christ,' for which enough has been told us, and that,
   believing, ye may have life in His name.' If that purpose be
   accomplished in us, God will not have spoken, nor we have heard, in
   vain. Let us hold by the Central Light, and then the circumference of
   darkness will gradually retreat, and a wider sphere of illumination be
   ours, until the day when we enter our mansion in the Father's house,
   and then in Thy Light shall we see light'; and we shall know even as we
   are known.'

   Let your Elder Brother lead you back, dear friend, to the Father's
   bosom, and be sure that if you trust Him and listen to Him, you will
   know enough on earth to turn earth into a foretaste of Heaven, and will
   find at last your place in the Father's house beside the Brother who
   has prepared it for you.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE FORERUNNER

   . . . I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place
   for you, I will come again, and receive you unto Myself; that where I
   am, there ye may be also.'--JOHN xiv. 2, 3.

   What divine simplicity and depth are in these words! They carry us up
   into the unseen world, and beyond time; and yet a little child can lay
   hold on them, and mourning hearts and dying men find peace and
   sweetness in them. A very familiar image underlies them. It was
   customary for travellers in those old days to send some of their party
   on in advance, to find lodging and make arrangements for them in some
   great city. Many a time one or other of the disciples had been sent
   before His face into every place where He Himself should come.' On that
   very morning two of them had gone in, at His bidding, from Bethany to
   make ready the table at which they were sitting. Christ here takes that
   office upon Himself. The emblem is homely, the thing meant is
   transcendent.

   Not less wonderful is the blending of majesty and lowliness. The office
   which He takes upon Himself is that of an inferior and a servant. And
   yet the discharge of it, in the present case, implies His authority
   over every corner of the universe, His immortal life, and the
   sufficiency of His presence to make a heaven. Nor can we fail to notice
   the blending of another pair of opposites: His certainty of His
   impending death, and His certainty, notwithstanding and thereby, of His
   continual work and His final return, are inseparably interlaced here.
   How comes it that, in all His premonitions of His death, Jesus Christ
   never spoke about it as failure or as the interruption or end of His
   activity, but always as the transition to, and the condition of, His
   wider work? I go, and if I go I return, and take you to Myself.'

   So, then, there are three things here, the departure with its purpose,
   the return, and the perfected union.

   I. The Departure.

   Our Lord's going away from that little group was a journey in two
   stages. Calvary was the first; Olivet was the second. He means by the
   phrase the whole continuous process which begins with His death and
   ends in His ascension. Both are embraced in His words, and each
   co-operates to the attainment of the great purpose.

   He prepares a place for us by His death. The High Priest, in the
   ancient ritual, once a year was privileged to lift the heavy veil and
   pass into the darkened chamber, where only the light between the
   cherubim was visible, because he bore in his hand the blood of the
   sacrifice. But in our New Testament system the path into the holiest of
   all,' the realisation of the most intimate fellowship with heavenly
   things and communion with God Himself, are made possible, and the way
   patent for every foot, because Jesus has died. And as the communion
   upon earth, so the perfecting of the communion in the heavens. Who of
   us could step within those awful sanctities, or stand serene amidst the
   region of eternal light and stainless purity, unless, in His death, He
   had borne the sins of the world, and, having overcome' its sharpness'
   by enduring its blow, had opened the Kingdom of Heaven to all
   believers'?

   Old legends tell us of magic gates that resisted all attempts to force
   them, but upon which, if one drop of a certain blood fell, they flew
   open. And so, by His death, Christ has opened the gates and made the
   heaven of perfect purity a dwelling-place for sinful men.

   But the second stage of His departure is that which more eminently is
   in Christ's mind here. He prepares a place for us by His entrance into
   and His dwelling in the heavenly places. The words are obscure because
   we have but few others with which to compare them, and no experience by
   which to interpret them. We know so little about the matter that it is
   not wise to say much; but though there be vast tracts of darkness round
   the little spot of light, this should only make the spot of light more
   vivid and more precious. We know little, but we know enough for mind
   and heart to rest upon. Our ignorance of the ways in which Christ by
   His ascension prepares a heaven for His followers should neither breed
   doubt nor disregard of His assurance that He does.

   If Christ had not ascended, would there have been a place' at all? He
   has gone with a human body, which, glorified as it is, still has
   relations to space, and must be somewhere. And we may even say that His
   ascending up on high has made a place where His servants are. But apart
   from that suggestion, which, perhaps, is going beyond our limits, we
   may see that Christ's presence in heaven is needful to make it a heaven
   for poor human souls. There, as here (Scripture assures us), and
   throughout eternity as to-day, Jesus Christ is the Mediator of all
   human knowledge and possession of God. It is from Him and through Him
   that there come to men, whether they be men on earth or men in the
   heavens, all that they know, all that they hope, all that they enjoy,
   of the wisdom, love, beauty, peace, power, which flow from God. Take
   away from the heaven of the Christian expectation that which comes to
   the spirit through Jesus Christ, and you have nothing left. He and His
   mediation and ministration alone make the brightness and the
   blessedness of that high state. The very glories of all that lies
   beyond the veil would have an aspect appalling and bewildering to us,
   unless our Brother were there. Like some poor savages brought into a
   great city, or rustics into the presence of a king and his court, we
   should be ill at ease amidst the glories and solemnities of that future
   life unless we saw standing there our Kinsman, to whom we can turn, and
   who makes it possible for us to feel that it is home. Christ's presence
   makes heaven the home of our hearts.

   Not only did He go to prepare a place, but He is continuously preparing
   it for us all through the ages. We have to think of a double form of
   the work of Christ, His past work in His earthly life, and His present
   in His exaltation. We have to think of a double form of His present
   activity--His work with and in us here on earth, and His work for us
   there in the heavens. We have to think of a double form of His work in
   the heavens--that which the Scripture represents in a metaphor, the
   full comprehension of which surpasses our present powers and
   experiences, as being His priestly intercession; and that which my text
   represents in a metaphor, perhaps a little more level to our
   apprehension, as being His preparing a place for us. Behind the veil
   there is a working Christ, who, in the heavens, is preparing a place
   for all that love Him.

   II. In the next place, note the Return.

   The purpose of our Lord's departure, as set forth by Himself here,
   guarantees for us His coming back again. That is the force of the
   simple argumentation of my text, and of the pathetic and soothing
   repetition of the sweet words, I go to prepare a place for you; and if
   I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto
   Myself.' Because the departure had for its purpose the preparing of the
   place, therefore it is necessarily followed by a return. He who went
   away as the Forerunner has not done His work until He comes back, and,
   as Guide, leads those for whom He had prepared the place to the place
   which He had prepared for them.

   Now that return of our Lord, like His departure, may be considered as
   having two stages. Unquestionably the main meaning and application of
   the words is to that final and personal coming which stands at the end
   of history, and to which the hopes of every Christian soul ought to be
   steadfastly directed. He will so come in like manner as' He has gone.
   We are not to water down such words as these into anything short of a
   return precisely corresponding in its method to the departure; and as
   the departure was visible, corporeal, literal, personal, and local, so
   the return is to be visible, corporeal, literal, personal, local too.
   He is to come as He went, a visible Manhood, only throned amongst the
   clouds of heaven with power and great glory. This is the aim that He
   sets before Him in His departure. He leaves in order that He may come
   back again.

   And, oh, dear friends! remember--and let us live in the strength of the
   remembrance--that this return ought to be the prominent subject of
   Christian aspiration and desire. There is much about the conception of
   that solemn return, with all the convulsions that attend it, and the
   judgment of which it is preliminary, that may well make men's hearts
   chill within them. But for you and me, if we have any love in our
   hearts and loyalty in our spirits to that King, His coming' should be
   prepared as the morning,' and we should join in the great burst of
   rapture of many a psalm, which calls upon rocks and hills to break
   forth into singing, and trees of the field to clap their hands, because
   He cometh as the King to judge the earth. His own parable tells us how
   we ought to regard His coming. When the fig-tree's branch begins to
   supple, and the little leaves to push their way through the polished
   stem, then we know that summer is at hand. His coming should be as the
   approach of that glorious, fervid time, in which the sunshine has
   tenfold brilliancy and power, the time of ripened harvests and matured
   fruits, the time of joy for all creatures that love the sun. It should
   be the glad hope of all His servants.

   We have a double witness to bear in the midst of this as of every
   generation. One half of the witness stretches backwards to the Cross,
   and proclaims Christ has come'; the other reaches onwards to the
   Throne, and proclaims Christ will come.' Between these two high
   uplifted piers swings the chain of the world's history, which closes
   with the return, to judge and to save, of the Lord who came to die and
   has gone to prepare a place for us.

   But do not let us forget that we may well take another point of view
   than this. Scripture knows of many comings of the Lord preliminary to,
   and in principle one with, His last coming. For nations all great
   crises of their history are comings of the Lord,' the Judge, and we are
   strictly in the line of Scripture analogy when, in reference to
   individuals, we see in each single death a true coming of the Lord.

   That is the point of view in which we ought to look upon a Christian's
   death-bed. The Master is come, and calleth for thee.' Beyond all
   secondary causes, deeper than disease or accident, lies the loving will
   of Him who is the Lord of life and of death. Death is Christ's
   minister, mighty and beauteous, though his face be dark,' and he, too,
   stands amidst the ranks of the ministering spirits sent forth to
   minister to them that shall be heirs of salvation.' It is Christ that
   says of one, I will that this man tarry,' and to another, Go!' and he
   goeth. But whensoever a Christian man lies down to die, Christ says,
   Come!' and he comes. How that thought should hallow the death-chamber
   as with the print of the Master's feet! How it should quiet our hearts
   and dry our tears! How it should change the whole aspect of that shadow
   feared of man'! With Him for our companion, the lonely road will not be
   dreary; and though in its anticipation, our timid hearts may often be
   ready to say, Surely the darkness shall cover me,' if we have Him by
   our sides, even the night shall be light about us.' The dying martyr
   beneath the city wall lifted up his face to the heavens, and said, Lord
   Jesus, receive my spirit!' It was the echo of the Master's promise, I
   will come again, and receive you to Myself.'

   III. Lastly, notice the Perfected Union.

   The departure for such a purpose necessarily involved the return again.
   Both are stages in the process, which is perfected by complete
   union--That where I am there ye may be also.'

   Christ, as I have been saying, is Heaven. His presence is all that we
   need for peace, for joy, for purity, for rest, for love, for growth. To
   be with Him,' as He tells us in another part of these wonderful last
   words in the upper chamber, is to behold His glory.' And to behold His
   glory, as John tells us in his Epistle, is to be like Him. So Christ's
   presence means the communication to us of all the lustre of His
   radiance, of all the whiteness of His purity, of all the depth of His
   blessedness, and of a share in His wondrous dominion. His glorified
   manhood will pass into ours, and they that are with Him where He is
   will rest as in the centre and home of their spirits, and find Him
   all-sufficient. His presence is my Heaven.

   That is almost all we know. Oh! it is more than all we need to know.
   The curtain is the picture. It is because what is there transcends in
   glory all our present experience that Scripture can only hint at it and
   describe it by negations--such as no night,' no sorrow,' no tears,'
   former things passed away'; and by symbols of glory and lustre gathered
   from all that is loftiest and noblest in human buildings and society.
   But all these are but secondary and poor. The living heart of the hope,
   and the lambent centre of the brightness, is, So shall we ever be with
   the Lord.'

   And it is enough. It is enough to make the bond of union between us in
   the outer court and them in the holy place. Parted friends will fix to
   look at the same star at the same moment of the night and feel some
   union; and if we from amidst the clouds of earth, and they from amidst
   the pure radiance of their heaven, turn our eyes to the same Christ, we
   are not far apart. If He be the companion of each of us, He reaches a
   hand to each, and, clasping it, the parted ones are united; and whether
   we wake or sleep we live together,' because we both live with Him.

   Brother! Is Jesus Christ so much to you that a heaven which consists in
   nearness and likeness to Him has any attraction for you? Let Him be
   your Saviour, your Sacrifice, your Helper, your Companion. Obey Him as
   your King, love Him as your Friend, trust Him as your All. And be sure
   that then the darkness will be but the shadow of His hand, and instead
   of dreading death as that which separates you from life and love and
   action and joy, you will be able to meet it peacefully, as that which
   rends the thin veil, and unites you with Him who is the Heaven of
   heavens.

   He has gone to prepare a place for us. And if we will let Him, He will
   prepare us for the place, and then come and lead us thither. Thou wilt
   show me the path of life' which leads through death. In Thy presence is
   fullness of joy, and at Thy right hand there are pleasures for
   evermore.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE WAY

   And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know. Thomas saith unto Him,
   Lord, we know not whither Thou goest; and how can we know the way?
   Jesus saith unto him, I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life: no man
   cometh unto the Father, but by Me. If ye had known Me, ye should have
   known My Father also: and from henceforth ye know Him, and have seen
   Him.'--JOHN xiv. 4-7.

   Our Lord has been speaking of His departure, of its purpose, of His
   return as guaranteed by that purpose, and of His servants' eternal and
   perfect reunion with Him. But even these cheering and calming thoughts
   do not exhaust His consolations, as they did not satisfy all the
   disciples' needs. They might still have said, Yes; we believe that You
   will come back again, and we believe that we shall be together; but
   what about the parenthesis of absence?' And here is the answer, or at
   least part of it: Whither I go ye know, and the way ye know'; or, if we
   adopt the shortened form which the Revised Version gives us, Whither I
   go ye know the way.'

   When you say to a man, You know the way,' you mean Come.' And in these
   words there lie, as it seems to me, a veiled invitation to the
   disciples to come to Him before He came back for them, and the
   assurance that they, though separated, might still find and tread the
   road to the Father's house, and so be with Him still. They are not left
   desolate. The Christ who is absent is present as the path to Himself.
   And so the parenthesis is bridged across. Now in these verses we have
   several large and important lessons which I think may best be drawn by
   simply seeking to follow their course.

   I. Observe the disciples' unconscious knowledge.

   Jesus Christ says: Ye know the way and ye know the goal.' One of them
   ventures flatly to contradict Him, and to traverse both assertions with
   a brusque and thorough-going negative. We do not know whither Thou
   goest,' says Thomas; how can we know the way?' He is the same man in
   this conversation that we find him in the interview before our Lord's
   journey to raise Lazarus, and in the interview after our Lord's
   resurrection. In all three cases he appears as mainly under the
   dominion of sense, as slow to apprehend anything beyond its limits, as
   morbidly melancholy and disposed to take the blackest possible view of
   things--a practical pessimist--and yet with a certain kind of frank
   outspokenness which half redeems the other characteristics from blame.
   He could not understand all the Lord's deep words just spoken. His mind
   was befogged and dimmed, and he blurts out his ignorance, knowing that
   the best place to carry it to is to the Illuminator who can make it
   light.

   We know not whither Thou goest, and how can we know the way?' Was Jesus
   right? was Thomas right? or were they both right? The fact is that
   Thomas and all his fellows knew, after a fashion, but they did not know
   that they knew. They had heard much in the past as to where Christ was
   going. Plainly enough it had been rung in their ears over and over
   again. It had made some kind of lodgment in their heads, and, in that
   sense, they did know. It is this unused and unconscious knowledge of
   theirs to which Christ appeals, and which He tries to draw out into
   consciousness and power when He says, You know whither I am going, and
   you know the road.' Is not that exactly what a patient teacher will do
   with some flustered child when he says to it: Take time! You know it
   well enough if you will only think'? So the Master says here: Do not be
   agitated and troubled in heart. Reflect, remember, overhaul your
   stores, and think what I have told you over and over again, and you
   will find that you do know whither I am going, and that you do know the
   way.'

   The patient gentleness of the Master with the slowness of the scholars
   is beautifully exemplified here, as is also the method, which He
   lovingly and patiently adopts, of sending men back to consult their own
   consciousness as illuminated by His teaching, and to see whether there
   is not lying somewhere, unrecked of and unemployed in some dusty corner
   of their mind, a truth that only needs to be dragged out and cleaned in
   order to show itself for what it is, the all-sufficient light and
   strength for the moment's need.

   The dialogue is an instance of what is true about us all, that we have
   in our possession truths given to us by Jesus Christ, the whole sweep
   and bearing of which, the whole majesty and power and illuminating
   capacity of which, we do not dream of yet. How much in our creeds lies
   dim and undeveloped! Time and circumstances and some sore agony of
   spirit are needed in order to make us realise the riches that we
   possess, and the certitudes to which our troubled spirits may cling;
   and the practice of far more patient, honest, profound meditation and
   reflection than finds favour with the average Christian man is needed,
   too, in order that the truths possessed may be possessed, and that we
   may know what we know, and understand the things that are given to us
   of God.'

   In all your creeds, there are large tracts that you, in some kind of a
   fashion, do believe; and yet they have no vitality in your
   consciousness nor power in your lives. And the Master here does with
   these disciples exactly what He is trying to do day by day with us,
   namely, fling us back on ourselves, or rather upon His revelation in
   us, and get us to fathom its depths and to walk round about its
   magnitudes, and so to understand the things that we say we believe.

   All our knowledge is ignorance. Ignorance that confesses itself to Him
   is in the way of becoming knowledge. His light will touch the smoke and
   change it into red spires of flame. If you do not know, go to Him and
   say, Lord! I do not.' An accurate understanding of where the darkness
   lies is the first step to the light. We are meant to carry all our
   inadequate and superficial realisations of His truth into His presence,
   that, from Him, we may gain deeper knowledge, a firmer faith, and a
   more joyous certitude in His inexhaustible lessons. In every article
   and item of the Christian faith there is a transcendent element which
   surpasses our present comprehension. Let us be confident that the light
   will break; and let us welcome the new illumination when it comes, sure
   that it comes from God. Be not puffed up with the conceit that you know
   all. Be sure of this, that, according to the good old metaphor, we are
   but as children on the shore of the great ocean, gathering a few of the
   shells that it has washed to our feet, itself stretching boundless,
   and, thank God, sunlit, before us. Ye know the way.' Master, we know
   not the way.'

   II. Observe here, in the second place, our Lord's great self-revelation
   which meets this unconscious knowledge.

   Jesus saith unto him: I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man
   cometh unto the Father but by Me.' Now it is quite plain, I think, from
   the whole strain of the context and the purpose of these words that the
   main idea in them is the first--I am the Way.' And that is made more
   certain because of the last words of the verse, which, summing up the
   force of the three preceding assertions, dwell only upon the metaphor
   of the Way; No man cometh unto the Father but by Me.' So that of these
   three great words, the Way, the Truth, the Life, we are to regard the
   second and the third as explanatory of the first. They are not
   co-ordinate, but the first is the more general, and the other two show
   how the first comes to be true. I am the Way' because I am the Truth
   and the Life.'

   There are no words of the Master, perhaps, to which my previous remarks
   are more necessary to be applied than these. We know; and yet oh! what
   an overplus of glory and of depth is here that we do not know and never
   can know. The most fragmentary and inadequate grasp of them with heart
   and mind will bring light to the mind and quietness and peace to the
   heart; but the whole meaning of them goes beyond men and angels. We can
   only skim the surface and seek to shift back the boundaries of our
   knowledge a little further, and to embrace within its limits a little
   more of the broad land into which the words bring us. So just take a
   thought or two which may tend in that direction.

   Note, then, as belonging to all three of these clauses that remarkable
   I am.' We show a way, Christ is it. We speak truth, Christ is it.
   Parents impart life, which they have received, Christ is Life. He
   separates Himself from all men by that representation that He is not
   merely the communicator or the teacher or the guide, but that He
   Himself is, in His own personal Being, Way, Truth, Life. He said that,
   when Calvary was within arm's-length. What did He think about Himself,
   and what should we think of Him?

   And then note, further, that He sets forth His unique relation to the
   truth as being one ground on which He is the Way to God. He is the
   Truth in reference to the divine nature. That Truth, then, is not a
   mere matter of words. It is not only His speech that teaches us, but
   Himself that shows us God. His whole life and character, His
   personality, are the true representation within human conditions of the
   Invisible God; and when He says, I am the Way and the Truth,' He is
   saying substantially the same thing as the great prologue of this
   Gospel says when it calls Him the Word and the Light of men, and as
   Paul says when he names Him the Image of the Invisible God.' There is
   all the difference between talking about God and showing Him. Men
   reveal God by their words; Christ reveals Him by Himself and the facts
   of His life. The truest and highest representation of the divine nature
   that men can ever have is in the face of Jesus Christ.

   I need only remind you in a sentence about other and lower applications
   of this great saying, which do not, as I think, enter into the purpose
   of the context. He is the Truth, inasmuch as, in the life and
   historical manifestation of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Scriptures,
   men find foundation truths of a moral and spiritual sort. Whatsoever
   things are true, whatsoever things are noble, whatsoever things are
   lovely and of good report,' He is these, and all true ethics is but the
   formulating into principles of all the facts of the life and character
   of Jesus Christ.

   Further, my text says He is the Way because He is the Life. On the one
   side God is brought to all hearts, and in some real sense to our
   comprehension, by the life of Jesus Christ, and so He is the Way. But
   that is not enough. There must be an action upon us as well as an
   action having reference to the divine nature. God is brought to men by
   the manifestation in Christ; and we, the dead, are quickened by the
   communication of the Life. The one phrase points to all His work as a
   Revealer, the other points to all His work upon us as life-giving
   Spirit, a Quickener and an Inspirer. Dead men cannot walk a road. It is
   of no use to make a path if it starts from a cemetery. Christ taught
   that men apart from Him are dead, and that the only life that they can
   have by which they can be knit to God is the divine life which was in
   Himself, and of which He is the source and the principle for the whole
   world. He does not tell us here what yet is true, and what He
   abundantly tells in other parts of this great conversation, that the
   only way by which the life which He brings can be diffused and
   communicated is by His death. Except a corn of wheat fall into the
   ground and die, it abideth alone.' He is the Life, and--paradox of
   mystery and yet fact which is the very heart and centre of His
   Gospel--His only way of giving His life to us is by giving up His
   physical life for us. He must die that He may be the life-spring for
   the world. The alabaster box must be broken if the ointment and its
   fragrance are to be poured out; and death is the gate of life' in a
   deeper than the ordinary sense of the saying, inasmuch as the death of
   the Life which is Christ is the life of the death which we are.

   And so, because, on the one hand, He brings a God to our hearts that we
   can love and trust, and because, on the other, He communicates to our
   spirits, dead in the only true death which is the separation from God
   by sin, the life by which we are knit to God, He is the Way to the
   Father.

   And what about people that never heard of Him, to whom that Way has
   been closed, to whom that Truth has never been manifested, to whom that
   Life has never been brought? Ah! Christ has other ways of working than
   through His historical manifestation, for there is no truth more
   plainly taught in this great fourth Gospel than this, that that Light
   lighteth every man that cometh into the world.' The eternal Word works
   through all the earth, in ways beyond our ken, and wherever any man
   has, however imperfectly, felt after and grasped the thought of a
   Father in the heavens, there the Word, which is the Light of men, has
   wrought.

   But for us to whom this Book has come, for what people call in bitter
   irony Christendom,' the law of my text rigidly applies, and it is being
   worked out all round us to-day. No man cometh unto the Father but by
   Me.' And here we are, in this England of ours, and in our sister
   nations on the continent of Europe and in America, face to face as I
   believe with this alternative--either Jesus Christ the Revealer of God
   and the Life of men, or an empty Heaven. And for you, individually, it
   is either--take Christ for the Way, or wander in the wilderness and
   forget your Father. It is either--take Christ for the Truth, or be
   given over to the insufficiencies of mere natural, political, and
   intellectual truths, and the shows and illusions of time and sense. It
   is either--take Christ for your Life, or remain in your deadness,
   separate from God.

   III. Lastly, we have here the disciples' ignorance and the new vision
   which dispels it.

   If ye had known Me, ye should have known My Father also, and from
   henceforth ye know Him, and have seen Him.' Our Lord accepts for the
   moment Thomas's standpoint. He supplements His former allegation of the
   disciples' knowledge with the admission of the ignorance which went
   with it as its shadow, and was only too sadly and plainly shown by
   their failure to discern in Him the manifestation of the Father. He has
   just told them that they did know what they thought they knew not; He
   now tells them that they did not know what they thought they knew so
   well, after so many years of companionship--even Himself. The proof
   that they did not is that they did not know the Father as revealed in
   Him, nor Him as revealing the Father. If they missed that, they missed
   everything; and for all they had known of His graciousness, were
   strangers to His truest Self. Their ignorance would turn out knowledge,
   if they would think, and their supposed knowledge would turn out
   ignorance.

   The lesson for us is that the true test of the completeness and worth
   of our knowledge of Christ lies in its being knowledge of God the
   Father, brought near to us by Him. This saying puts a finger on the
   radical deficiency of all merely humanitarian views of Christ's person,
   however clearly they may see and admiringly extol the beauty of His
   character and the sweet reasonableness' of His wisdom. They all break
   down here, and are arraigned as so shallow and incomplete that they do
   not deserve to be called knowledge of Him at all. If you know anything
   about Jesus Christ rightly, this is what you know about Him, that in
   Him you see God. If you have not seen God in Him, you have not got to
   the heart of the mystery. The knowledge of Christ which stops with the
   Man and the Martyr, and the Teacher and the beautiful, gentle Brother,
   is knowledge so partial that even He cannot venture to call it other
   than ignorance. Oh! brethren, do our conceptions of Him meet this test
   which He Himself has laid down, and can we say that, seeing Him, we see
   in Him God?

   And then our Lord passes on to another thought, the new vision which at
   the moment was being granted to this unconscious ignorance that was
   passing into conscious knowledge. From henceforth ye know Him and have
   seen Him.' We must give that from henceforth,' as a note of time, a
   somewhat liberal interpretation, and apply it to the whole series of
   utterances and deeds of which the words of our text are but a portion.
   And, if so, we come to this--it was in the wisdom, and the gentleness,
   and the deep truths of that upper chamber; it was in the agony and
   submission of Gethsemane; it was in the meek patience before the
   judges, and the silent acceptance of ignominy and shame; it was in the
   willing, loving endurance of the long hours upon the Cross, that Christ
   inaugurated the new stage in His revelation of God and in His
   life-giving to the world. And it is from thenceforth and thereby that
   in the man Jesus, men know and see the Father' as they never did
   before. The Cross and the Passion of Christ are the unveiling to the
   world of the heart of God; and by the side of that new vision the
   fairest and the loftiest and the sweetest of Christ's former
   manifestations and utterances sink into comparative insignificance. It
   is the dying Christ that reveals the living God.

   So, dear friends, He is your way to God. See that ye seek the Father by
   Him alone. He is your Truth; grapple Him to your hearts, and by patient
   meditation and continual faithfulness enrich yourselves with all the
   communicated treasures that you have already received in Him. He is
   your Life; cleave to Him, that the quick Spirit that was in Him may
   pass into you and make you victors over all deaths, temporal and
   eternal. Know Him as a Friend, not as a mere historical person, or with
   mere head-knowledge, for to know a friend is something far deeper than
   to know a truth. Acquaint thyself with Him and be at peace.' This is
   life eternal, to know,' with the knowledge which is life and
   possession, Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast
   sent.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE TRUE VISION OF GOD

   Philip saith unto Jesus, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us.
   9. Jesus saith unto Him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet
   hast thou not known Me, Philip? He that hath seen Me hath seen the
   Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew us the Father? Believest thou
   not that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? The words that I
   speak unto you I speak not of Myself: but the Father, that dwelleth in
   Me, He doeth the works. Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the
   Father in Me: or else believe Me for the very works' sake.'--JOHN xiv.
   8-11.

   The vehement burst with which Philip interrupts the calm flow of our
   Lord's discourse is not the product of mere frivolity or curiosity. One
   hears the ring of earnestness in it, and the yearnings of many years
   find voice. Philip had felt out of his depth, no doubt, in the profound
   teachings which our Lord had been giving, but His last words about
   seeing God set a familiar chord vibrating. As an Old Testament believer
   he knew that Moses had once led the elders of Israel up to the mount
   where they saw the God of Israel,' and that to many others had been
   granted sensible manifestations of the divine presence. As a disciple
   he longed for some similar sign to confirm his faith. As a man he was
   conscious of the deep need which all of us have, whether we are
   conscious of it or not, for something more real and tangible than an
   unseeable and unknowable God. The peculiarities of Philip's temperament
   strengthened the desire. The first appearance that he makes in the
   Gospels is characteristically like this his last. To all Nathanael's
   objections he had only the reply, Come and see.' And here he says: Oh!
   if we could see the Father it would be enough.' He was one of the men
   to whom seeing is believing, and so he speaks.

   His petition is childlike in its simplicity, beautiful in its trust,
   noble and true in its estimate of what men need. He longs to see God.
   He believes that Christ can show God; he is sure that the sight of God
   will satisfy the heart. These are errors, or truths, according to what
   is meant by seeing.' Philip meant a palpable manifestation, and so far
   he was wrong. Give the word its highest and its truest meaning, and
   Philip's error becomes grand truth. Our Lord gently, lovingly, and with
   only a hint of rebuke, answers the request, and seeks to disengage the
   error from the truth. His answer lies in the verses that we have read.
   Let us try to follow them, and, as we may, to skim their surface, for
   their depths are beyond us.

   First of all, then, we have the sight of God in Christ as enough to
   answer men's longings. There is a world of sadness and tenderness, of
   suppressed pain and of grieved affection, in the first words of our
   Lord's reply. Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not
   known Me, Philip?' He seldom names His disciples. When He does, there
   is a deep cadence of affection in the designation. This man was one of
   the first disciples, the little original band called by Christ Himself,
   and thus had been with Him all the time of His ministry, and the Master
   wonders with a gentle wonder that, before eyes that loved Him as much
   as Philip's did, His continual self-revelation had been made to so
   little purpose. In the answer, in its first portion, there lies the
   reiteration of the thoughts that I was trying to dwell upon in the last
   sermon, which, therefore, I may lightly touch now--viz., that the sight
   of Christ is the sight of God--He that hath seen Me hath seen the
   Father'--and that not to know Christ as thus showing God is not to know
   Him at all--Thou hast not known Me, Philip.' Further, there is the
   thought that the sight of God in Christ is sufficient, How sayest thou,
   Shew us the Father?' From all this we may gather some thoughts on which
   I lightly touch.

   I. The first is, that we all do need to have God made visible to us.

   The history of heathendom shows us that, in every land men have said,
   The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men.' And the highest
   cultivation of this highly cultivated and self-conscious twentieth
   century has not removed us from the same necessity that the rudest
   savage has, to have some kind of manifestation of the divine nature
   other than the dim and vague ones which are possible apart from the
   revelation of God in Christ. A God who is only the product of
   inferences from creation, or providence, or the mysteries of history,
   or the wonders of my own inner life, the creature of logic or of
   reflection, is very powerless to sway and influence men. The
   limitations of our faculties and the boundlessness of our hearts both
   cry out for a God who is nearer to us than that, and whom we can see
   and love and be sure of. The whole world wants the making visible of
   divinity as its deepest want. And your heart and mind require it.
   Nothing else will ever stay our hunger, will ever answer our
   questioning minds.

   Christ meets this need. How can you make wisdom visible? How can a man
   see love or purity? How do I see your spirit? By the deeds of your
   body. And the only way by which God can ever come near enough to men to
   be a constant power and a constant motive in their lives is by their
   seeing Him at work in a Man, who amongst them is His image and
   revelation. Christ's whole life is the making visible of the invisible
   God. He is the manifestation to the world of the unseen Father.

   That vision is enough--enough for mind, enough for heart, enough for
   will. There is none else that is sufficient, but this is. How sayest
   thou, Shew us the Father?' If we can see God it suffices us. Then the
   mind settles down upon the thought of Him as the basis of all being,
   and of all change, and the heart can twine itself round Him, and the
   seeking soul folds its wings and is at rest, and the troubled spirit is
   quiet, and the accusing conscience is silent, and the rebellious will
   is subdued, and the stormy passions are quieted, and in the inner
   kingdom is a great peace. The sight of God in Christ brings rest to
   every heart, and, Oh! the absence of the vision is the true secret of
   all disquiet. We are troubled and careful, and tossed from one stormy
   billow to another, and swept over by all the winds that blow, because
   we see not God, our Father, in the face of Jesus. Show us the Father,
   and it sufficeth us,' is either a puerile petition, or the deepest and
   noblest prayer of the human heart. Blessed are they who have learned
   what it is to see, and know where that great sight is to be seen!

   Our present knowledge and vision are far higher than that mere external
   symbol of God which this man wanted. The elders of Israel saw the God
   of Israel, but what they saw was but some symbolical manifestation of
   that which in itself is unseen and unattainable. But we who see God in
   Christ see no symbol but the Reality, and there is nothing more
   possible or to be hoped for here. Our present manifestation and sight
   of God in Christ does fall, in some ways unknown to us, beneath the
   bright hopes that we are entitled to cherish. But howsoever imperfect
   it may be, as measured against the perfection of the vision when we
   shall see face to face, and know even as we are known, it is enough,
   and more than enough, for all the questionings and desires of our
   hungering spirits.

   II. Our Lord goes on to a further answer, and points to the divine and
   mutual indwelling by which this sight is made possible.

   Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? The
   words that I speak unto you, I speak not of Myself, but the Father that
   dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works.' There are here, mainly, two
   things, Christ's claim to the oneness of unbroken communion, and
   Christ's claim, consequently, to the oneness of complete co-operation.
   I am in the Father' indicates the suppression of all independent and
   therefore rebellious will, consciousness, thought and action; And the
   Father in Me' indicates the influx into that perfectly filial Manhood
   of the whole fullness of God in unbroken, continuous, gentle, deep
   flow. These are the two sides of this great mystery on which neither
   wisdom nor reverence lead us to dilate; and they combine to express the
   closest and most uninterrupted blending, interpenetration, and
   communion.

   And then follows the other claim, that because of this continuous
   mutual indwelling there is perfect cooperation. This is also stated in
   terms corresponding to the preceding double representation. The words
   that I speak unto you, I speak not of Myself,' corresponds to, I am in
   the Father.' The Father that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works,'
   corresponds to The Father in Me.' The two put together teach us this,
   that by reason of that mysterious and ineffable union of communion,
   Jesus Christ in all His words and in all His works is the perfect
   instrument of the divine will, so that His words are God's words, and
   His works are God's works; so that, when He speaks, His gentle wisdom,
   His loving sympathy, His melting tenderness, His authoritative
   commands, His prophetic threatenings, are the speech of God, and that
   when He acts, whether it be by miracle or in the ordinary deeds of His
   life, what we see is God working before our eyes as we never see Him in
   any human being.

   And from all this follow just two or three considerations which I name.
   Note the absolute absence of any consciousness on Christ's part of the
   smallest deflection or disharmony between Himself and the Father. Two
   triangles laid on each other are in every line, point, and angle
   absolutely coincident. That humanity is capable of receiving the whole
   inflow of God, and that indwelling God is perfectly expressed in the
   humanity. There is no trace of a consciousness of sin. Everything that
   Jesus Christ said He knew to be God's speaking; everything that He did
   He knew to be God's acting. There were no barriers between the two.
   Jesus Christ was conscious of no separation--not the thinnest film of
   air between these Two who adhered and inhered so closely and so
   continuously. It is an awful assertion.

   Now I pray you to ask yourselves the question: If this was what Christ
   said, what did He think of Himself? And is this a Man, like the rest of
   us, with blotches and sins, with failures to embody His own ideas, and
   still more to carry out in life the will that He knows to be God's
   will? Is this a man like other men who thus speaks to us? If Jesus had
   this consciousness, either He was ludicrously, tragically,
   blasphemously, utterly mistaken and untrustworthy, or He is what the
   Church in all ages has confessed Him to be, the Everlasting Son of the
   Father.'

   III. Lastly, our Lord further sets before us the faith to which He
   invites us on the ground of His union with, and revelation of, God.

   Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me, or else
   believe Me for the very works' sake.' Observe that the verb at the
   beginning of this last verse of our text passes into a plural form. Our
   Lord has done with Philip especially, and speaks now to all who hear
   Him, and to us amongst the rest of His auditors. He bids us believe
   Him, and believe something about Him on the strength of His own
   testimony, or, in default of that, and as second best, believe Him on
   the testimony of His works. I gather together what I have to say about
   this point into three remarks.

   The true bond of union between men and Jesus Christ is faith. We have
   to trust, and that is better than sight. We have to trust Him. He is
   the personal Object of our faith. In all faith there is what I may call
   a moral and a voluntary element. A man believes a proposition because
   it is forced upon him, and his intelligence is obliged to accept it. A
   man trusts Christ because he will trust Him, and the moral and
   voluntary element carries us far beyond the mere intellectual
   conception of faith as the assent to a set of theological propositions.
   Faith really is the outgoing of the whole man--heart, will, intellect,
   and all--to a person whom it grasps. But the Christ that you and I have
   to trust is the Christ as He Himself has declared Himself to us.
   Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me.' There is a
   bastard, mutilated kind of thing that calls itself Christian faith,
   that goes about the world in this generation, which believes in Jesus
   Christ in all sorts of beautiful ways, but it will not believe in Him
   as the Personal Revelation and making visible of the unseen God. Jesus
   Christ Himself tells us here that that is not the kind of faith which
   He invites us to put forth. If we put forth that only, we have not yet
   come to understand Him. Oh, dear friends! Christ as here declared to us
   by Himself is the only Christ to whom it is right to give our trust. If
   He be not God manifest in the flesh, I ought not to trust Him. I may
   admire Him as a historical personage; I may reverence Him for His
   wisdom and beauty; I may even in some vague way have a kind of love to
   Him. But what in the name of common sense shall I trust Him for? And
   why should He call upon me to exercise faith in Him unless He stand
   before me as the adequate Object of a man's trust--namely, the manifest
   God?

   And then, further, note that believing in the sense of trusting is
   seeing and knowing. Philip said, Shew us the Father.' Christ answers,
   Believe, and thou dost see.' If you look back upon the previous verses
   of this chapter, you will find that in the earlier portion of them the
   key-word is know'; that in the second portion of them the key-word is
   see'; that in this portion of them the key-word is believe.' The world
   says, Ah! seeing is believing.' The Gospel says, Believing is seeing.'
   The true way to knowledge, and to a better vision than the uncertain
   vision of the eye, is faith. In certitude and in directness, the
   knowledge of God that we have through faith in the Christ whom our eyes
   have never seen is far ahead of the certitude and the directness that
   attach to our mere bodily sight; and so the key to all divine
   knowledge, and the sure road to the truest vision of God, is faith.

   Further, faith, even if based upon lower than the highest grounds, is
   still faith, and acceptable to Him: Or else believe Me for the very
   works' sake.' The works' are mainly, I suppose, though not exclusively,
   His miracles. And if so, we are here taught that, if a man has not come
   to that point of spiritual susceptibility in which the image of Jesus
   Christ lays hold upon His heart and obliges him to trust Him and to
   love Him, there are yet the miracles to look at; and the faith that
   grasps them, and by help of that ladder climbs to Him, though it be
   second best, is yet real. The evidence of miracles is subordinate, and
   yet it is valid and true. So our Lord contradicts both the
   exaggerations of past generations and the exaggerations of this, and
   neither asserts that the great reason for faith is miracles, nor that
   miracles are of no use at all. Former centuries in the Christian Church
   reiterated the former exaggeration, and thus partly provoked the
   exaggeration of this day. Let us keep the middle course: there is a
   better way of coming to Christ than through the gate of miracles, and
   that is that He should stamp His own divine sweetness and elevation
   upon our minds and hearts. But if we have not reached that point, do
   not let us kick away the ladder that may help us to it. Believe Him for
   the very works' sake.' Imperfect faith may be the highway to
   perfection. Let us follow the light, if it be but a far-off glimmer,
   sure that it will bring us into noontide day if we are faithful to its
   leading.

   On the other hand, dear friends, let us remember that no faith avails
   itself of all the treasures laid up for it, which does not lay hold
   upon Christ in the character in which He presents Himself. The only
   adequate, worthy trust in Him is the trust which grasps Him as the
   Incarnate God and Saviour. Only such a faith does justice to His own
   claim. Only such a faith is the sure path to vision and to knowledge.
   Only such a faith draws down the blessing of a questioning intellect
   answered, a hungry heart satisfied, a conscience, accusing and
   prophetic of a judgment to come, cleansed and purified.

   To each of us Christ addresses His merciful invitation, Believe Me that
   I am in the Father, and the Father in Me.' May we all answer, We
   believe that Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God!'
     __________________________________________________________________

CHRIST'S WORKS AND OURS

   Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on Me, the works that
   I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do;
   because I go unto My Father. 13. And whatsoever ye shall ask in My
   name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14.
   If ye shall ask any thing in My name, I will do it.'--JOHN xiv. 12-14.

   I have already pointed out in a previous sermon that the key-word of
   this context is Believe!' In three successive verses we find it, each
   time widening in its application. We have first the question to the
   single disciple: Philip! believest thou not?' We have then the
   invitation addressed to the whole group: Believe Me!' And here we have
   a wholly general expression referring to all who, in every generation
   and corner of the world, put their trust in Christ, and extending the
   sunshine of this great promise to whosoever believeth in Him. Our Lord
   has pointed to believing as the great antidote to a troubled heart, as
   the sure way of knowing the Father, as the better substitute for sight;
   and now here He opens before us still more wonderful prerogatives and
   effects of faith. His words carry us up into lofty and misty regions,
   where we can neither breathe freely nor see clearly, except as we hold
   to His words. Therefore He prefaces them with His Verily, verily!'
   bidding us listen to them with sharpened attention as the disclosure of
   something wonderful, and receive them with unfaltering confidence, on
   His authority, however marvellous and otherwise undiscoverable they may
   be.

   What is it, then, that He thus commends to our acceptance? If I may
   venture a paraphrase which may at least have the advantage of being
   cast into less familiar words, it is just this, that because of, and
   after, Christ's departure from earth, He will, in response to prayer,
   work upon faithful souls in such a fashion as that they will do what He
   did, and in some sense will do even more.

   I. We have here the continuous work of the exalted Lord for and through
   His servants.

   These disciples, of course, were trembling and oppressed with the
   thought that the departure of Jesus would be the end of His ceaseless
   activity for them, on which they had depended implicitly for so long.
   Henceforward, whatever distress or need might come, that Voice would be
   silent, and that Hand motionless, and they would be left to face every
   storm, uncompanioned and uncounselled. Some of us know how dreary such
   experience makes life, and we can understand how these men shrank from
   the prospect. Christ's words give strength to meet that trial, and not
   only tell them that after He is gone they will be able to do what they
   cannot do now, and what He used to do for them, but that in them He
   will work as well as for them, and be the power of their action, after
   He has departed.

   For, notice the remarkable connection of the words with which we are
   dealing. He that believeth on Me, the works that I do shall he do,' and
   the ground of that is because I go to My Father,' and whatsoever the
   believer shall ask, I will do.'

   So, then, there are here two very distinct paths on which Christ
   represents to us that His future activity will travel; the one, that of
   doing for us, in response to our prayers; the other that of working on
   us and in us, so that our acts are His and His acts are ours. We may
   look at these two for a moment separately.

   Here, then, there is clearly stated this great thought, that Christ's
   removal from the world is not the end of His activity in the world and
   on material things, but that, absent, He still is a present power, and
   having passed through death, and been removed from sense, He can still
   operate upon the things round us, and move these according to His will.
   We are not to water down such words as these into any such thought as
   that the continuous influence of the memory and history of His past
   will be a present power in all ages.

   That is true, gloriously and uniquely true, but that is not the truth
   which He speaks here. Over and above that perpetual influence of past
   recorded work, there is the present influence of His present work, and
   to-day He is working as truly as He wrought when on earth. One form of
   His work was finished on Calvary, as His dying breath proclaimed; but
   there is another work of Christ in the midst of the ages, moving the
   pawns on the chessboard of the world, and presiding over the fortunes
   of the solemn conflict, which will not be ended until that day when the
   angel voices shall chant, It is done! The kingdoms of the world are the
   kingdoms of our God and of His Christ.' The living Christ works by a
   true forth-putting of His own present power upon material things, and
   amidst the providences of life. And therefore these disciples were not
   to be cast down as if His work for them were ended.

   Now it is clear, of course, that such words as these do demand for
   their vindication something perfectly unique and solitary in the nature
   and person of Jesus Christ. All other men's work is cut in twain by
   death. This man, having served his generation by the will of God, fell
   on sleep and was gathered to his fathers, and saw corruption,' that is
   the epitaph over the greatest thinkers, statesmen, heroes, poets, the
   epitaph for the tenderest and most hopeful. Father, mother, husband,
   wife, child, friend, all cease to act when they die, and though
   thunders should break, they are silent and can help no more. But Christ
   is living to-day, and working all around us.

   Now, brethren, it is of the last importance for the joyousness of our
   Christian lives, and for the courage of our conflict with sorrow and
   sin, that we should give a very prominent place in our creeds, and our
   hearts, to this great truth of a living Christ. What a joyful sense of
   companionship it brings to the solitary, what calmness of vision in
   contemplating the complications and calamities of the world's history,
   if we grasp firmly the assurance that the living Christ is actually
   working by the present forth-putting of His power in the world to-day!

   But that is not all. There is another path on which our Lord shows us
   here a glimpse of His working, not only for us, but on and in and
   therefore through us, so that the deeds that we do in faith that rests
   upon Him are in one aspect His, and in another ours.

   The works that I do shall He do also'; because whatsoever ye shall ask
   I will do it.'

   We have not to think only of a Lord whose activity for us, beneficent
   and marvellous as it is, was finished in the misty past upon the Cross,
   nor have we only to think of a Lord whose activity for us, mighty and
   comforting as it is to all the solitary and struggling, is wrought as
   from the heights of the heavens, but we have to think of One who is
   beside us and in us and knows the hidden paths that no eye sees, and no
   foot but His can tread, into the inmost recesses of our souls, and
   there can enter as King and righteousness, as life and strength. This
   is the deepest of the lessons that He would teach us here. I live, yet
   not I, but Christ liveth in me,' and through me, if I keep close to
   Him, will work mightily in forms that my poor manhood could never have
   reached. The emblem of the vine and the branches, and the other emblem
   of the house and its inhabitants, and the other of the head and the
   members, all point to this one same thing which shallow and unspiritual
   men call mystical,' but which is the very heart of the Christian
   prerogative and the anchor of the Christian hope. Christ in us is our
   present righteousness and our hope of a future glory.

   And now mark that a still more solemn and mysterious aspect of this
   union of Jesus Christ and the believer is given, since it is set forth
   as resulting in our doing Christ's works, and Christ doing ours; and
   therein is paralleled with the yet more wonderful and ineffable union
   between the Father and the Son. It is no accident that in one clause He
   says, I am in the Father, and the Father in Me. The words that I speak
   unto you I speak not of Myself, but the Father that dwelleth in Me, He
   doeth the works'; and that in the next He says, The works that I do
   shall he do also'; and so bids us see in that union between the Father
   and the Son, and in that consequent union of co-operation between Him
   and His Father, a pattern after which our union with Him is to be
   moulded, both as regards the closeness of its intimacy and as regards
   the resulting manifestations in life. Christ is in us and we in Christ
   in some measure as the Son is in the Father and the Father in the Son.
   And the works that we do He does in some fashion that faintly echoes
   and shadows the perfect co-operation of the Father and the Son in the
   works that the Christ did upon the earth.

   All the doings of a Christian man, if done in faith, and holding by
   Christ, are Christ's doings, inasmuch as He is the life and the power
   which does them all. And Christ's deeds are reproduced and perpetuated
   in His humble follower, inasmuch as the life which is imparted will
   unfold itself according to its own kind; and he that loves Christ will
   be changed into His likeness, and become a partaker of His Spirit. So
   let us curb all self-dependence and self-will, that that mighty tide
   may flow into us; and let us cast from us all timidity, distrust, and
   gloom, and be strong in the assurance that we have a Christ living in
   the heavens to work for us, and living within us to work through us.

   There is no record of the Ascension in John's Gospel, but these words
   of my text unveil to us the inmost meaning of that Ascension, and are
   in full accord with the great picture which one of the Evangelists has
   drawn--a picture in two halves, which yet are knit together into one.
   So then, after He had spoken unto them, He was received up into heaven,
   and sat at the right hand of God; and they went forth and preached
   everywhere.' What a contrast between the two--the repose above, the
   toil below! Yes! But the next words knit them together--The Lord also
   working with them, and confirming the word with signs following.'

   II. Note, in the next place, the greater work of the servants on and
   for whom the Lord works. Greater works than these shall he do.' Is,
   then, the servant greater than his Lord, and he that is sent greater
   than He that sent him? Not so, for whatsoever the servant does is done
   because the Lord is with and in him, and the contrast that is drawn
   between the works that Christ does on earth and the greater works that
   the servant is to do hereafter is, properly and at bottom, the contrast
   between Christ's manifestations in the time of His earthly limitation
   and humiliation, and His manifestations in the time of His Ascension
   and celestial glory.

   We need not be afraid that such great words as these in any measure
   trench on the unique and unapproachable character of the earthly work
   of Christ in its two aspects, which are one--of Revelation and
   Redemption. These are finished, and need no copy, no repetition, no
   perpetuation, until the end of time. But the work of objective
   Revelation, which was completed when He ascended, and the work of
   Redemption which was finished when He rose--these require to be applied
   through the ages. And it is in regard to the application of the
   finished work of Christ to the actual accomplishment of its
   contemplated consequences, that the comparison is drawn between the
   limited sphere and the small results of Christ's work upon earth, and
   the worldwide sweep and majestic magnitude of the results of the
   application of that work by His servants' witnessing work. The wider
   and more complete spiritual results achieved by the ministration of the
   servants than by the ministration of the Lord is the point of
   comparison here. And I need only remind you that the poorest Christian
   who can go to a brother soul, and by word or life can draw that soul to
   a Christ whom it apprehends as dying for its sins and raised for its
   glorifying, does a mightier thing than it was possible for the Master
   to do by life or lip whilst He was here upon earth. For the Redemption
   had to be completed in act before it could be proclaimed in word; and
   Christ had no such weapon in His hands with which to draw men's souls,
   and cast down the high places of evil, as we have when we can say, We
   testify unto you that the Son of God hath died for our sins, and is
   raised again according to the Scriptures.' Nor need I do more than
   remind you of the comparison, so exalting for His humility and so
   humbling for our self-exaltation, between the narrow sphere in which
   His earthly ministrations had to operate and the worldwide scope which
   is given to His servants. He laid His hands on a few sick folk, and
   healed them'; and at the end of His life there were one hundred and
   twenty disciples in Jerusalem and five hundred in Galilee, and you
   might have put them all into this chapel and had ample room to spare.
   That was all that Jesus Christ had done; while to-day and now the world
   is being leavened and the kingdoms of the earth are beginning to
   recognise His name. Greater works than these shall he do' who lets
   Christ in him do all His works.

   III. Lastly, notice the conditions on which the exalted Lord works for
   and on His servants.

   These are two, faith and prayer.

   He that believeth on Me, the works that I do shall he do also.' Faith,
   the simple act of loving trust in Jesus Christ, opens the door of our
   hearts and natures for the entrance of all His solemn Omnipotence, and
   makes us possessors of it. It is the condition, and the only condition,
   and plainly the indispensable condition, of possessing this divine
   Christ's power, that we should trust ourselves to Him that gives it.
   And if we do, then we shall not trust in vain, but to us there will
   come power that will surpass our desire, and fill us with its own
   rejoicing and pure energy. Faith will make us like Christ. Faith is
   intensely practical. He that believeth shall do.' It is no mere cold
   assent to a creed which is utterly impotent to operate upon men's acts,
   no mere hysterical emotion which is utterly impotent to energise into
   nobilities of service and miracles of consecration, but it is the
   affiance of the whole nature which spreads itself before Him and prays,
   Fill my emptiness and vitalise me with Thine own Spirit.' That is the
   faith which is ever answered by the inrush of the divine power, and the
   measure of our capacity of receiving is the measure of His gift to us.

   So if Christian individuals and Christian communities are impotent, or
   all but impotent, there is no difficulty in understanding why. They
   have cut the connection, they have shut the tap. They lack faith; and
   so their power is weakness. Why could we not cast him out?' said they,
   perplexed when they had no need to be. Why could you not cast him out?
   Because you do not believe that I, working in you, can cast him out.
   That is why; and the only why.' Let us learn that the secret of
   Christians' weakness is the weakness of their Christian faith.

   And the other condition is prayer. Whatsoever ye shall ask in My name I
   will do it,' and He repeats it, for confirmation and for greater
   emphasis. If ye shall ask anything in My name,' or, as perhaps that
   clause ought to be read with some versions, If ye shall ask Me anything
   in My name I will do it.'

   Three points may be named here. Our power depends upon our prayer.
   God's and Christ's fullness and willingness to communicate do not
   depend upon our prayer. But our capacity to receive of that fullness,
   and so the possibility of its communication to us, do depend upon our
   prayer. We have not because we ask not.'

   The power of our prayer depends upon our conscious oneness with the
   revealed Christ. If ye shall ask in My name,' says He. And people think
   they have fulfilled the condition when, in a mechanical and external
   manner, they say, as a formula at the end of petitions that have been
   all stuffed full of self-will and selfishness, for Christ's sake.
   Amen!' and then they wonder they do not get them answered! Is that
   asking in Christ's name?

   Christ's name is the revelation of Christ's character, and to do a
   thing in the name of another person is to do it as His representative,
   and as realising that in some deep and real sense--for the present
   purpose at all events--we are one with Him. And it is when we know
   ourselves to be united to Christ and one with Him, and representative
   in a true fashion of Himself, as well as when, in humble reliance on
   His work for us and His loving heart, we draw near, that our prayer has
   power, as the old divines used to say, to move the Hand that moves the
   world,' and to bring down a rush of blessing upon our heads. Prayer in
   the name of Christ is hard to offer. It needs much discipline and
   watchfulness; it excludes all self-will and selfishness. And if, as my
   text tells us, the end of the Son's working is the glory of the Father,
   that same end, and not our own ease or comfort, must be the end and
   object of all prayer which is offered in His name. When we so pray we
   get an answer. And the reason why such multitudes of prayers never
   travel higher than the roof, and bring no blessings to him who prays,
   is because they are not prayers in Christ's name.

   Prayer in His name will pass into prayer to Him. As He not obscurely
   teaches us here (if we adopt the reading to which I have already
   referred), He has an ear to hear such requests, and He wields divine
   power to answer. Surely it was not blasphemy nor any diversion of the
   worship due to God alone, when the dying martyr outside the city wall
   cried and said, Lord Jesus! receive my spirit.' Nor is it any departure
   from the solemnest obligations laid upon us by the unity of the divine
   nature, nor are we bringing idolatrous petitions to another than the
   Father, when we draw near to Christ and ask Him to give us that which
   He gives as the Father's gift, and to work on us that which the Father
   that dwelleth in Him works through Him for us.

   Trust yourselves to Christ, and let your desires be stilled, to listen
   to His voice in you, and let that voice speak. And then, dear brethren,
   we shall be lifted above ourselves, and strength will flow into us, and
   we shall be able to say, I can do all things, through the Christ that
   dwells in me and makes me strong.' And just as the glad, sunny waters
   of the incoming tide fill the empty places of some oozy harbour, where
   all the ships are lying as if dead, and the mud is festering in the
   sunshine, so into the slimy emptiness of our corrupt hearts there will
   pour the flashing sunlit wave, the ever fresh rush of His power; and
   everything will live whithersoever it cometh,' and we shall be able to
   say in all humility, and yet in glad recognition of Christ's
   faithfulness to this, His transcendent promise, I live, yet not I, but
   Christ liveth in me,' because the life which I live in the flesh I live
   by faith of the Son of God.'
     __________________________________________________________________

LOVE AND OBEDIENCE

   If ye love Me, keep My commandments.'--JOHN xiv. 15.

   As we have seen in former sermons, the keyword of the preceding context
   is Believe!' and that word passes now into Love.' The order here is the
   order of experience. There is first the believing gaze upon the Christ
   as He is revealed--the image of the invisible God. That kindles love,
   and prompts to obedience.

   There is another very beautiful and subtle link of connection between
   these words and the preceding. Our Lord has just been saying,
   Whatsoever ye shall ask in My name, that will I do.' Is the parallel
   wholly accidental or fanciful between the Lord who does as the servant
   asks and the servant who is to do as the Lord commands? On both sides
   there is love delighting to be set in motion by a message from the
   other side. On the one part there is love supreme which commands and
   delights to be asked, on the other part there is love dependent, which
   asks and delights to be commanded; and though the gulf between the two
   is great, and the difference between Christ's law and our petitions is
   infinite, yet there is an analogy.

   I pause on these words, though they are introduced here only as the
   basis of the great promise which follows, because they open out into
   such wide fields. They contain the all-sufficient law of Christian
   conduct. They contain the one motive adequate to bring that law into
   realisation. They disclose the very roots of Christian morality, and
   part of the secret of Christ's unique power and influence amongst men.
   They come with a message of encouragement to all souls despairing of
   being able to do that which they would, and of freedom to all men
   burdened with a crowd of minute and external regulations. If ye love
   Me, keep My commandments'--there are three points to be dwelt upon
   here--namely, the all-sufficient ideal or guide of life, the
   all-powerful motive which Christ brings to bear, and the all-subduing
   gaze of faith by which that motive is brought into action.

   I. We have here the all-sufficient ideal or guide for life.

   Jesus Christ is not speaking merely to that little handful of men in
   the upper chamber, but to all generations and to all lands, to the end
   of time and round the world. The authoritative tone which He assumes
   here is very noteworthy. He speaks as Jehovah spoke from Sinai, and
   quotes the very words of the old law when He speaks of keeping My
   commandments.' There are distinctly involved in this quite incidental
   utterance of Christ's two startling things--one the assumption of His
   right to impose His will upon every human being, and the other His
   assumption that His will contains the all-sufficient directory for
   human conduct.

   What, then, are His commandments? Those which He spoke are plain and
   simple; and people who wish to pick holes in the greatness of Christ's
   work in the world tell us that you can match almost all His precepts up
   and down amongst moralists and philosophers, and they crow very loud
   if, scratching amongst Rabbinical dust-heaps, they find something that
   looks like anything that He once said. Be it so! What does that matter?
   Christ's commandments' are Christ Himself. This is the originality and
   uniqueness of Christ as a moral Teacher, that He says, not Do this,
   that, and the other thing,' but Copy Me.' Take My yoke upon you and
   learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart.' His commandments are
   Himself; and the sum of them all is this--a character perfectly
   self-oblivious, and wholly penetrated and saturated with joyful, filial
   submission to the Father, and uttermost and entire giving Himself away
   to His brethren. That is Christ's commandment which He bids us keep,
   and His law is to be found in His life.

   And then, if that be so, what a change passes on the aspect of law,
   when we take Christ as being our living embodiment of it! Everything
   that was hard, repellent, far-off, cold, vanishes. We have no longer
   tables of stone,' but fleshy tables of the heart'; and the Law stands
   before us, a Being to be loved, to be clung to, to be trusted, and whom
   it is blessedness to know and perfection to resemble. The rails upon
   which the train travels may be rigid, but they mean safety, and they
   carry men smoothly into otherwise inaccessible lands. So the life of
   Jesus Christ brought to us is the firm and plain track along which we
   are to travel; and all that was difficult and hard in the cold thought
   of duty becomes changed into the attraction of a living Pattern and
   Example. This living and breathing and loving commandment is
   all-sufficient for every detail and complexity of human life. It is so
   by the confession of believers and of unbelievers, by the joyful
   confession of the one, and by the frank acknowledgment of many of the
   others. Listen to one of them. Whatever else may be taken away from us
   by rational criticism, Christ is still left, a unique Figure, not more
   unlike all His predecessors than all His followers . . . . Religion
   cannot be said to have made a bad choice in selecting this Man as the
   ideal Representative and Guide of humanity; nor even now would it be
   easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule
   of virtue from the abstract into the concrete than to endeavour so to
   live that Christ would approve our life.'

   It is enough for conduct, it is enough for character, it is enough in
   all perplexities of conflicting duties, that we listen to and obey the
   voice that says, Keep My commandments.'

   II. Now note, secondly, the all-powerful motive.

   Probably my text is best understood as the Revised Version understands
   it, which reads, If ye love Me, ye will keep My commandments,' making
   it an assurance and not an injunction. Christ speaks with the calm
   confidence that love to Him will have power enough to sway the life.
   His utterance here is not the addition of another commandment to the
   list, but rather the pointing out of how they may all be kept.

   The principle that underlies these words, then, is this, that love is
   the foundation of obedience, and obedience is the sure outcome and
   result of love. That is true in regard to those lower forms of love,
   which may teach us something of the operation of the higher. We all
   know that love which is real, and not simply passion and selfishness
   with a mask on, delights most chiefly in knowing and conforming to the
   will of the beloved, and that there is nothing sweeter than to be
   commanded by the dear voice and to obey for dear love's sake. And you
   have only to take that which is the experience of every true heart, in
   a thousand sweet ways in daily life, and to lift it into the higher
   region, and to transfer it to the bond that unites us with Jesus
   Christ, to see that He has invoked no illusory, but an omnipotent power
   when He has rested the whole force of His transforming and sanctifying
   energy upon this one principle, If ye love Me, the Lawgiver, ye will
   keep the commandments of My Law.'

   That is exactly what distinguishes and lifts the morality of the Gospel
   above all other systems. The worst man in the world knows a great deal
   more of his duty than the best man does. It is not for want of
   knowledge that men go to the devil, but it is for want of power or will
   to live their knowledge. And what morality fails to do, with its
   clearest utterances of human duty, Christ comes and does. The one law
   is like the useless proclamations posted up in some rebellious
   district, where there is no army to back them, and the king's authority
   from whom they come is flouted. The other law gets itself obeyed. Such
   is the difference between the powerless morality of the world and the
   commandment of Jesus Christ. Here is the road plain and straight. What
   matters that, if there is no force to draw the cart along it? There
   might as well be no road at all. Here stand all your looms, polished
   and in perfect order, but there is no steam in the boilers; and so
   there is no motion, and nothing is woven. What we want is not law, but
   power, and what the Gospel gives us, and stands alone in giving us, is
   not merely the knowledge of the will of God, and the clear revelation
   of what we ought to be, but the power to become it.

   Love does that, and love alone. That strong force brought into action
   in our hearts will drive out from thence all rivals, all false and low
   things. The true way to cleanse the Augean stables, as the old myth has
   it, was to turn the river into them. It would have been endless work to
   wheel out the filth in wheelbarrows loaded by spades: turn the stream
   in, and it will sweep away all the foulness. When the Ark comes into
   the Temple, Dagon lies, a mutilated stump, upon the threshold. When
   Christ comes into my heart, then all the obscene and twilight-loving
   shapes that lurked there, and defiled it, will vanish like ghosts at
   cock-crowing before His calm and pure Presence. He, and He alone,
   entering my heart by the portals of my love, will coerce my evil and
   stimulate my good. And if I love Him, I shall keep His commandments.

   Now, brethren, here is a plain test and a double-barrelled one, which
   tries both our love and our obedience with a sharp touchstone. If ye
   love Me, ye will keep My commandments.' That implies, first, that there
   is no love worth calling so which does not keep the commandment. All
   the emotional and the mystic, and the so-called higher parts of
   Christian experience, have to be content to submit to this plain
   test--do they help us to live as Christ would have us, and that because
   He would have us? Love to Him that does not keep His commandments is
   either spurious or dangerously feeble. The true sign of its presence in
   the heart and the noblest of its operations is not to be found in
   high-pitched expressions of fervid emotion, nor even in the sacred joys
   of solitary communion, but in its making us, while in the rough
   struggle of daily life, and surrounded by trivial tasks, live near Him,
   and by Him, and for Him, and like Him. If I live so, I love Him; if
   not, not. Not that I mean to say that in regard to each individual
   action of a Christian man's life there must be the conscious presence
   of reference to the supreme love, but that each individual action of
   the life ought to come from a character of which that reference to the
   supreme love is the very formative principle and foundation. The
   colouring matter put in at the fountain will dye every drop of the
   stream; and they whose inmost hearts are tinged and tinctured with the
   sweet love of Jesus Christ, from their hearts will go forth issues of
   life all coloured and moulded thereby. Test your Christian love by your
   practical obedience.

   And, on the other hand, there is no obedience worth calling so which is
   not the child of love; and all the multitude of right things which
   Christians do without that motive are made short work of by that
   consideration. Obedience which is formal, mechanical, matter-of-course,
   without the presence in it of a loving submission of the will;
   obedience which is reluctant, calculated, forced upon us by dread,
   imitated from others--all that is nothing; and Jesus Christ does not
   count it as obedience at all. This is a sieve with very small meshes,
   and there will be a great deal of rubbish left in it after the shaking.
   If ye love Me, keep My commandments.' The keeping of My commandments'
   which has not love to Me' underlying it is no keeping at all.

   III. And so, lastly, notice the all-subduing gaze.

   That is not included in my text, but it is necessary in order to
   complete the view of the forces to which Jesus Christ here entrusts the
   hallowing of life and the sanctifying of our nature; and we are led to
   refer to it by what I have already pointed out; the connection between
   the love' of my text and the believe' of the preceding verses. I can
   fancy a man saying, Keep His commandments? Woe is me! How am I to
   keep?' The answer is Love.' And I can fancy him saying Love?' Yes! And
   how am I to love? I cannot get up love at the word of command, or by
   any voluntary effort.' And the answer comes again, Believe!' Trust
   Christ, and you will love Him. Love Him and you will do His will. And
   then the question comes again, Believe what?' And the answer comes,
   Believe that He is the Son of God who died for you.'

   Nothing else will kindle a man's love than the faithful contemplation
   and grasp of Christ in that character and aspect. Only the redeeming
   Christ affords a reasonable ground for our love to Him. Here is a dead
   man, dead for nineteen centuries, expecting you and me to have towards
   Him a vivid personal affection which will influence our conduct and our
   character. What right has He to expect that? There is only one
   reasonable ground upon which I may be called to love Jesus Christ, and
   that is that He died for me, and such a love towards such a Christ is
   the only thing which will wield power sufficient to guide, to coerce,
   to restrain, to constrain, and to sustain my weak, wayward, rebellious,
   and sluggish will. All other emotions of so-called admiration and
   worship and reverence and affection for Jesus Christ are apt to be
   tepid; but this one has power and warmth in it.

   Here is a unique fact in the history of the world, that not only did He
   make this astounding claim upon all subsequent generations; but that
   all subsequent generations have responded to it, and that to-day there
   are millions of men who love Jesus Christ with a love warm, personal,
   deep, powerful--the spring of all their goodness and the Lord of their
   lives. Why do they? For one reason only. Because they believe that He
   died for them individually, and that He lives an ascended yet
   ever-present Helper and Lover of their souls.

   My brethren, that conviction, and that conviction only, as I venture to
   affirm, has power to send a glow of love into the heart which will move
   all the limbs in swift and happy obedience. That conviction, and that
   conviction alone, will melt the thick-ribbed ice of our spirits and
   will make it flow down in sweet waters. The love that has looked upon
   the Cross will be the fulfilling of the law of Him that speaks from the
   Throne. When our faith has grasped Him, as enduring that cross for us,
   then our love will be awakened to hear and to do His commandments.

   We love Him because He first loved us,' and such love will flower and
   fruit in obedience. I shall keep His commandments when I love Him. I
   shall love Him with a love that makes my will plastic and my life a
   glad service, when by faith I grasp Him as the Incarnate Lord, who
   loved me and gave Himself for me.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE COMFORTER GIVEN

   And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter,
   that He may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of Truth; whom the
   world cannot receive, because it seeth Him not, neither knoweth Him:
   but ye know Him; for He dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.'--JOHN
   xiv. 16, 17.

   The and' at the beginning of these words shows us that they are
   continuous with and the consequence of what precedes. If ye love Me, ye
   will keep My commandments, and I will pray . . . and He will send.'
   Such is the series; but we must also remember that, as we have seen in
   previous sermons, the obedience spoken of in the clause before my text
   is itself treated as a consequence of some preceding steps. The ladder
   that is fixed upon earth and has its summit in heaven has for its
   rungs, first and lowest, believe'; second, love'; third, obey.' And
   thus the context carries us from the very basis of the Christian life
   up into its highest reward, even the larger gift to an obedient spirit
   of that Great Spirit, who is the Comforter and the Teacher.

   And there is another very striking link of connection between these
   words and the preceding. There are, if I may so say, two telephones
   across the abyss that separates the ascended Christ and us. One of them
   is contained in His words, If ye ask anything in My name I will do it';
   the other is contained in these words, If ye keep My commandments I
   will ask.' Love on this side of the great cleft sets love on the other
   side of it in motion in a twofold fashion. If we ask, He does; if we
   do, He asks. His action is the answer to our prayers, and His prayers
   are the answer to our obedient action. So we have here these
   points--the praying Christ and the giving Father; the abiding Gift; the
   blind world and the recipient disciples.

   I. Note, then, first, the praying Christ and the giving Father.

   I will ask and He will give' seems a strange drop from the lofty claims
   with which we have become familiar in the earlier verses of this
   chapter. Believe in God, believe also in Me'; He that hath seen Me hath
   seen the Father'; If ye shall ask anything in My name I will do it';
   Keep My commandments.' All these distinctly express, or necessarily
   imply, divine nature, prerogatives, and authority. But here the voice
   that spake the perfect revelation of God, and gave utterance
   authoritatively to the perfect law of life, softens and lowers its
   tones in petition; and Jesus Christ joins the rank of the suppliants.
   Now common sense tells us that apparently diverse views lying so close
   together in one continuous stream of speech cannot have seemed to the
   utterer of them to be contradictory; and I venture to affirm that there
   is no explanation which does justice to these two sides of Christ's
   consciousness--the one all divine and authoritative and lofty, and the
   other all lowly and identifying Himself with petitioners and suppliants
   everywhere--except the old-fashioned and to-day discredited belief that
   He is God manifest in the flesh,' who prays in His Manhood and hears
   prayer in His Divinity. The bare humanistic view which emphasises such
   utterances as these of my text does not, for the life of it, know what
   to do with the other ones, and cannot manage to unite these two images
   into a stereoscopic solid. That is reserved for the faith which
   believes in the Manhood and in the Deity of our Lord and Saviour.

   His intercession is the great hope of the Christian heart. His
   intercession is the great activity of His present exalted and glorious
   state. His intercession is no mere verbal utterance, nor the
   representation to the Father of an alien or a diverse will, but His
   intercession, mysterious as it is, and unfathomable to our poor, short
   lines and light plummets, must mean this at all events--His continual
   activity in presenting before the divine Father, as the motive and
   condition of His petition being granted, His own great work upon the
   Cross. The High Priest passes within the veil, bearing in His hand the
   offering which He has made, and by reason of that offering, and of His
   powerful presence before the mercy-seat, all the spiritual gifts which
   redeem and regenerate and sanctify humanity are for ever coming forth.
   I will pray, and He will give,' is but one way of saying, Seeing then,
   that we have a great High Priest over the House of God who is entered
   within the veil, let us draw near.'

   But I would have you notice how, as is always the case in all
   utterances of Jesus Christ which express the lowest humiliation and
   completest identification of Himself with humanity, there is ever
   present some touch of obscured glory, some all but suppressed flash of
   brightness which will not be wholly concealed. Note two things in this
   great utterance; one, Christ's quiet assumption that all through the
   ages, and today, nineteen centuries after He died, He knows, at the
   moment of their being done, His servants' deeds. Keep my commandments,
   and, knowing that you keep them, I will then and there pray for you.'
   He claims in the lowly words an altogether supernatural, abnormal,
   divine cognisance of all the acts of men down the ages and across the
   gulf between earth and heaven.

   And the other signature of divinity stamped on the prayer of Christ is
   His certitude of the answer. I will ask and He will give': He puts, as
   it were, the Father's act in pledge to us, and assures us, in a tone of
   certainty, which is not merely the assurance of faith, but the
   certitude of One who is one with the Father,' that His prayer brings
   ever its answer. Father! I will that they whom Thou hast given Me be
   with Me.' How strange! How far beyond the warrantable language of man!
   And how impossible for a fisherman of Bethsaida to imagine, if he had
   not heard, that strange blending of submission and of authority which
   speaks in such words!

   Then, remember what I have already said, that, according to the
   teaching of this verse, taken in connection with its context, that
   which put in motion Christ's Intercessory activity, as represented in
   my text, is the obedience of a Christian man. If you obey He will pray,
   and the Father will send. So the reward of imperfect obedience is the
   larger measure given to us of that divine Spirit by whose indwelling
   obedience becomes possible, and self-surrender a joy and a power. And
   that is not merely because of the natural operation by which any kind
   of conduct tends to repeat itself in more complete measure, nor is it
   merely a case of to him that hath shall be given'; as a man's arm is
   strengthened by exercise, and any faculty becomes more assured, and
   swift, and at the command of its owner, by use. But there is a distinct
   supernatural impartation to every obedient heart of divine gifts which
   come straight through Jesus Christ to it. He Himself, in this immediate
   context, says, If I depart I will send Him unto you,' and the true
   conception is that in that Spirit's gift, which is a reality waiting as
   its crown and reward upon our poor stained obedience, the whole Godhead
   is present; the Father the Source, the Son the Channel, the Spirit the
   Gift.

   II. And so, secondly, note what our text tells us of that abiding gift.

   He will send another Comforter,' that He may abide with you for ever,
   even the Spirit of Truth.' I suppose I may take it for granted that
   most of my audience know all that need be said as to the meaning of
   this word Comforter.' In our present modern English it has a very much
   narrower range of meaning than its etymology would give it, and than
   probably it had when it was first used in an English translation.
   Comforter' means a great deal more than consoler,' though we have
   narrowed it to that signification almost exclusively. It means not only
   one who administers sweet whispers of consolation in sorrow, but one
   who, in any circumstances, by his presence makes strong. And the
   original Greek word, of which it is the translation here, has a
   precisely analogous meaning; its original signification being that of
   one who is called to the aid of another,' primarily as an advocate in a
   court of law, but more widely as a helper in any form whatsoever. And
   that is the idea which is to be attached to the word here:--a Comforter
   who makes strong by His presence; the Paraclete, who is our Advocate,
   Helper, Guide, and Instructor. Need I dwell upon the great thoughts
   that spring from that metaphor; how we have to look for a Person, and
   not merely a vague influence; a divine Person who will be by our sides
   on condition of our faith, love, and obedience, to be our Strength in
   all weakness, our Peace in all trouble, our Wisdom in all darkness, our
   Guide in every perplexity, our Comforter and Cherisher, our
   Righteousness when sin is strong, the Victor over our temptations, and
   the Companion and Sweetener of our solitude? The metaphors with which
   Scripture represents this great personal Influence are full of
   instruction and beauty. He comes as the Fire,' which melts, which
   warms, which cleanses, which quickens. He comes as the rushing, mighty
   Wind,' which bears health upon its wings, and sometimes breathes softly
   as an infant's breath, and sometimes sweeps with irresistible power. He
   comes as the Oil,' gently flowing, lubricating, making every joint
   supple, nourishing. He comes as the Water of Life,' refreshing,
   vitalising, quickening all growth. He comes fluttering down as the Dove
   of God, the bird of peace that will brood upon our hearts. The
   predicates which Scripture attaches to that great Name are equally
   various, and are full of teaching as to the manner in which He is the
   Comforter and the Advocate. He is the Spirit of Holiness, the Spirit of
   Truth, the Spirit of Wisdom, the Spirit of Power, the Spirit of Love,
   the Spirit of a sound Mind, the Spirit of Sonship, the Spirit of
   Supplication, and of many great things besides. And this sweet, strong,
   all-sufficient Person is offered to each of us, and waits to enter our
   hearts.

   And, says Christ, this Strengthener and Advocate is to replace Me and
   to carry on My work. He will send another Comforter.' Who was the other
   but the Master who was speaking? So all that that handful of men had
   found of sweetness and shelter and assured guidance, and stay for their
   weakness, and enlightenment for their darkness, and companionship for
   their solitude, and a breast on which to rest their heads, and love in
   which to bathe their hearts, all these this divine Spirit will bring to
   each of us if we will.

   And further, our Lord tells us that this strong continuer of His
   presence will be a permanent Companion. He will abide with you for
   ever.' He was comforting the disciples who were trembling at the
   thought of His departure, and knowing that all the sweetness of these
   three short years had come to an end; and He says to them, and through
   them to all the ages to the end of time: Here is the abiding Guest,
   that nothing but your own sin will ever cast out from your hearts.'

   And Christ tells us how this great Spirit will do His work. He is the
   Spirit of Truth,' not as if He brought new truth. To suppose that He
   does so, opens the door to all manner of fanaticism, but the truth, the
   revelation of which is all summed and finished in the person and work
   of Jesus Christ, is the weapon by which the divine Spirit works all His
   conquests, the staff on which He makes us lean and be strong. He is the
   Spirit by whom the truth passes into our personal possession, by no
   mere imperfect form of outward teaching which is always confused and
   insufficient, but by the inward teaching that deals with our hearts and
   our spirits.

   But Christ speaks, too, of the blind world. There is a tone of deep
   sadness in His words. The thought of the immense multitude of men who
   were incapacitated to receive this Strengthener steals across and casts
   a momentary shadow upon even the brightness and greatness of His
   promise. The world cannot receive because it seeth Him not, neither
   knoweth Him.' The world' is the mass of man, considered as godless and
   separate from Him, and there is a bit of the world in us all; but there
   are men who are wholly under its influence and dominion. And these men,
   says Christ, are perfectly incapable of receiving the teaching of this
   divine Comforter. Of course there are other operations of that Great
   Spirit of which we shall have to hear as we go on further in this
   context, in which His work convicts the world of sin and of
   righteousness and of judgment.' But what our Lord is speaking of here
   is the work of that Spirit who comes in response to His prayer which
   rises in consequence of our obedience, and who, coming, brings with Him
   strength and purity and peace and wisdom; and that aspect of His
   operations a heart that is all full and seething with the world is
   unfit to receive. It cannot see Him. Embruted natures are altogether
   incapacitated for high thoughts, for the perception of natural beauty,
   for the appreciation of art; and worldly men, by the very same law, are
   incapable of receiving this divine Spirit. A savage stares at the
   sunshine and sees nothing but a glare. And worldly men--that is to say,
   men whose tastes, inclinations, desires, hopes, purposes, strivings,
   are all bound by this visible diurnal round--lack the organ that
   enables them to see that divine Spirit moving round about them. Whether
   you have put your eyes out by fleshly lusts, or, as many men in this
   generation have done, by intellectual self-sufficiency and conceit, if
   the world, in its grosser or in its most refined forms, is your master,
   you are stone blind to all the best realities of the universe, and you
   cannot see the things that are. If you look out upon the history of the
   Church, or upon the present condition of Christendom, and say, I see no
   divine Spirit working there'; well, then, the only thing that is to be
   said to you is, Go to an oculist; your sight is bad. Perhaps there is
   solid land, as some of us see it, where you see only mist.' This
   generation needs the preaching of a supernatural power at work beside
   us, and among us, and until we come to believe that, we do not
   understand the fullness of Christ's gift.

   III. Then, lastly, note the recipient disciples.

   Observe that the order of clauses is reversed in the last part of the
   text. The world cannot receive, because it does not know. The disciple
   knows, because he receives. Possession and knowledge reciprocally
   interchange places, and may be regarded as cause and effect of one
   another. That is to say, at bottom they are one and the same thing.
   Knowledge is possession, and possession is the only knowledge. These
   disciples knew Christ in a fashion. He had just been telling them that
   they did not know Him; but so far as they did dimly grasp Him, they saw
   the Spirit--in another form, indeed, than they would hereafter see--but
   still truly, though imperfectly. Beholding the Spirit, though through a
   glass darkly,' and cherishing their partial possession of Him, they
   will come to more, and steadfastly increase from the morning's twilight
   to the midday glory. So He says: He dwelleth with you' now, and He
   shall be in you' hereafter. There is a better form of possession
   opening before them, which came at Pentecost, and has lasted ever
   since. From thenceforward we have a Spirit that not only stands by our
   sides and holds fellowship with us (for the two withs' of our text are
   two different words, expressing respectively proximity and communion),
   but who actually dwells in the central depths of our natures, and whom
   we thus possess more perfectly and blessedly than is possible to even
   the closest outward proximity, and the sweetest outward fellowship.

   That possession of an abiding and indwelling Spirit is the gift of
   Christ to every Christian soul, and is to be found by us all upon the
   path so plainly marked out in our text and its connections--believe,'
   love,' obey.' Then the Dove of God will flutter down upon our heads and
   nestle in our hearts, and brooding over the solemn and solitary sea of
   our chaotic spirits, will bring up from it a new world glistening in
   fresh order and beauty, and very good' in its Maker's eyes.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE ABSENT PRESENT CHRIST

   I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you. Yet a little
   while, and the world seeth Me no more; but ye see Me: because I live,
   ye shall live also.'--JOHN xiv. 18, 19.

   The sweet and gracious comfortings with which Christ had been soothing
   the disciples' fears went very deep, but hitherto they had not gone
   deep enough. It was much that they should know the purpose of His
   going, whither He went, and that they had an interest in His departure.
   It was much that they should have before them the prospect of reunion;
   much that they should know that all through His absence He would be
   working in them, and that they should be assured that, absent, He would
   send them a great gift. But reunion, influence from afar, and gifts
   from the other side of the gulf were not all that their hearts needed.
   And so here our Lord gives yet more, in the paradoxes that, absent He
   will be present, unseen visible, and dying will be for them for ever,
   living and life-giving. These great thoughts go to the centre of their
   needs and of ours; and on them I now touch briefly.

   There are then in the words I have read, though they be but a fragment
   of a closely-linked-together context, these three great thoughts: the
   absent Christ the present Christ; the unseen Christ the seen Christ;
   the Christ who dies the living and life-giving Christ. Let us look at
   these as they stand.

   I. First, then, the absent Christ is the present Christ.

   I will not leave you comfortless,' or, as the Revised Version has it,
   desolate--I come to you.' Now, most of us know, I suppose, that the
   literal meaning of the word rendered comfortless,' or desolate,' is
   orphans.' But that is rather an unusual form in which to represent the
   relation between our Lord and His disciples, and so, possibly, our
   versions are accurate in giving the general idea of desolation rather
   than the specific idea conveyed directly by the word. But still it is
   to be remembered that this whole conversation begins with Little
   children'; and there seems to be no strong reason for suppressing the
   literal meaning of the word, if only it be remembered that it is
   employed not so much to define Christ's relation to his brethren as to
   describe the comfortless and helpless condition of that little group
   when left by Him. They would be like fatherless and motherless children
   in a cold world. And what is to hinder that? One thing only. I come to
   you.' Then, and only then, will you cease to be desolate and orphans.
   My presence will change everything and turn winter into glorious
   summer.'

   Now, what is this coming'? It is to be observed that our Lord says, not
   I will,' as a future, but I come,' or I am coming,' as an immediately
   impending, and, we may almost say, present, thing. There can be no
   reference in the word to that final coming to judgment which lies so
   far ahead; because, if there were, then there would follow from the
   text, that, until that period, all that love Him here upon earth are to
   wander about as orphans, desolate and forsaken; and that certainly can
   never be. So that we have to recognise here the promise of a coming
   which is contemporaneous with His absence, and which is, in fact, but
   the reverse side of His bodily absence.

   It is true about Him that He departs from' His people in bodily form
   for a season, that they may receive Him' in a better form for ever.'
   This, then, is the heart and centre of the consolation here, that
   howsoever the external presence may be withdrawn, and the foolish
   senses' may have to speak of an absent Christ, we may rejoice in the
   certainty that He is with all those that love Him, and all the more
   with them because of the very withdrawal of the earthly manifestation
   which has served its purpose, and now is laid aside as an impediment
   rather than as a help to the full communion. We confound bodily with
   real. The bodily presence is at an end; the real presence lasts for
   ever.

   I do not need to insist, I suppose, upon the manifest implication of
   absolute divinity which lies in such words as these. I come.' Being
   absent, I am present in all generations. I am present with every single
   heart.' That is equivalent to the Omnipresence of deity; that is
   equivalent to or implies the undying existence of the divine nature,
   and He that says, when He is leaving earth and withdrawing the
   sweetness of His visible form from the eyes of men, I come,' in the
   very act of going, and I am with you always, with all of you to the end
   of the ages,' can be no less than God, manifest in the flesh for a
   time, and present in the Spirit with His children for ever.

   I cannot but think that the average Christian life of this day wofully
   fails in the simple, conscious realisation of this great truth, and
   that we are all far too little living in the calm, happy, strengthening
   assurance that we are never alone, but have Jesus Christ with each of
   us more closely, more truly, in a more available fashion, and with more
   omnipotence of influence, than they had who were nearest Him during the
   days that He lived upon earth.

   Oh, brethren! if we really believed, not as an article of our creed
   which has become so familiar to us that it produces little impression
   upon us, but as a vital and ever-present conviction of our souls, that
   with us there was ever the real presence of the real Christ, how all
   burdens and cares would be lightened, how all perplexities would begin
   to smooth themselves out and be straightened, how all the force would
   be sucked out of temptations, and how sorrows and joys and all things
   would be changed in their aspect by that one conviction intensely
   realised and constantly with us! A present Christ is the Strength, the
   Righteousness, the Peace, the Joy, and as we shall see, in the most
   literal sense, the Life of every Christian soul.

   Then, note, further, that this coming of our Lord is identified with
   that of His divine Spirit. He has been speaking of sending that other
   Comforter,' but though He be Another, He is yet so indissolubly united
   with Him who sends as that the coming of the Spirit is the coming of
   Jesus. He is no gift wafted to us as from the other side of a gulf, but
   by reason of the unity of the Godhead and the divinity of the sent
   Spirit, Jesus Christ and the Spirit whom He sends are inseparable
   though separate, and so indissolubly united that where the Spirit is,
   there is Christ, and where Christ is, there is the Spirit. These are
   amongst the deep things which the disciples were not able to carry' at
   that stage of their development, and which waited for a further
   explanation. Enough for them and enough for us, to know that we have
   Christ in the Spirit and the Spirit in Christ; and to remember that if
   any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His.'

   We stand here on the margin of a shoreless and fathomless sea; and for
   my part I venture to think that the men who talk about the
   incredibilities and the contradictions of the orthodox faith would show
   themselves a little wiser if they were more conscious of the limitation
   of human faculty, and remembered that to pronounce upon contradictions
   in the doctrine of the divine Nature implies that the pronouncer stands
   above and goes round about the whole of that nature. So, for my part,
   abjuring omniscience and the comprehension of Deity, I accept the
   statement that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit come together
   and dwell in the heart.

   Then, note, further, that this present Christ is the only Remedy for
   the orphanhood of the world. The words had a tender and pathetic
   reference to that little, bewildered group of followers, deprived of
   their Guide, their Teacher, and their Companion. He who had been as
   eyes to their weak vision, and Counsellor and Inspirer and everything
   for three blessed years, was going away to leave them unsheltered to
   the storm, and we can understand how forlorn and terrified they were,
   when they looked forward to fronting the things that must come to them,
   without His presence. Therefore He cheers them with the assurance that
   they will not be left without Him, but that, present still, just
   because He is absent, He will be all that He ever had been to them.

   And the promise was fulfilled. How did that dis-spirited group of
   cowardly men ever pluck up courage to hold together at all after the
   Crucifixion? Why was it that they did not follow the example of John's
   disciples, and dissolve and disappear; and say, The game is up. It is
   no use holding together any longer'? The process of separation began on
   the very day of the Crucifixion. Only one thing could have stopped it,
   and that is the Resurrection and the presence with His Church of the
   risen Christ in His power and in all the fullness of His gifts. If it
   had not been that He came to them, they would have disappeared, and
   Christianity would have been one more of the abortive sects forgotten
   in Judaism. But, as it is, the whole of the New Testament after
   Pentecost is aflame with the consciousness of a present Christ, working
   amongst His people. And although it be true that, in one aspect, we are
   absent from the Lord when we are present with the body, in another
   aspect, and an infinitely higher one, it is true that the strength of
   the Christian life of Apostles and martyrs was this, the assurance that
   Christ Himself--no mere rhetorical metaphor for His influence or His
   example, or His memory lingering in their imaginations, but the
   veritable Christ Himself--was present with them, to strengthen and to
   bless.

   That same conviction you and I must have, if the world is not to be a
   desert and a dreary place for us. In a very profound sense it is true
   that if you take away Jesus Christ, the elder Brother, who alone
   reveals to men the Father, we are all orphans, fatherless children, who
   look up into an empty heaven and see nothing there. It is only Christ
   who reveals to us the Father and makes our happy hearts feel that we
   are of His children. And in the wider sense of the word orphans,' is
   not life a desolation without Him? Hollow joys, fleeting blessednesses,
   roses whose thorns last long after the petals have dropped, real
   sorrows, shows and shams, bitternesses and disappointments--are not
   these our life, in so far as Christ has been driven out of it? Oh!
   there is only one thing that saves us from being as desolate,
   fatherless children, groping in the dark for the lost Father's hand,
   and dying for want of it, and that is that the Christ Himself shall
   come to us and be with us.

   II. The unseen Christ is a seen Christ.

   It is clear that the period referred to in the second clause of our
   text is the same as that referred to in the first, that yet a little
   while' covers the whole space up to His Ascension; and that if there be
   any reference at all to the forty days of His earthly life, during
   which literally, the work saw Him no more,' but the Apostles saw Him,'
   that reference is only secondary. These transitory appearances are not
   of sufficient moment or duration to bear the weight of so great a
   promise as this. The vision, which is the consequence of the coming,
   has the same extension in time as the coming--that is to say, it is
   continuous and permanent. We must read here the great promise of a
   perpetual vision of the present Christ.

   It is clear, too, that the word see' is employed in these two clauses
   in two different senses. In the former it refers only to bodily sight,
   in the latter to spiritual perception. For a few short hours still, the
   ungodly mass of men were to have that outward vision which might have
   been so much to them, but which they had used so badly that they seeing
   saw not.' It was to cease, and they who loved Him would not miss it
   when it did; but the withdrawal which hid Him from sense and
   sense-bound souls would reveal Him more clearly to His friends. They,
   too, had but dimly seen Him while He stood by them; they would gaze on
   Him with truer insight when He was present though absent.

   So this is what every Christian life may and should be--the continual
   sight of a continually-present Christ. It is His part to come. It is
   ours to see, to be conscious of Him who does come.

   Faith is the sight of the soul, and it is far better than the sight of
   the senses. It is more direct. My eye does not touch what I look at.
   Gulfs of millions of miles may lie between me and it. But my faith is
   not only eye, but hand, and not only beholds, but grasps, and comes
   into contact with that to which it is directed. It is far more clear.
   Sense may deceive; faith, built upon His Word, cannot deceive. Its
   information is far more certain, far more valid. I have better reason
   for believing in Jesus Christ than I have for believing in the things
   that I touch and handle. So that there is no need for men to say, Oh,
   if we had only seen Him with our eyes!' You would very likely not have
   known Him if you had. There is no reason for thinking that the Church
   has retrograded in its privileges, because it has to love instead of
   beholding, and to believe instead of touching. That is advance, and we
   are better than they, inasmuch as the blessing of those who have not
   seen, and yet have believed,' comes down upon our heads. The vision of
   Christ which is granted to the faithful soul is better and not worse,
   more and not less, other in kind indeed, but loftier in degree too,
   than that which was granted to the men who saw Him upon earth. Sense
   disturbs, faith alone beholds.

   The world seeth Me no more.' Why? Because it is a world. Ye see Me.'
   Why? Because, and in the measure in which you have turned away your
   eyes from seeing vanity. If you want the eye of the soul to be opened,
   you must shut the eye of sense. And the more we turn away from looking
   at the dazzling lies with which time and the material universe befool
   and bewilder us, the more shall we see Him whom to see is to live for
   ever.

   Oh, brethren! does that strong word see' in any measure express the
   vividness, the directness, the certainty of our realisation of our
   Master's presence? Is Jesus Christ as clear, as perceptible, as sure to
   us as the men round us are? Which are the shadows and which are the
   realities to us? The things which are seen, which the senses crown as
   real,' or the things which cannot be seen because they are so great,
   and tower above us, invisible in their eternity? Which world are our
   eyes most open to, the world where Christ is, or the world here? Our
   happy eyes may behold and our blessed hands may handle the Word of Life
   which was manifested to us. Let us beware that we turn not away from
   the one thing worthy to be looked at, to gaze upon a desolate and
   dreary world.

   III. Lastly, the present and seen Christ is living and life-giving.

   The last words of my text may be connected with the preceding, as the
   marginal rendering of the Revised Version shows. But it is probably
   better to take them as standing independently, and presenting another
   and co-ordinate element of the blessedness arising from the coming of
   the Christ. Because He comes, His life passes into the hearts of the
   men to whom He comes, and who gaze upon Him.

   Time forbids me to dwell upon that majestic proclamation of His own
   absolute and divine life, from lips that were so soon to be paled with
   death. Mark the grand I live'--the timeless present tense, which
   expresses unbroken, underived, undying, and, as I believe, divine life.
   It is all but a quotation of the great Old Testament name Jehovah.' The
   depth and sweep of its meaning are given to us in this Apostle's
   Apocalypse, where Christ is called the living One,' who lived whilst He
   died, and having died is alive for evermore.'

   And this Christ, coming to all His friends, possessor of the fullness
   of life in Himself, and proclaiming His absolute possession of that
   life, even whilst He stands within arm's-length of Calvary, is
   Life-giver to all that love Him and trust Him.

   We live because He lives. In all senses of the word life,' as I
   believe, the life of men is derived from the Christ who is the Agent of
   creation, the channel from whom life passes from the Godhead into the
   creatures, and who is also the one means by whom any of us can ever
   hope to live the better life which is the only true one, and consists
   in fellowship with God and union to Him.

   We shall live as long as He lives, and His being is the pledge and the
   guarantee of the immortal being of all who love Him. Anything is
   possible, rather than that it should be credible that a soul, which has
   drawn spiritual life from Jesus Christ here upon earth, should ever be
   rent apart from Him by such a miserable and external trifle as the mere
   dissolution of the bodily frame. As long as Christ lives our life is
   secure. If the Head has life, the members cannot see corruption,' Take
   me not away in the midst of my days: Thy years are throughout all
   generations' was the prayer of a saint of old, deeply feeling the
   contrast of the worshipper's transiency and God's eternity, and dimly
   hoping that the contrast might be changed into likeness. The great
   promise of our text answers the prayer, and assures us that the
   worshipper is to live as long as does He whom He adores.

   We shall live as He lives, nor ever cease the appropriation of His
   being until all His life we know, and all its fullness has expanded our
   natures--and that will be never. Therefore we shall not die.

   Men's lives have been prolonged by the transfusion of blood from
   vigorous frames. Jesus Christ passes His own blood into our veins and
   makes us immortal. The Church chose for one of its ancient emblems of
   the Saviour the pelican, which fed its young, according to the fable,
   with blood from its own breast. So Christ vitalises us. He in us is our
   Life.

   Brethren, without Jesus Christ we are orphans in a fatherless world.
   Without Him, our wearied and yet unsatisfied eyes have only trifles and
   trials and trash to look at. Without Him, we are dead whilst we live.'
   He and He only can give us back a Father, and renew in us the spirit of
   sons. He and only He can satisfy our eyes with the sight which is
   purity and restfulness and joy. He and He only can breathe life into
   our death. Oh! let Him do it for you. He comes to us with all these
   gifts in His hands, for He comes to give us Himself, and in Himself, as
   in a box where sweets compacted lie,' are all that lonely hearts and
   wearied eyes and dead souls can ever need. All are yours if you are
   Christ's. All are yours if He is yours. And He is yours if by faith and
   love you make yourself His and Him your own.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE GIFTS OF THE PRESENT CHRIST

   At that day ye shall know that I am in My Father, and ye in Me, and I
   in you. He that hath My commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that
   loveth Me; and he that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, and I
   will love him, and will manifest Myself to him.'--JOHN xiv. 20, 21.

   We have heard our Lord in the previous verse unveiling His deepest and
   strongest encouragements to His downcast followers. These were: His
   presence with them, their true sight of Him, and their participation in
   His life. The first part of our present text is closely connected with
   these, for it gives us their upshot and consequence. Because Christ's
   true disciple is conscious of Christ's presence, sees Him with the eyes
   of his spirit, and draws life from Him, therefore he will know by
   experience the deep truths of Christ's indwelling at once in the Father
   and in His servant, and of His servant's indwelling in Him. Our Lord
   had just previously been exhorting His disciples to believe that He was
   in the Father and the Father in Him; and had been gently wondering at
   the slowness of their faith. Now He tells them that, when He is gone,
   their spiritual stature will be so increased as that they shall know
   the thing which, with Him by their side, they found it so hard to
   believe.

   The second part of our present text is the close of this whole section
   of our Lord's discourse, and in it He urges the requirement of
   practical obedience, as the sign and test of love, and as the condition
   of receiving these high and wonderful things of which He has been
   speaking. He has been unveiling spiritual blessings, which may seem
   recondite and up in the clouds, and which, as a matter of fact, have
   often been perverted into dreamy mysticisms of a most immoral and
   unpractical kind. And so He brings us sharp back again here to very
   plain truths, and would teach us that all these lofty and ineffable
   gifts of which He has been dimly speaking are to be reached only by the
   commonplace road of honest obedience and simple conformity to His
   commandments. In these last words of my text, He administers the
   antidote and the check to the possible abuses of the great things which
   He has been saying.

   I. Note, then, first, the knowledge that comes with the Christ who
   comes.

   At that day' covers the whole period of which He has been speaking,
   between His withdrawal from the disciples and His final corporeal
   coming to judgment--that great day of which generations are but the
   moments. In it the men who love Him are to have His presence, His
   vision, His life, and because they have, Ye shall know that I am in My
   Father, and ye in Me, and I in you,' The principle that underlies these
   wonderful words is that Christian experience is the best teacher of
   fundamental Christian truth. Observe with what decision, and with what
   strange boldness, our Lord carries that principle into regions where we
   might suppose at first sight that it was altogether inapplicable. Ye
   shall know that I am in My Father.' How can such a thing as the
   relation between Christ and God ever be a matter of consciousness to us
   here upon earth? Must it not always be a truth that we must take on
   trust and believe because we have been told it, without having any
   verification in ourselves? Not so; remember what has gone before. If a
   man has the consciousness of Christ's presence with Him, sees Him with
   the true inward eye, which is the only real organ of real vision, and
   is drawing from Him, moment by moment, His own high and immortal life,
   then is it not true that this man's experiences are of such a sort as
   to be utterly inexplicable, except on the ground that they come from a
   divine source? If I have these experiences I know that it is Jesus
   Christ who gives them, and I know that He could not give them, if He
   did not dwell in God and were not divine. These new influences, this
   revolution in my being, this healing, constraining, cleansing touch,
   these calming, gladdening, elevating powers, these new hopes, these
   reversed desires, loving all to which I was formerly indifferent, and
   growing dead to all that formerly appealed most strongly to me; all
   these things bear upon their very front the signature that they are
   wrought by a divine hand, and as sure as I am of my own Christian
   consciousness, so sure am I that all its experiences proclaim their
   Author, and that Christ who gives me them is in God. Ye shall know that
   I am in My Father.'

   The New Testament, as I read it, is full at every point of the divinity
   of Jesus Christ; and many profound and learned arguments on that
   subject have been urged by theologians, and these are all well and
   needful in their places, but the true way to be sure of it is to have
   Him dwelling with us and working in us; and then what was an article of
   belief becomes an article of knowledge, and we know Him to be our
   Saviour and the Son of God.

   In like manner, and yet more obviously, the other elements of this
   knowledge which Christ promises here may be shown to flow naturally and
   necessarily from Christian experiences. That ye are in Me, and I in
   you,'--if a Christian man carries the consciousness of Christ's
   presence, and has Him as a Sun in his darkness, and as a Life-source
   feeding his deadness with life, then he knows with a consciousness
   which is irrefragable that Jesus Christ is in him, for he feels His
   touch; and he knows that he is in Christ, for he is aware of the power
   that girdles him, and in which he has peace and righteousness and all.

   So, dear brethren, let us learn what the Christian man's experience
   ought to be and to do for him. It should change the articles of our
   creed into elements of our consciousness. It should make all the
   fundamentals of the Gospel vitally and vividly true; and certified by
   what has passed within our own spirits We should be able to say: We
   have the witness in ourselves.' And though there will remain much that
   is uncertain, much in Christian doctrine which is not capable of that
   clear and all-sufficing verification; much about which we must still
   depend on the mere teaching of others, or on our own study, the central
   facts which make the Gospel may all become, by this plain and short
   path, elements of our very consciousness which stand undeniable to us,
   whosoever denies them.

   Such a direct way to knowledge is reasonable, is in full analogy with
   the manner by which we attain to the knowledge of everything except the
   mere external facts, the knowledge of which has arrogated to itself the
   exclusive name of science,' How do you know anything about love? You
   may read poems and tragedies to the end of time, and you will not
   understand it until you come under its spell for yourself; and then all
   the things that men said about it cease to be mere words, because you
   yourself have experienced the emotion.


     He must be loved, ere that to you

     He will seem worthy of your love,'

   and the only way to be sure, with a vital certitude, of Christ, is to
   take Christ for your very own, and then He comes into your very being,
   and dwells there quickening, the Sun and the Life.

   So, dear brethren, though such certitude arising from experience, which
   in its nature is the very highest, is not available for other people,
   the fact that so many millions of men allege that in varying degrees
   they possess this certitude is available for other people, and there is
   nothing to be said by the unbeliever to this, the attestation of the
   Christian consciousness to the truth of the truths which it has tried.
   Whether this man be a sinner or no, I know not.' You may jangle as much
   as you like about the questionable and controversial points that
   surround the Christian revelation, I do not care in the present
   connection what answer you give to them. Whether this man be a sinner
   or no, I know not. One thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I
   see.' And we may push the war into the enemy's quarters, and say: Why!
   herein is a marvellous thing, that you that know everything do not know
   whence this man is, and yet He has opened mine eyes. You want facts;
   there are some. You want verification; we have verified by experience,
   and we set to our seals that God is true.'

   Oh but,' you say, this is not a fair account of the way in which
   Christian men and women generally feel about this matter.' Well, all
   that I can say about that is, so much the worse for the so-called
   Christian men and women. And if they are Christians, and do not know by
   this inward experience that Christ is divine and their Saviour, then
   there is only one of two reasons to be given for it; either their
   experience is so wretchedly superficial and fragmentary, so rudimentary
   as to be scarcely worth calling by the name or, having the facts, they
   have failed to appreciate their significance, and to make their own by
   reflection the certitudes which are their own.

   Brethren, it becomes every Christian man and woman to be able to say,
   Because I have Christ with me, and see Him, and derive my life from
   Him, I know that He is in the Father, and I in Him, and He in me.' And
   if you cannot say that, it is your own grasp of Him, or your meditation
   upon what you have got by your grasp, that is painfully and sinfully
   defective.

   II. My text speaks of the obedience which is the sign and test of love.

   The words here are substantially equivalent to former words in the
   chapter which we have already considered, where our Lord says: If ye
   love Me, ye will keep My commandments.'

   There is, however, a slight difference in the point of view in the two
   sayings; the former begins with the root and traces it upwards and
   outwards to its fruits, love blossoming into obedience. Our text
   reverses the process, and takes the thing by the other end; begins with
   the fruits and traces them downwards and inwards to the root. He that
   hath and keepeth My commandments, he it is that loveth Me.' The two
   sayings substantially mean the same thing; but in the one love is put
   first as the cause of obedience, and in the other obedience is put
   first, as the certain fruit and sure sign of love. The connection
   between these and the preceding words is, as I have already pointed
   out, that our Lord here brings all His lofty promises down to the
   sharp, practical requirement of obedience, as the only condition on
   which they can be fulfilled.

   So note, and very briefly about this matter, how remarkably our Lord
   here declares the possession of His commandments to be a sign of love
   to Him. He that hath,' a word which is generally passed over in our
   reading--He that hath My commandments, He it is that loveth Me.' Of
   course there are two ways of having His commandments; there is having
   them in the Bible, and there is having them in the heart;--present
   before my eye, as a law that I ought to obey, or present within my
   will, as a power that shapes it. And the latter is the only kind of
   having' that Christ regards as real and valid. The rest is only
   preparatory and superficial. Love possesses the knowledge of the loved
   one's will. Is not that true? Do we not all know how strange is the
   power of divining desires that goes along with true affection, and how
   the power, not only of divining, but of treasuring, these desires is
   the test and the thermometer of our true love? Some of us, perhaps,
   keep laid away in sacred, secret places tattered, yellow, old bits of
   paper with the words of a dear one on them, that we would not part
   with. He that hath My commandments' laid up in lavender in the deepest
   recesses of his faithful heart, he it is that loveth Me.'

   In like manner, our Lord says, the practical obedience to His
   commandments is the sure sign and test of love. I need not dwell upon
   that. There are two motives for keeping commandments--one because they
   are commanded, and one because we love Him that commands. The one is
   slavery, the other is liberty. The one is like the Arctic regions, cold
   and barren, the other is like tropical lands, full of warmth and
   sunshine, glorious and glad fertility.

   The form of the sentence suggests how easy it is for people to delude
   themselves about their love to Jesus Christ. That emphatic he,' and the
   putting first of the character before its root is pointed out, are
   directed against false pretensions to love. The love that Christ stamps
   with His hall-mark, and passes as genuine, is no mere emotion, however
   passionate, however sweet; no mere sentiment, however pure, however
   deep. The tiniest little rivulet that drives a mill is better than a
   Niagara that rushes and foams and tumbles idly. And there is much
   so-called love to Jesus Christ that goes masquerading up and down the
   world, from which the paint is stripped by the sharp application of the
   words of my text. Character and conduct are the true demonstrations of
   Christian love, and it is only love so attested that He accepts.

   III. Lastly, notice the further and sweeter gifts of divine love and
   manifestation which reward our love and obedience.

   He that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, and I will love him, and
   will manifest Myself to him.' Two things, then, He tells us, are the
   rich rewards and sparkling crowns with which He crowns our poor love to
   Him--the love of the Father and the love of the Christ, separate and
   yet united, and the further manifestation of Christ's sweetness to the
   waiting heart.

   Note, as to the first, the extraordinary boldness of that majestic
   saying: If a man loves Me, My Father will love him.' God regards our
   love to Jesus Christ as the fulfilling of the law, as equivalent to our
   supreme love to Himself, as containing in it the germ of all that is
   pleasing in His sight. And so, upon our hearts, if we love Christ,
   there falls the benediction of the Father's love. Of course I need not
   remind you that our Lord here is not beginning at the very beginning of
   everything; for prior to all men's love to Christ is Christ's love to
   men, and ours to Him is but the reflection and the echo called forth by
   His to us. We love Him because He first loved us' digs a story deeper
   down in the building than the words of my text, which is speaking, not
   of the process by which a man comes to receive the love of God for the
   first time, but of the process by which a Christian man grows in his
   possession of it. That being understood, here is a great lesson. It is
   not all the same to God whether a man is a scoundrel or a saint. The
   divine love is over all its works, and embraces every variety of
   humanity, the most degraded, alien, hostile. But in this generation, as
   it seems to me, there is great need for preaching that whilst that is
   gloriously and blessedly true, the other thing is just as true, that to
   know the deepest depth and to taste the sweetest sweetness of the love
   of our Father God, there must be in our hearts love to Him whom He has
   sent, which manifests itself by our obedience. God's love is a moral
   love; and whilst the sunbeams play upon the ice and melt it sometimes,
   they flash back from, and rest most graciously and fully on, the
   rippling stream into which the ice has turned. God loves them that love
   Him not, but the depths of His heart and the secret, sacred favours of
   His grace can only be bestowed upon those who in some measure are
   conformed, and are growingly being conformed, to His likeness in Jesus
   Christ, and who love Him and obey Him.

   And, in like manner, my text tells us that if we wish to know all that
   it is possible for us here, amidst the clouds, and shadows, and
   darknesses, to know of that dear Lord, the path to such knowledge is
   plain. Walk in the way of obedience, and Christ will meet you with the
   unveiling of more and more of His love. To live what we believe is the
   sure way to increase its amount. To be faithful to the little is the
   certain way to inherit the much. And Christ manifests Himself, in all
   deep and recondite sweetness, gentleness, constraining power, to the
   men who treasure the partial knowledge as yet possessed, in their
   loving hearts and obedient wills, and who make a conscience of
   translating all their knowledge into conduct, and of basing all their
   conduct on knowledge of Him. He gives us His whole self at the first,
   but we traverse the breadth of the gift by degrees. He puts Himself
   into our hands and into our hearts when we humbly trust Him and
   imperfectly try to love Him. But the flower is but a bud when we get
   it, and, as we hold it, it opens its petals to the light.

   So, if any man wills to do His will, he shall know of the doctrine';
   and if, touched by His divine love and infinite sacrifice for me, I
   cast my poor self upon Him, and try to love Him back again, and to keep
   His commandments because I love, then day by day I shall realise more
   and more of His strong, immortal, all-satisfying love, and see more and
   more deeply into that Saviour, whose infinite beauties remain
   unrevealed after all revelation, and to know more and more of whom
   shall be the Heaven of Heavens yonder, as it is the joy and life of the
   soul here.
     __________________________________________________________________

WHO BRING CHRIST

   Judas saith unto Him, not Iscariot, Lord, how is it that Thou wilt
   manifest Thyself unto us, and not unto the world? Jesus answered and
   said unto him, If a man love Me he will keep My words: and My Father
   will love him, and We will come unto him, and make Our abode with him.
   He that loveth Me not, keepeth not My sayings: and the word which ye
   hear is not Mine, but the Father's which sent Me.'--JOHN xiv. 22-24.

   This Judas held but a low place amongst the Apostles. In all the lists
   he is one of the last of the groups of fours, into which they are
   divided, and which were evidently arranged according to their spiritual
   nearness to the Master. His question is exactly that which a listener,
   with some dim, confused glimmer of Christ's meaning, might be expected
   to ask. He grasps at His last words about manifesting Himself to
   certain persons; he rightly feels that he and his brethren possess the
   qualification of love. He rightly understands that our Lord
   contemplates no public showing of Himself, and that disappoints him. It
   was only a day or two ago that Jesus seemed to them to have begun to do
   what they had always wanted Him to do, manifest Himself to the world.
   And now, as he thinks, something unknown to them must have happened in
   order to make Him change His course, and go back to the old plan of a
   secret communication. And so he says, Lord! what has come to pass to
   induce you to abandon and falter upon the course on which we entered,
   when you rode into Jerusalem with the shouting crowd?'

   His question is no better in intelligence, though it is a great deal
   better in spirit, than the taunt of Christ's brethren, If Thou do these
   things, show Thyself to the world.' Judas, too, thought of the simple
   flashing of His Messianic glory, in some visible, vulgar form, before
   else blind eyes.

   How sad and chilling such a question must have been to Jesus! Slow
   scholars we all are; and with what wonderful patience, without a word
   of pain, or of rebuke, He reiterates His lesson, here a little and
   there a little, and once more unfolds the conditions of His
   self-revelation, and the fullness of the blessings that He brings. He
   moulds His words so as to meet both the clauses of Judas's foolish
   question--To us, not to the world'; and quietly tells them the positive
   conditions and the negative disqualifications for His self-revelation.
   So my text deals with two things, the crown of loving obedience in the
   possession of a fuller Christ, and the impassable barrier to His
   manifestation which unloving disobedience makes. Or to put it into
   briefer words, we have in one of the verses--first, what brings Christ
   and what Christ brings; and, in the other, second, what keeps away
   Christ and all His gifts. Now let us look at these two things.

   I. We have what brings Christ and what Christ brings.

   If a man love Me, He will keep My word' (not words,' as our Authorised
   Version has it), and My Father will love him, and We will come unto
   him, and make Our abode with him.' Now notice how here, in the first
   part of this verse, our Lord subtly and significantly alters the form
   of the statement which He has already made. He had formerly said, If ye
   love Me, ye will keep My commandments,' but now He casts it into a
   purely impersonal form, and says, If a man,' anybody, not you' only,
   but anybody--If a man love Me, he,' anybody, will keep My word.' And
   why the change? Why, I suppose, in order to strike full and square
   against that complacent assumption of Judas that it was to us and not
   to the world' that the showing was to take place. Our Lord, by the
   studiously impersonal form into which He casts the promise, proclaims
   its universality, and says this to His ignorant questioner, Do not
   suppose that you Apostles have the monopoly. You may not even have a
   share in My self-manifestation. Anybody may have it. And there is no
   "world," as you suppose, to which I do not show Myself. Anybody may
   have the vision if he observes the conditions.'

   Now I need not dwell at any length upon the earlier words of this text,
   because we have had to consider them in previous sermons on the former
   verses of this chapter. I need only remark that here, as there, our
   Lord brings out the thought that the very life-blood of love is the
   treasuring of the word of the beloved One; and that there is no joy
   comparable to the joy of the loving heart that yields itself to the
   Beloved's will. That is true about earth, and it makes the sweetest and
   selectest blessedness of our ordinary existence. And it is true about
   heaven, and it makes the liberty and the gladness of the bond that
   knits us to Him.

   But I would like just to notice, before I come to the more immediate
   subject of my discourse, that remarkable expression, He will keep My
   word.' That is more than a commandment' is it not? Christ's word' is
   wider than precept. It includes all His sayings, and it includes them
   all as in one vital unity and organic whole. We are not to go picking
   and choosing among them; they are one. And it includes this other
   thought, that every word of Christ, be it revelation of the deep things
   of God, or be it a promise of the great shower of blessings which, out
   of His full hand, He will drop upon our heads, enshrines within itself
   a commandment. He utters no revelations, simply that we may know. He
   utters no comforting words, simply that our sore hearts may be healed,
   but in all His utterances there is a practical bearing; and every word
   of His teaching, every word of His sweet, whispered assurances of love
   and favour to the waiting heart, has in it the imperativeness of His
   manifested will, and has a direct bearing upon duty. All His words are
   gathered into one word, and all the variety of His sayings is, in their
   unity, the law of our lives. So much by way of observation on the mere
   language of my text. And now let us look at what, as He says to us
   here, are the rewards and crown of loving obedience.

   Christ will show Himself to the loving heart. That is true on the very
   lowest level. Every act of obedience to any moral truth is rewarded by
   additional insight. Every act of submission to His will cleanses the
   lenses of the telescope from some film that has gathered upon them, and
   so the stars look brighter and larger and nearer. All duty done opens
   out into a loftier conception of duty, and a clearer vision of Him. To
   him that hath shall be given.' As we climb the hill we get a wider
   view. Obedience is in all things the parent of insight.

   But in reference to our relation to Him, we have to do not with truths
   only, but with a Person. How do we learn to know people? There is only
   one way--that is, by loving them. Sympathy is the parent of all true
   knowledge of one another. They tell us in the foolish old proverb that
   love is blind.' No! There is not such a pair of clear eyes anywhere as
   the eyes of love; and if we want to see into a man, the first condition
   is that we feel kindly towards him. Sympathy is the parent of insight
   into persons, as Obedience is the parent of insight into duty.

   But both of these illustrations are only imperfect preparations for the
   great truth here, which is that our loving obedience to the discerned
   will of Jesus Christ has not only an operation inwards upon us, but has
   an effect outwards upon Him. I am afraid that Christian people in this
   generation have but a very imperfect belief in the actual,
   supernatural, and, if you like to call it so, miraculous manifestation
   of Jesus Christ, His very Self, to men that love Him and cleave to Him.
   Do you believe as a simple revealed truth, plain as a sunbeam in such
   words as these, that Jesus Christ Himself will do something on you, and
   in you, and for you, if you love Him and trust Him; that His hand will
   be laid on your eyes as it was laid of old; that He will indeed, in no
   metaphor, but in reality, show Himself to you? I may be mistaken, but I
   think that too commonly it is the case, that even good Christian people
   have a far more vivid and realising and real faith in the past work of
   Christ on earth than in the present work of Christ in themselves. They
   think the one a plain truth, and the other something like a metaphor,
   whereas the New Testament teaches us, as plainly as it can teach us
   anything, that, far above all the natural operations of truth upon our
   understandings, hearts, and wills, there is an actual, supernatural,
   continuous communication of Christ to hearts that love Him, which leads
   day by day, if they be faithful, to a fuller knowledge, a sweeter love,
   a larger possession, of a fuller Christ. And it is this that He tells
   us of, to fire our ambition to attain, in such words as these.

   Brethren, one piece of honest, loving obedience is worth all the study
   and speculation of an unloving heart when the question is, How are we
   to see Christ?'

   Again, Jesus shows Himself to the obedient heart in indissoluble union
   with the Father. Look at the majesty, and, except upon one hypothesis,
   the insane presumption, of such words as these: If a man love Me, My
   Father will love him'; as if identifying love to Christ with love to
   Himself. And look at that wondrous union, the consciousness of which
   speaks in We will come.' Think of a man saying that. It is blasphemous
   insanity; or else the speech of Him who is conscious of union with the
   Father, close and indissoluble and transcending all analogies. We will
   come,' together, hand-in-hand, if I may so say; or rather, His coming
   is the Father's coming. Just as in heaven so closely are they
   represented as united, that there is but one throne for God and the
   Lamb,' so on earth so closely are they represented as united, that
   there is but one coming of the Father in the Son.

   And this is the only belief, as it seems to me, that will keep this
   generation from despair and moral suicide. The question for this
   generation is, Is it possible for men to know God? Science, both of
   material things and of inward experiences, is more and more unanimous
   in its proclamation; Behold! we know not anything'; and the only
   attitude to take before that great black vault above us is to say, We
   know nothing.' The world has learned half of a great verse of the
   Gospel: No man hath seen God at any time, nor can see Him.' If the
   world is not to go mad, if hearts are not to be tortured into despair,
   if morality and enthusiasm and poetry and everything higher and nobler
   than the knowledge of material phenomena and their sequences is not to
   perish from the earth, the world must learn the next half of the verse,
   and say, The only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, He
   hath declared Him.' Christ shows Himself in indissoluble union with the
   Father.

   Lastly about this matter, Christ shows Himself to obedient love by a
   true coming. We will come and make our mansion with him.' And that
   coming is a fact of a higher order, and not to be confounded either
   with the mere divine Omnipresence, by which God is everywhere, nor to
   be reduced to a figment of our own imaginations, or a strong way of
   promising increased perception on our part of Christ's fullness. That
   great central Sun, if I might use so violent a figure, draws nearer and
   nearer and nearer to the planets that move about it, and having once
   been far off on an almost infinitely distant horizon, approaches until
   planet and Sun unite.

   Dear brethren, if we could only get to the attitude of simple
   acceptance of this as a literal truth, and believe that, in prose
   reality, Christ comes to every heart that loves Him, would not all the
   world be different to us?

   That coming is a permanent residence: We will make our abode with him.'
   Very beautiful is it to notice that our Lord here employs that same
   sweet and significant word, with which He began this wonderful series
   of encouragements, when He said, In My Father's house are many
   mansions.' Yonder they dwell for ever with God; here God in Christ for
   ever dwells with the loving heart. It is a permanent abode so long as
   the conditions are fulfilled, but only so long. If self-will, rising in
   the Christian heart from its torpor and apparent death, reasserts
   itself and shakes off Christ's yoke, Christ's presence vanishes. In the
   last hours of the Holy City there was heard by the trembling priests
   amidst the midnight darkness the motion of departing Deity, and a great
   voice said: Let us depart hence'; and to-morrow the shrine was empty,
   and the day after it was in flames. Brethren, if you would keep the
   Christ in whom is God, remember that He cannot be kept but by the act
   of loving obedience.

   II. Now, in the next place, my text gives us the negative side, and
   shows us what keeps away Christ and all His blessings.

   An unloving disobedience closes the eyes to the vision, and the heart
   against the entrance, of that dear Lord. Our Master lays down for us
   two principles, and leaves us to draw the conclusion for ourselves.

   The first is, He that loveth Me not, keepeth not My sayings.' No love,
   no obedience. That is plainly true, because the heart of all the
   commandments is love, and where that is not, disobedience to their very
   spirit is. It is plainly true, because there is no power that will lead
   men to true obedience to Christ's yoke except the power of love. His
   commandments are too alien from our nature ever to be kept, unless by
   the might of love. It was only the rising sunbeam that could draw music
   from the stony lips of Memnon, as he gazed out across the desert, and
   it is only when Christ's love shines on our faces that we open our lips
   in praise, and move our hands in service. Those great rocking-stones
   down in Cornwall stand unmoved by any tempest, but a child's finger,
   laid on the right place, will set them vibrating. And so the heavy,
   hard, stony bulk of our hearts lies torpid and immovable, until He lays
   His loving finger upon them, and then they rock at His will. There is
   no keeping of Christ's commandments without love. That makes short work
   of a great deal that calls itself Christianity, does it not? Reluctant
   obedience is no obedience; self-interested obedience is no obedience;
   constrained obedience is no obedience; outward acts of service, if the
   heart be wanting, are rubbish and dung. Morality without religion is
   nought. The one thing that makes a good man is love to Jesus Christ;
   and where that is, there, and only there, is obedience.


     Talk they of morals? O Thou Bleeding Lamb!

     The grand morality is love of Thee.'

   If a man love Me not, he will not keep My words.'

   Then the second principle is, disobedience to Christ is disobedience to
   God. The Word which ye hear is not Mine, but the Father's.' Christ's
   consciousness of union so speaks out here as that He is quite sure that
   all His words are God's words, and that all God's words are spoken by
   Him. Paul has to say, So speak I, not the Lord.' And you would not
   think a man a very sound or safe religious teacher who said to you, to
   begin with, Now, mind, everything that I say, God says.' There are no
   errors then, no deterioration of the treasure by the vessel in which it
   lies. The water does not taste of the vase in which it is carried. The
   personality of Jesus Christ is never, through all His utterances, so
   separated from God but that God speaks in Him; and, listening to His
   voice, we hear the absolute utterance of the uncreated and eternal
   Wisdom.

   Therefore follows the conclusion, which our Lord does not state, but
   leaves us to supply. If it be true that the absence of love of Him is
   disobedience to Him, and if it be true that disobedience to Him is
   disobedience to God, then it plainly follows that what keeps away
   Christ and all His gifts, and God in Him, is unloving obedience. What
   brings Him is the obedience of love; what repels Him is alienation and
   rebellion. If the heart be full of confusion, of the world, of self, of
   unbridled inclinations, of careless indifference to His bleeding love,
   He can but listen at the gate and hear the household jar within.'

   And so, dear friends, from all this there follow one or two points,
   which I touch very briefly. One is, that it is possible for men not to
   see Christ, though He stands there close before them. It is possible to
   grope at noonday as at midnight, to see only bracken green and cold
   grey stone' on the hillside, where another man sees the chariots of
   fire and the horses of fire. It is possible for you--and, alas! it is
   the condition of some of my hearers--to look upon Christ and to turn
   away and say, I see no beauty in Him that I should desire Him,' whilst
   the man beside yon, looking at the same facts and the same face, can
   see in Him the Chief among ten thousand, and the altogether lovely.'

   Another thought is, that Christ's showing of Himself to men is in no
   sense arbitrary. It is you that determine what you shall see. You can
   hermetically seal your heart against Him, you can blind yourself to all
   His beauty. The door of your hearts is hinged to open from within, and
   if you do not open it, it remains shut, and Christ remains outside.

   Another thought is, that you do not need to do anything to blind
   yourselves. Simple negation is fatal. If a man love not'; that is all.
   The absence of love is your ruin.

   And the last thought is this, that my text does not begin at the
   beginning. Jesus Christ has been speaking about manifestations of
   Himself to the loving and obedient; but there are manifestations of
   Himself made that we may become loving and obedient. You can build a
   barrier over which these sweeter revelations, of which loyal love and
   docile submission are the conditions, cannot rise. But you cannot build
   a barrier over which the prior revelations to the unthankful and
   disobedient cannot rise. No mountains of sin and neglect and alienation
   can be piled so high but that the flood of pardoning grace will rise
   above their crests, and pour itself into your hearts. You ask, How can
   I get the love and obedience of which you have been singing the praises
   now? There is only one answer, brethren. We know that we love Him when
   we know that He loves us; and we know that He loves us when we see Him
   dying on His Cross. So here is the ladder, that is planted in the miry
   clay of the horrible pit, and fastens its golden hooks on His throne.
   The first round is, Behold the dying Christ and His love to me. The
   second is, Let that love melt my heart into sweet responsive love. The
   third is, Let my love mould my life into obedience. And then Christ,
   and God in Him, will come to me and show Himself to me; and give me a
   fuller knowledge and a deeper love, and make His dwelling with me. And
   then there is only one round still to roach, and that will land us by
   the Throne of God, in the many mansions of the Father's house, where we
   shall make our abode with Him for evermore.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE TEACHER SPIRIT

   These things have I spoken unto you, being yet present with you. But
   the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in My
   name, He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your
   remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.'--JOHN xiv. 25, 26.

   This wonderful outpouring of consolation and instruction with which our
   Lord sought to soothe the pain of parting is nearing its end. We have
   to conceive of a slight pause here, whilst He looks back upon what He
   has been saying and contrasts His teaching with that of the Comforter,
   whom He has once already, though in a different connection, promised to
   His followers. He speaks of His earthly residence with them as being an
   abiding,' distinctly therein referring to what He has just said, that
   the Father and He will, in the future, make their abode' with His
   disciples. He contrasts the outward and transitory presence which was
   now nearing its end, with the inward and continuous presence, which its
   end was to inaugurate.

   And, in like manner, with, at first sight, startling humility, He
   contrasts these things,' the partial and to a large extent
   unintelligible utterances which He had given with His human lips, with
   the complete, universal teaching of that divine Spirit, who was to
   instruct in all things' pertaining to man's salvation. We have then,
   here, sketched in broad outline, the great truths concerning the
   ever-present, inward Teacher of God's Church who is to come, now that
   the earthly manifestation of Christ, whom the twelve called their
   Teacher,' had reached a close. I think we may best gain the deep
   instruction which lies in the words before us, if we look at three
   points of view which they bring into prominence: the Teacher, His
   lesson, and His scholars.

   I. Now, as to the first, the promised Teacher.

   I need not repeat what I have said in former sermons as to the wide
   sweep of that word the Comforter,' beyond just reminding you that it
   means literally one who is called to the side of another, primarily for
   the purpose of being his representative in some legal process; and,
   more widely, for any purpose of help, encouragement, and strength. That
   being so, Comforter,' in its modern sense of Consoler, is far too
   narrow for the full force of the word, which means much rather
   Comforter,' in its ancient and etymological sense of one who, in
   company with another, makes Him strong and brave.

   But the point to which I desire to turn attention now is this, that
   this comforting and strengthening office of the divine Spirit is
   brought into immediate connection here with the conception of Him as a
   Teacher. That is to say, the best strength that God, by His Spirit, can
   give us is by our firm grasp and growing clearness of understanding of
   the truths which are wrapped up in Jesus Christ. All power for
   endurance, for service, is there, and when the Spirit of God teaches a
   man what God reveals in Christ, He therein and thereby most fully
   discharges His office of Strengthener.

   Then note still further the other designation of this divine Teacher
   which is here given: The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost.' We might
   have expected, as indeed we find in another context in this great final
   discourse, the Spirit of Truth' as appropriate in connection with the
   office of teaching. But is there not a profound lesson for us here in
   this, that, side by side with the thought of illumination, there lies
   the thought of purity built upon consecration, which is the Scripture
   definition of holiness? That suggests that there is an indissoluble
   connection between the real knowledge of God's truth and practical
   holiness of life. That connection is of a double sort. There is no
   holiness without such knowledge, and there is no such knowledge without
   holiness.

   There is no real knowledge of Christ and His truth without purity of
   heart. The man who has no music in his soul can never be brought to
   understand the deep harmonies of the great masters and magicians of
   sound. The man who has no eye for beauty can never be brought to bow
   his spirit before some of those embodiments of loveliness and sublimity
   which the painter's brush has cast upon the canvas. And the man who has
   no longings after purity, nor has attained to any degree of moral
   conformity with the divine image, is not in possession of the sense
   which is needed in order that he should understand the deep things of
   God.'

   The scholars in this school have to wash their hands before they go to
   school, and come there with clean hands and clean hearts. Foulness and
   the love of it are bars to all understanding of God's truth. And, on
   the other hand, the truest inducements, motives, and powers for purity
   are found in that great word which is all according to godliness,' and
   is meant much rather to make us good than to make us wise.

   So, in this designation of the teaching Spirit as holy, there lie
   lessons for two classes of people. All fanatical professions of
   possessing divine illumination, which are not warranted and sealed by
   purity of life, are lies or self-delusion. And, on the other hand,
   coldblooded intellectualism will never force the locks of the palace of
   divine truth, but they that come there must have clean hands and a pure
   heart; and only those who have the love and the longing for goodness
   will be wise scholars in Christ's school. Your theology is nothing
   unless its distinct outcome is morality, and you must be prepared to
   accept the painful, the punitive, the purifying influences of that
   divine Spirit on your moral natures if you want to have His
   enlightening influences shining on the truth as it is in Jesus.' If any
   man wills to do His will, he,' and only he, shall know of the
   doctrine.' Knowledge and holiness are as inseparable in divine things
   as light and heat.

   And still further note that this great Teacher is sent by God' in
   Christ's name. That pregnant phrase, In My name,' cannot be represented
   by any one form of expression into which we may translate it, but
   covers a larger space. God in Christ's name sends the Spirit. That is
   to say, in some deep sense God acts as Christ's representative; just as
   Christ comes in the Father's name and acts as His representative. And,
   again, God sends in Christ's name; that is, the historical
   manifestation of Christ is the basis on which the sending of the Spirit
   is possible and rests. The revelation had to be complete before He who
   came to unfold the meaning of the revelation had material to work upon.
   The Spirit, which is sent in Christ's name, has, for the basis of His
   mission, and the means by which He acts, the recorded facts of Christ's
   life and death, these and none other.

   And then note finally about this matter, the strong and unmistakable
   declaration here, that that divine Spirit is a person: He shall teach
   you all things.' They tell us that the doctrine of the Trinity is not
   in the New Testament. The word is not, but the thing is. In this verse
   we have the Father, the Son, and the Spirit brought into such close and
   indissoluble union as is only vindicated from the charge of blasphemy
   by the belief in the divinity of each. Just as the Apostolic
   benediction, The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God
   the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit' necessarily involves
   the divinity of all who are thus invoked, so we stand here in the
   presence of a truth which pierces into the deeps of Deity. That divine
   Spirit is more than an influence. He shall teach,' and He can be
   grieved by evil and sin. I do not enlarge upon these thoughts. My
   purpose is mainly to bring them out clearly before you.

   II. I pass in the second place to the consideration of the Lesson which
   this promised Teacher gives.

   Mark the words, He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to
   your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.' Now as we have seen
   in the exposition of the words in My name,' the whole subject-matter of
   the divine Spirit's teaching is the life and work and death and person
   of Jesus Christ. He shall teach you all things' is wider than He shall
   bring all things which I have said to you to your remembrance.' But
   whilst that is so, the clear implication of the words before us is that
   Christ is the lesson book, of which the divine Spirit is the Teacher.
   His weapon, to take another metaphor, with which He plies men's hearts
   and minds and wills, convincing the world of sin and of righteousness
   and of judgment, and leading those who are convinced into deeper
   knowledge and larger wisdom, is the recorded facts concerning the life
   and manifestation of Jesus Christ. The significance of this lesson
   book, the history of our Lord, cannot be unfolded all at once. There is
   something altogether unique in the incorruption and germinant power of
   all His deeds and of all His words. This Carpenter of Nazareth has
   reached the heights which the greatest thinkers and poets of the past
   have never reached, or only in little snatches and fragments of their
   words. His words open out, generation after generation, into
   undreamed-of wisdom, and there are found to be hived in them stores of
   sweetness that were never suspected until the occasion came that drew
   them forth. The world and the Church received Christ, as it were, in
   the dark; and, as with some man receiving a precious gift as the
   morning was dawning, each fresh moment revealed, as the light grew, new
   beauties and new preciousness in the thing possessed. So Christ, in His
   infinite significance, fresh and new for all generations, was given at
   first, and ever since the Church and the world have been learning the
   meaning of the gift which they received. Christ's words are
   inexhaustible, and the Spirit's teaching is to unveil more and more of
   the infinite significance that lies in the apparently least significant
   of them.

   Now, then, note that if this be our Lord's meaning here, Jesus Christ
   plainly anticipated that, after His departure from earth, there should
   be a development of Christian doctrine. We are often taunted with the
   fact, which is exaggerated for the purpose of controversy, that a clear
   and full statement of the central truths which orthodox Christianity
   holds, is found rather in the Apostolic epistles than in the Master's
   words, and the shallow axiom is often quoted with great approbation:
   Jesus Christ is our Master, and not Paul.' I do not grant that the
   germs and the central truths of the Gospel are not to be found in
   Christ's words, but I admit that the full, articulate statement of them
   is to be found rather in the servant's letters, and I say that that is
   exactly what Jesus Christ told us to expect, that after He was gone,
   words that had been all obscure, and thoughts that had been only
   fragmentarily intelligible, would come to be seen clearly, and would be
   discerned for what they were. The earlier disciples had only a very
   partial grasp of Christ's nature. They knew next to nothing of the
   great doctrine of sacrifice; they knew nothing about His resurrection;
   they did not in the least understand that He was going back to heaven;
   they had but glimmering conceptions of the spirituality or universality
   of His Kingdom. Whilst they were listening to Him at that table they
   did not believe in the atonement; but they dimly believed in the
   divinity of Jesus Christ; they did not believe in His resurrection;
   they did not believe in His ascension; they did not believe that He was
   founding a spiritual kingdom, a kingdom was to rule over all the world
   till the end of time. None of these truths were in their mind. They had
   all been in germ in His words. And after He was gone, there came over
   them a breath of the teaching Spirit, and the unintelligible flashed up
   into significance. The history of the Church is the proof of the truth
   of this promise, and if anybody says to me, Where is the fulfilment of
   the promise of a Spirit that will bring all things to your
   remembrance?' I say--here in this Book! These four Gospels, these
   Apostolic Epistles, show that the word which our Lord here speaks has
   been gloriously fulfilled. Christ anticipated a development of
   doctrine, and it casts no slur or suspicion on the truthfulness of the
   apostolic representation of the Christian truths, that they are only
   sparsely and fragmentarily to be found in the records of Christ's life,

   Then there is another practical conclusion from the words before us, on
   which I touch for a moment, and that is, that if Jesus Christ and the
   deep understanding of Him be the true lesson of the divine, teaching
   Spirit, then real progress consists, not in getting beyond Christ, but
   in getting more fully into Him. We hear a great deal in these days
   about advanced thought and progressive Christianity. I hope I believe
   in the continuous advance of Christian thought as joyfully as any man,
   but my notion of it--and I humbly venture to say Christ's notion of
   it--is to get more and more into His heart, and to find within Him, and
   not away from Him, all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.' We leave
   all other great men behind. All other teachers' words become feeble by
   age, as their persons become ghostly, wrapped in thickening folds of
   oblivion; but the progress of the Church consists in absorbing more and
   more of Christ, in understanding Him better, and becoming more and more
   moulded by His influence. The Spirit's teaching brings out the ever
   fresh significance of the ancient and perpetual revelation of God in
   Jesus Christ.

   III. And now, lastly, note the Scholars.

   Primarily, of course, these are the Apostolic group but the Apostles,
   in all these discourses, stand as the representatives of the Church,
   and not as separated from it. And whilst the teaching Spirit could
   bring to the remembrance' of those only who first heard them the words
   that He said unto them,' that Spirit's teaching function is not limited
   to those who listened to the Lord Jesus. The fire that was kindled on
   Pentecost has not died down into grey ashes, nor the river that then
   broke forth been sucked up by thirsty sands of successive generations,
   but the fire is still with us, and the river still flows near our lips,
   and we, too, may be taught by that divine Spirit. For this very
   Evangelist, in writing his Epistle, has at least two distinct
   references to, and almost verbal quotations of, this promise, when he
   says, addressing all his Asiatic brethren, Ye have an unction from the
   Holy One, and know all things.' And again, The unction which ye have of
   Him abideth with you, and ye need not that any man should teach you.'

   So, then, Christian men and women, every believing soul has this divine
   Spirit for His Teacher, and the humblest of us may, if we will, learn
   of Him and be led by Him into profounder knowledge of that great Lord.

   Oh! dear brethren, the belief in the actual presence with the Church of
   a Spirit that teaches all faithful members thereof, is far too much
   hesitatingly held by the common Christianity of this day. We ought to
   be the standing witnesses in the world of the reality of a supernatural
   influence, and how can we be, if we do not believe it ourselves, and
   never feel that we are under it?

   But whilst a continuous inspiration from that self-same Spirit is the
   prerogative of all believing souls, let us not forget that the early
   teaching is the standard by which all such must be tried. As to the
   first disciples the office of the divine Spirit was to bring before
   them the deep significance of their Master's life and words, so to us
   the office of the teaching Spirit is to bring to our minds the deep
   significance of the record by these earliest scholars of what they
   learned from Him. The authority of the New Testament over our faith is
   based upon these words, and Paul's warning applies especially to this
   generation, with its thoughts about a continuous inspiration and
   outgrowing of the New Testament teaching: If a man think himself to be
   spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you
   are the commandments of the Lord.'

   Now from all this take three counsels. Let this great promise fill us
   with shame. Look at Christendom. Does it not contradict such words as
   these? Disputatious sects, Christians scarcely agreed upon any one of
   the great central doctrines, seem a strange fulfilment. The present
   condition of Christendom does not prove that Jesus Christ did not send
   the Spirit, but it does prove that Christ's followers have been wofully
   remiss and negligent in their acceptance and use of the Spirit. What
   slow scholars we are! How little we have learnt! How we have let
   passion, prejudice, human voices, the babble of men's tongues, anybody
   and everybody, take the office of teaching us God's truth, instead of
   waiting before Him and letting His Spirit teach us! It is the shame of
   us Christians that, with such a Teacher, we, when for the time we ought
   to be teachers, have need that one teach us again which be the first
   principles of the oracles of Christ!'

   Let it fill us with desire and with diligence. Let it fill us with calm
   hope. They tell us that Christianity is effete. Have we got all out of
   Jesus Christ that is in Him? Is the process that has been going on for
   all these centuries to stop now? No! Depend upon it that the new
   problems of this generation will find their solution where the old
   problems of past generations have found theirs, and the old commandment
   of the old Christ will be the new commandment of the new Christ.

   Foolish men, both on the Christian and on the anti-Christian side,
   stand and point to the western sky and say, The Sun is setting.' But
   there is a flush in the opposite horizon in an hour, as at midsummer;
   and that which sank in the west rises fresh and bright in the east for
   a new day. Jesus Christ is the Christ for all the ages and for every
   soul, and the world will only learn more and more of His inexhaustible
   fullness. So let us be ever quiet, patient, hopeful amidst the babble
   of tongues and the surges of controversy, assured that all change will
   but make more plain the inexhaustible significance of the infinite
   Christ, and that humble and obedient hearts will ever possess the
   promised Teacher, nor ever cry in vain, Teach me to do Thy will, for
   Thou art my God. Thy Spirit is good, lead me into the land of
   uprightness.'
     __________________________________________________________________

CHRIST'S PEACE

   Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you: not as the world
   giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it
   be afraid.'--JOHN xiv. 27.

   Peace be unto you!' was, and is, the common Eastern salutation, both in
   meeting and in parting. It carries us back to a state of society in
   which every stranger might be an enemy. It is a confession of the deep
   unrest of the human heart. Christ was about closing His discourse, and
   the common word of leave-taking came naturally to His lips; just as
   when He first met His followers after the Resurrection, He soothed
   their fears by the calm and familiar greeting, Peace be unto you!' But
   common words deepen their force and meaning when He uses them. In Him
   all things become new,' and on His lips the conventional threadbare
   salutation changes into a tender and mysterious communication of a real
   gift. His words are deeds, and His wishes for His disciples fulfil
   themselves.

   I. So we have here, first, the greeting, which is a gift.

   Peace I leave with you. My peace I give unto you.' We have seen, in
   former discourses on this chapter, how prominently and repeatedly our
   Lord insists on the great truth of His dwelling with and in His
   disciples. He gives His peace because He gives Himself; and in the
   bestowal of His life He bestows, in so far as we possess the gift, the
   qualities and attributes of that life. His peace is inseparable from
   His presence. It comes with Him, like an atmosphere; it is never where
   He is not. It was His peace inasmuch as, in His own experience, He
   possessed it. His manhood was untroubled by perturbation or tumult, by
   passions or contending desires, and no outward things could break His
   calm. If we open our hearts by lowly faith, love, and aspiration for
   His entrance, we too may be at rest; for His peace, like all which He
   is and has, is His that it may be ours.

   The first requisite for peace is consciousness of harmonious and loving
   relations between me and God. The deepest secret of Christ's peace was
   His unbroken consciousness of unbroken communion with the Father, in
   which His will submitted and the whole being of the man hung in filial
   dependence upon God. And the centre and foundation of all the
   peace-giving power of Jesus Christ is this, that in His death, by His
   one offering for sin for ever, He has swept away the occasion of
   antagonism, and so made peace between the twain, the Father in the
   heavens and the child, rebellious and prodigal, here below. Little as
   these disciples dreamed of it, the death impending, which was already
   beginning to cast its shadow over their souls, was the condition of
   securing to them and to us the true beginning of all real peace, the
   rectifying of our antagonistic relation to God, and the bringing Him
   and us into perfect concord.

   My brother, no man can be at rest down to the very roots of His being,
   in the absence of the consciousness that he is at peace with God. There
   may be tumults of gladness, there may be much of stormy brightness in
   the life, but there cannot be the calm, still, impregnable,
   all-pervading, and central tranquillity that our souls hunger for,
   unless we know and feel that we are right with God, and that there is
   nothing between us and Him. And it is because Jesus Christ, dying on
   the Cross, has made it possible for you and me to feel this, that He Is
   our peace, and that He can say, Peace I leave with you.'

   Another requisite is that we must be at peace with ourselves. There
   must be no stinging conscience, there must be no unsatisfied desires,
   there must be no inner schism between inclination and duty, reason and
   will, passion and judgment. There must be the quiet of a harmonised
   nature which has one object, one aim, one love; which--to use a very
   vulgar phrase--has all its eggs in one basket,' and has no
   contradictions running through its inmost self. There is only one way
   to get that peace--cleaving to Jesus Christ and making Him our Lord,
   our righteousness, our aim, our all. Your consciences will sting, and
   that destroys peace; or if they do not sting, they will be torpid, and
   that destroys peace, for death is not peace. Unless we take Christ for
   our love, for the light of our minds, for the Sovereign Arbiter and
   Lord of our will, for the home of our desires, for the aim of our
   efforts, we shall never know what it is to be at rest. Unsatisfied and
   hungry we shall go through life, seeking what nothing short of an
   Infinite Humanity can ever give us, and that is a heart to lean our
   heads upon, an adequate object for all our faculties, and so a quiet
   satisfaction of all our desires. Wherefore do ye spend your money for
   that which is not bread?' A question that no man can answer without
   convicting himself of folly! There is One, and only One, who is enough
   for me, poor and weak and lowly and fleeting as I am, and as my earthly
   life is. Take that One for your Treasure, and you are rich indeed. The
   world without Christ is nought. Christ without the world is enough.

   Nor is there any other way of healing the inner discord, schism, and
   contradiction of our anarchic nature, except in bringing it all into
   submission to His merciful rule. Look at that troubled kingdom that
   each of us carries about within himself, passion dragging this way,
   conscience that, a hundred desires all arrayed against one another,
   inclination here, duty there, till we are torn in pieces like a man
   drawn asunder by wild horses. And what is to be done with all that
   rebellious self, over which the poor soul rules as it may, and rules so
   poorly? Oh! there is an inner unrest, the necessary fate of every man
   who does not take Christ for his King. But when He enters the heart
   with His silken leash, the old fable comes true, and He binds the lions
   and the ravenous beasts there with its slender tie and leads them
   along, tamed, by the cord of love, and all harnessed to pull together
   in the chariot that He guides. There is only one way for a man to be at
   peace with himself through and through, and that is that he should put
   the guidance of his life into the hands of Jesus Christ, and let Him do
   with it as He will. There is one power, and only one, that can draw
   after it all the multitudinous heaped waters of the weltering ocean,
   and that is the quiet, silver moon in the heavens that pulls the tidal
   wave, into which melt and merge all currents and small breakers, and
   rolls it round the whole earth. And so Christ, shining down lambent,
   and gentle, but changeless, from the darkest of our skies, will draw,
   in one great surge of harmonised motion, all the else contradictory
   currents of our stormy souls. My peace I give unto you.'

   Another element in true tranquillity, which again is supplied only by
   Jesus Christ, is peace with men. Whence come wars and fightings amongst
   you? From your lusts.' Or to translate the old-fashioned phraseology
   into modern English, the reason why men are in antagonism with one
   another is the central selfishness of each, and there is only one way
   by which men's relations can be thoroughly sweetened, and that is, by
   the divine love of Jesus Christ pouring into their hearts, and casting
   out the devil of selfishness, and so blending them all into one
   harmonious whole.

   The one basis of true, happy relations between man and man, without
   which there is not the all-round tranquillity that we require, lies in
   the common relation of all, if it may be, but certainly in the
   individual relation of myself, to Him who is the Lover and the Friend
   of all. And in the measure in which the law of the Spirit of life which
   was in Jesus Christ is in me, in that measure do I find it possible to
   reproduce His gentleness, sympathy, compassion, insight into men's
   sorrows, patience with men's offences, and all which makes, in our
   relations to one another, the harmony and the happiness of humanity.

   Another of the elements or aspects of peace is peace with the outer
   world. It is hard to kick against the pricks,' but if you do not kick
   against them, they will not prick you. We beat ourselves all bruised
   and bleeding against the bars of the prison-house in trying to escape
   from it, but if we do not beat ourselves against them, they will not
   hurt us. If we do not want to get out of prison, it does not matter
   though we are locked in. And so it is not external calamities, but the
   resistance of the will to these, that makes the disturbances of life.
   Submission is peace, and when a man with Christ in his heart can say
   what Christ said, Not My will, but Thine be done,' Oh! then, some faint
   beginnings, at least, of tranquillity come to the most agitated and
   buffeted; and even in the depths of our sorrow we may have a deeper
   depth of calm. If we have yielded ourselves to the Father's will,
   through that dear Son who has set the example and communicates the
   power of filial obedience, then all winds blow us to our haven, and all
   things work together for good,' and nothing that is at enmity with joy'
   can shake our settled peace. Storms may break upon the rocky shore of
   our islanded lives, but deep in the centre there will be a secluded,
   inland dell which heareth not the loud winds when they call,' and where
   no tempest can ever reach. Peace may be ours in the midst of warfare
   and of storms, for Christ with us reconciles us to God, harmonises us
   with ourselves, brings us into amity with men, and makes the world all
   good.

   II. So, secondly, note here the world's gift, which is an illusion.

   Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.' Our Lord contrasts, as it
   seems to me, primarily the manner of the world's bestowment, and then
   passes insensibly into a contrast between the character of the world's
   gifts and His own. That phrase the world' may have a double sense. It
   may mean either mankind in general or the whole external and material
   frame of things. I think we may use both significations in elucidating
   the words before us.

   Regarding it in the former of them, the thought is suggested--Christ
   gives; men can only wish. Peace be unto you' comes from many a lip, and
   is addressed to many an ear, unfulfilled. Christ says peace,' and His
   word is a conveyance. How little we can do for one another's
   tranquillity, how soon we come to the limits of human love and human
   help! How awful and impassable is the isolation in which each human
   soul lives! After all love and fellowship we dwell alone on our little
   island in the deep, separated by the salt, unplumbed, estranging sea,'
   and we can do little more than hoist signals of goodwill, and now and
   then for a moment stretch our hands across the echoing straits
   between.' But it is little after all that husband or wife can do for
   one another's central peace, little that the dearest friend can give.
   We have to depend upon ourselves and upon Christ for peace. That which
   the world wishes Christ gives.

   And then, if we take the other signification of the world,' and the
   other application of the whole promise, we may say--Outward things can
   give a man no real peace. The world is for excitement; Christ alone has
   the secret of tranquillity. It is as if to a man in a fever a physician
   should come and say: I cannot give you anything to soothe you; here is
   a glass of brandy for you.' That would not help the fever, would it?
   The world comes to us and says: I cannot give you rest: here is a sharp
   excitement for you, more highly spiced and titillating for your tongue
   than the last one, which has turned flat and stale.' That is about the
   best that it can do.

   Oh! what a confession of unrest are the rush and recklessness, the
   fever and the fret of our modern life with its ever renewed and ever
   disappointed quest after good! You go about our streets and look men in
   the face, and you see how all manner of hungry desires and eager wishes
   have imprinted themselves there. And now and then--how seldom!--you
   come across a face out of which beams a deep and settled peace. How
   many of you are there who dare not be quiet because then you are most
   troubled? How many of you are there who dare not reflect because then
   you are wretched? How many of you are uncomfortable when alone, either
   because you are utterly vacuous, or because then you are surrounded by
   the ghosts of ugly thoughts that murder sleep and stuff every pillow
   with thorns? The world will bring you excitement; Christ, and Christ
   alone will bring you rest.

   The peace that earth gives is a poor affair at best. It is shallow; a
   very thin plating over a depth of restlessness, like some skin of turf
   on a volcano, where a foot below the surface sulphurous fumes roll, and
   hellish turbulence seethes. That is the kind of rest that the world
   brings.

   Oh! dear friends, there is nothing in this world that will fill and
   satisfy your hearts except only Jesus Christ. The world is for
   excitement; and Christ is the only real Giver of real peace.

   III. Lastly, note the duty of the recipients of that peace of Christ's:
   Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.'

   The words that introduced this great discourse return again at its
   close, somewhat enlarged and with a deepened soothing and tenderness.
   There are two things referred to as the source of restlessness,
   troubled agitation or disturbance of heart; and that mainly, I suppose,
   because of terror in the outlook towards a dim and unknown future. The
   disciples are warned to fight against these if they would keep the gift
   of peace.

   That is to say, casting the exhortation into a more general expression,
   Christ's gift of peace does not dispense with the necessity for our own
   effort after tranquillity. There is much in the outer world that will
   disturb us to the very end, and there is much within ourselves that
   will surge up and seek to shake our repose and break our peace; and we
   have to coerce and keep down the temptations to anxiety, the
   temptations to undue agitation of desire, the temptations to tumults of
   sorrow, the temptations to cowardly fears of the unknown future. All
   these will continue, even though we have Christ's peace in our hearts,
   and it is for us to see to it that we treasure the peace, and in
   everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let our
   requests be made known unto God,' that nothing may break the calm which
   we possess.

   So, then, another thought arises from this final exhortation, and that
   is, that it is useless to tell a man, Do not be troubled, and do not be
   afraid,' unless he first has Christ's peace as his. Is that peace
   yours, my brother, because Jesus Christ is yours? If so, then there is
   no reason for your being troubled or dreading any future. If it is not,
   you are mad not to be troubled, and you are insane if you are not
   afraid. The word for you is, Be troubled, ye careless ones,' for there
   is reason for it, and be afraid of that which is certainly coming. The
   one thing that gives security and makes it possible to possess a calm
   heart is the possession of Jesus Christ by faith. Without Him it is a
   waste of breath to say to people, Do not be frightened,' and it is
   wicked counsel to say to men, Be at ease.' They ought to be terrified,
   and they ought to be troubled, and they will be some day, whether they
   think so or not.

   But then the last thought from this exhortation is--and now I speak to
   Christian people--your imperfect possession of this peace is all your
   own fault. Why, there are hundreds of professing Christian people who
   have some kind of faint, rudimentary faith, and there are many of them,
   I dare say, listening to me now, who have no assured possession of any
   of those elements, of which I have been speaking, as the constituent
   parts of Christ's peace. You are not sure that you are right with God.
   You do not know what it is to possess satisfied desires. You do know
   what it is to have conflicting inclinations and impulses; you have envy
   and malice and hostility against men; and the world's storms and
   disasters do strike and disturb you. Why? Because you have not a firm
   grasp of Jesus Christ. I have set the Lord always at my right hand,
   therefore I shall not be be moved'; there is the secret. Keep near Him,
   my brother; and then all things are fair, and your heart is at peace.

   I remember once standing by the side of a little Highland loch on a
   calm autumn day, when all the winds were still, and every birch-tree
   stood unmoved, and every twig was reflected on the steadfast mirror,
   into the depths of which Heaven's own blue seemed to have found its
   way. That is what our hearts may be, if we let Christ put His guarding
   hand round them to keep the storms off, and have Him within us for our
   rest. But the man who does not trust Jesus is like the troubled sea
   which cannot rest,' but goes moaning round half the world, homeless and
   hungry, rolling and heaving, monotonous and yet changeful, salt and
   barren--the true emblem of every soul that has not listened to the
   merciful call, Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden,
   and I will give you rest.'
     __________________________________________________________________

JOY AND FAITH, THE FRUITS OF CHRIST'S DEPARTURE

   Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away, and come again unto you.
   If ye loved Me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father:
   for My Father is greater than I. And now I have told you before it come
   to pass, that, when it is come to pass, ye might believe.'--JOHN xiv.
   28, 29.

   Our Lord here casts a glance backward on the course of His previous
   words, and gathers together the substance and purpose of these. He
   brings out the intention of His warnings and the true effect of the
   departure, concerning which He had given them notice, as being twofold.
   In the first verse of my text His words about that going away, and the
   going away itself, are represented as the source of joy, which is an
   advance on the peace that He had just previously been promising. In the
   second of our verses these two things--His words, and the facts which
   they revealed--are represented as being the very ground and nourishment
   of faith.

   So, then, we have these two thoughts to look at now, the departed Lord,
   the fountain of joy to all who love Him; the departed Lord, the ground
   and food of faith.

   I. The departure of the Lord is a fountain of joy to those who love
   Him.

   In the first part of our text the going away of Jesus is contemplated
   in two aspects.

   The first is that with which we have already become familiar in
   previous sermons on this chapter--viz., its bearing upon the disciples;
   and in that respect it is declared that Christ's going is Christ's
   coming.

   But then we have a new aspect, one on which, in His sublime
   self-repression, He very seldom touches--viz., its bearing upon
   Himself; and in that aspect we are taught here to regard our Lord's
   going as ministering to His exaltation and joy, and therefore as being
   a source of joy to all His lovers.

   So, then, we have these thoughts, Christ's going is Christ's coming,
   and Christ's going is Christ's exaltation, and for both reasons that
   departure ought to minister to His friends' gladness. Let us look at
   these three things for a little while.

   First of all, there comes a renewed utterance of that great thought
   which runs through the whole chapter, that the departure of Jesus
   Christ is in reality the coming of Christ. The word again' is a
   supplement, and somewhat restricts and destroys the true flow of
   thought and meaning of the words. For if we read, as our Authorised
   Version does, I go away and come again unto you,' we are inevitably led
   to think of a coming, separated by a considerable distance of time from
   the departure, and for most of us that which is suggested is the final
   coming and return, in bodily form, of the Lord Jesus.

   Now great and glorious as that hope is, it is too far away to be in
   itself a sufficient comfort to the mourning disciples, and too remote
   to be for us, if taken alone, a sufficient ground of joy and of rest.
   But if you strike out the intrusive word again,' and read the sentence
   as being what it is, a description of one continuous process, of which
   the parts are so closely connected as to be all but contemporaneous,
   you get the true idea. I go away, and I come to you.' There is no gap,
   the thing runs on without a break. There is no moment of absolute
   absence; there are not two motions, one from us and the other back
   again towards us, but all is one. The going' is the coming'; the solemn
   series of events which began on Calvary, and ended on Olivet, to the
   eye of sense were successive stages in the departure of Jesus Christ.
   But looked at with a deeper understanding of their true meaning, they
   are successive stages in His approach towards us. His death, His
   resurrection, His ascension, were not steps in the cessation of His
   presence, but they were simply steps in the transition from a lower to
   a higher kind of that presence. He changed the limitations and
   externalities of a mere bodily, local nearness for the realities of a
   spiritual presence. To the eye of sense, the going away' was the
   reality, and the coming' a metaphor. To the eye enlightened to see
   things as they are, the dropping away of the visible corporeal was but
   the inauguration of the higher and the more real. And we need to
   reverse our notions of what is real and what is figurative in Christ's
   presence, and to feel that that form of His presence which we may all
   have to-day is far more real than the form which ceased when the
   Shekinah cloud received Him out of their sight,' before we can
   penetrate to the depth of His words, or grasp the whole fullness of
   blessing and of consolation which lie in them here. In a very deep and
   real sense, He therefore departed from us for a season that we might
   receive Him for ever.'

   The real presence of Jesus Christ to-day, and through the long ages
   with every waiting heart, is the very keynote to the solemn music of
   these chapters. And again I press upon you, and upon myself, the
   question, Do we believe it? Do we live in the faith of it? Does it fill
   the same place in the perspective of our Christian creed as it does in
   the revelation of the Scripture, or have we refined it and watered it
   down, until it comes to be little more than merely the continuous
   influence of the record of His past, just as any great and sovereign
   spirit that has influenced mankind may still rule the nations from his
   urn'? Or do we take Him at His word, and believe that He meant what He
   said, in something far other than a violent figure for the continuance
   of His influence and of the inspiration drawn from Him, Lo! I am with
   you alway, even unto the end of the world'? Say not in thine heart, Who
   shall ascend up into heaven? that is, to bring Christ down from above,
   the Word,' the Incarnate Word, is nigh thee, in thy heart,' if thou
   lovest and trustest Him.

   Then, again, the other aspect of our Lord's coming, which is emphasised
   here, is that in which it is regarded as affecting Himself. Christ's
   going is Christ's exaltation.

   Now observe that, in the first clause of our verse, there is simply
   specified the fact of departure, without any reference to the whither';
   because all that was wanted was to contrast the going and the coming.
   But, in the second clause, in which the emphasis rests not so much upon
   the fact of departure as upon the goal to which He went, we read: I go
   to the Father.' Hitherto we have been contemplating Christ's departure
   simply in its bearing upon us, but here, with exquisite tenderness, He
   unveils another aspect of it, and that in order that He may change His
   disciples' sadness into joy; and says to them, If ye were not so
   absorbed in yourselves, you would have a thought to spare about Me, and
   you would feel that you should be glad because I am about to be
   exalted.'

   Very, very seldom does He open such a glimpse into His heart, and it is
   all the more tender and impressive when He does. What a hint of the
   continual self-sacrifice of the human life of Jesus Christ lies in this
   thought, that He bids His disciples rejoice with Him, because the time
   is getting nearer its end, and He goes back to the Father! And what
   shall we say of the nature of Him to whom it was martyrdom to live, and
   a supreme instance of self-sacrificing humiliation to be found in
   fashion as a man'?

   He tells His followers here that a reason for their joy in His
   departure is to be found in this fact, that He goes to the Father, who
   is greater than Himself.

   Now mark, with regard to that remarkable utterance, that the whole
   course of thought in the context requires, as it seems to me, that we
   should suppose that for Christ to go to the Father' was to share in the
   Father's greatness. Why else should the disciples be bidden to rejoice
   in it? or why should He say anything at all about the greatness of the
   Father? If so, then this follows, that the greatness to which He here
   alludes is such as He enters by His ascension. Or, in other words, that
   the inferiority, of whatever nature it may be, to which He here
   alludes, falls away when He passes hence.

   Now these words are often quoted triumphantly, as if they were dead
   against what I venture to call the orthodox and Scriptural doctrine of
   the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. And it may be worth while to
   remark that that doctrine accepts this saying as fully as it does
   Christ's other word, I and My Father are one,' I venture to think that
   it is the only construction of Scripture phraseology which does full
   justice to all the elements. But be that as it may, I wish to remind
   you that the creed which confesses the unity of the Godhead and the
   divinity of Jesus Christ is not to be overthrown by pelting this verse
   at it; for this verse is part of that creed, which as fully declares
   that the Father is greater than the Son, as it declares that the Son is
   One with the Father. You may be satisfied with it or no, but as a
   matter of simple honesty it must be recognised that the creed of the
   Catholic Church does combine both the elements of these
   representations.

   Now we can only speak in this matter as Scripture guides us. The depths
   of Deity are far too deep to be sounded by our plummets, and he is a
   bold man who ventures to say that he knows what is impossible in
   reference to the divine nature. He needs to have gone all round God,
   and down to the depths, and up to the heights of a bottomless and
   summitless infinitude, before he has a right to say that. But let me
   remind you that we can dimly see that the very names Father' and Son'
   do imply some sort of subordination, but that that subordination,
   inasmuch as it is in the timeless and inward relations of divinity,
   must be supposed to exist after the ascension, as it existed before the
   incarnation; and, therefore, any such mysterious difference is not that
   which is referred to here. What is referred to is what dropped away
   from the Man Jesus Christ, when He ascended up on high. As Luther has
   it, in his strong, simple way, in one of his sermons, Here He was a
   poor, sad, suffering Christ'; and that garb of lowliness falls from
   Him, like the mantle that fell from the prophet as he went up in the
   chariot of fire, when He passes behind the brightness of the Shekinah
   cloud that hides Him from our sight. That in which the Father was
   greater than He, in so far as our present purpose is concerned, was
   that which He left behind when He ascended, even the pain, the
   suffering, the sorrow, the restrictions, the humiliation, that made so
   much of the burden of His life. Therefore we, as His followers, have to
   rejoice in an ascended Christ, beneath whose feet are foes, and far
   away from whose human personality are all the ills that flesh is heir
   to. If ye loved Me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the
   Father; for My Father is greater than I.'

   So then the third thought, in this first part of our subject, is that
   on both these grounds Christ's ascension and departure are a source of
   joy. The two aspects of His departure, as affecting Him and as
   affecting us, are inseparably welded together. There can be no presence
   with us, man by man, through all the ages, and in every land, unless
   He, whose presence it is, participates in the absolute glory of
   divinity. For to be with you and me and all our suffering brethren,
   through the centuries and over the world, involves something more than
   belongs to mere humanity. Therefore, the two sources of gladness are
   confluent--Christ's ascension as affecting us is inseparably woven in
   with Christ's ascension as affecting Himself.

   Love will delight to dwell upon that thought of its exalted Lover. We
   may fairly apply the simplicity of human relationships and affections
   to the elucidation of what ought to be our affection to Him, our Lord.
   And surely if our dearest one were far away from us, in some lofty
   position, our hearts and our thoughts would ever be going thither, and
   we should live more there than here, where we are cribbed, cabined, and
   confined.' And if we love Jesus Christ with any depth of earnestness
   and fervour of affection, there will be no thought more sweet to us,
   and none which will more naturally flow into our hearts, whenever they
   are for a moment at leisure, than this, the thought of Him, our Brother
   and Forerunner, who has ascended up on high; and in the midst of the
   glory of the throne bears us in His heart, and uses His glory for our
   blessing. Love will spring to where the beloved is; and if we be
   Christians in any deep and real sense, our hearts will have risen with
   Christ, and we shall be sitting with Him at the right hand of God. My
   brother, measure your Christianity, and the reality of your love to
   Jesus Christ, by this--is it to you natural, and a joy, to turn to Him,
   and ever to make present to your mind the glories in which He loves and
   lives, and intercedes, and reigns, for you? If ye love Me, ye will
   rejoice, because I go unto the Father.'

   II. And now I can deal with the second verse of our text very briefly.
   For our purpose it is less important than the former one. In it we find
   our Lord setting forth, secondly, His departure and His announcement of
   His departure as the ground and food of faith.

   He knew what a crash was coming, and with exquisite tenderness,
   gentleness, knowledge of their necessities, and suppression of all His
   own feelings and emotions, He gave Himself to prepare the disciples for
   the storm, that, forewarned, they might be forearmed, and that when it
   did burst upon them, it might not take them by surprise.

   So He does still, about a great many other things, and tells us
   beforehand of what is sure to come to us, that when we are caught in
   the midst of the tempest we may not bate one jot of heart or hope.

   Why should I complain Of want or distress, Temptation or pain? He told
   me no less.'

   And when my sorrows come to me, I may say about them what He says about
   His departure--He has told us before, that when it comes we may
   believe.

   But note how, in these final words of my text, Christ avows that the
   great aim of His utterances and of His departure is to evoke our faith.
   And what does He mean by faith? He means, first of all, a grasp of the
   historic facts--His death, His resurrection, His ascension. He means,
   next, the understanding of these as He Himself has explained them--a
   death of sacrifice, a resurrection of victory over death and the grave,
   and an ascension to rule and guide His Church and the world, and to
   send His divine Spirit into men's hearts if they will receive it. And
   He means, therefore, as the essence of the faith that He would produce
   in all our hearts--a reliance upon Himself as thus revealed, Sacrifice
   by His death, Victor by His resurrection, King and interceding Priest
   by His ascension--a reliance upon Himself as absolute as the facts are
   sure, as unfaltering as is His eternal sameness. The faith that grasps
   the Christ, dead, risen, ascended, as its all in all, for time and for
   eternity, is the faith which by all His work, and by all His words
   about His work, He desires to kindle in our hearts. Has He kindled it
   in yours?

   Then there is a second thought--viz., that these facts, as interpreted
   by Himself, are the ground and the nourishment of our faith. How
   differently they looked when seen from the further side and when seen
   from the hither side! Anticipated and dimly anticipated, they were all
   doleful and full of dismay; remembered and looked back upon, they were
   radiant and bright. The disciples felt, with shrinking hearts and
   fainting spirits, that their whole reliance upon Jesus Christ was on
   the point of being shattered, and that everything was going when He
   died. We trusted,' said two of them, with such a sad use of the past
   tense, we trusted that this had been He which should have redeemed
   Israel. But we do not trust it any more, nor do we expect Him to be
   Israel's Redeemer now.' But after the facts were all unveiled, there
   came back the memory of His words, and they said to one another, Did He
   not tell us that it was all to be so? How blind we were not to
   understand Him!'

   And so the Cross, the grave, the skies,' are the foundations of our
   faith; and they who see Him dying, rising, ascended, henceforth will
   find it impossible to doubt. Feed your faith upon these great facts,
   and take Christ's own explanation of them, and your faith will be
   strong.

   Again, we learn here that faith is the condition of the true presence
   of our absent Lord. Faith is that on our side which corresponds to His
   spiritual coming to us. Whosoever trusts Him possesses Him, and He is
   with and in every soul that, loving Him, relies upon Him, in a
   closeness so close and a presence so real that heaven itself does not
   bring the spirit of the believer and the Spirit of the Lord nearer one
   another, though it takes away the bodily film that sometimes seems to
   part their lives.

   We, too, may and should be glad when we lift our eyes to that Throne
   where our Brother reigns. We too, may be glad that He is there, because
   His being there is the reason why He can be here; and we, too, may feed
   our faith upon Him, and so bring Him in very deed to dwell in our
   hearts. If we would have Christ within us, let us trust Him dying,
   rising, living in the heavens; and then we shall learn how, by all
   three apparent departures, He is drawing the closer to the souls that
   love and trust.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHRIST FORESEEING HIS PASSION

   Hereafter I will not talk much with you: for the Prince of this world
   cometh, and hath nothing in Me. But that the world may know that I love
   the Father; and as the Father gave Me commandment, even so I do. Arise,
   Let us go hence.'--JOHN xiv. 30, 31.

   The summons to departure which closes these verses shows that we have
   now reached the end of that sacred hour in the upper room. In obedience
   to the summons, we have to fancy the little group leaving its safe
   shelter, as sailors might put out from behind a breakwater into a
   stormy sea. They pass from its seclusion and peace into the joyous stir
   of the crowded streets, filled with feast-keeping multitudes, on whom
   the full paschal moon looked down, pure and calming. Somewhere between
   the upper chamber and the crossing of the brook Kedron, the divine
   words of the following chapters were spoken, but this discourse,
   closely connected as it is with them, reaches its fitting close in
   these penetrating, solemn words of outlook into the near future, so
   calm, so weighty, so resolute, so almost triumphant, with which Christ
   seeks finally to impart to His timorous friends some of His own peace
   and assurance of victory.

   They lead us into a region seldom opened to our view, and never to be
   looked upon but with reverent awe. For they tell us what Christ thought
   about His sufferings, and how He felt as He went down to that cold,
   black river, in which He was to be baptized. Put off thy shoes from off
   thy feet, for the place where thou standest is holy ground.' So,
   reverently listening to the words, sacred because of the Speaker, the
   theme, and the circumstances, we note in them these things: His calm
   anticipation of the assailant, His unveiling of the secret and motive
   of His apparent defeat, and His resolute advance to the conflict. Let
   us look at these three points.

   I. First, we have here our Lord's calm anticipation of the assailant.

   Hereafter I will not talk much with you: for the Prince of this world
   cometh, and hath nothing in Me.' One of the other Gospels tells us, in
   finishing its account of our Lord's temptation in the wilderness, that
   when Satan had ended all these temptations he departed from Him for a
   season.' And now we have the second and the intenser form of that
   assault. The first was addressed to desires, and sought to stimulate
   ambition and ostentation and the animal appetites, and so, through the
   cravings of human nature, to shake the Master's fixed faith. The second
   used sharper and more fatal weapons, and appealed, not to desire of
   enjoyment, or ease, or good, but to the natural human shrinking from
   pain and suffering and shame and death. He that was impervious on the
   side of natural necessities and more subtle spiritual desires might yet
   be reached through terror. And so the second form of the assault,
   instead of tempting the traveller by the sunshine to cast aside his
   cloak, tempted him by storm and tempest to fling it aside; and the one,
   as the other, was doomed to failure.

   Note how the Master, with that clear eye which saw to the depths as
   well as the heights, and before which men and things were but, as it
   were, transparent media through which unseen spiritual powers wrought,
   just as He discerns the Father's will as supreme and sovereign, sees
   here--beneath Judas's treachery, and Pharisees' and priests' envy, and
   the people's stolid indifference, and the Roman soldiers' impartial
   scorn--the workings of a personal source and centre of all. The Prince
   of this world,' who rules men and things when they are severed from
   God, cometh.' Christ's sensitive nature apprehends the approach of the
   evil thing, as some organisations can tell when a thunderstorm is about
   to burst. His divine Omniscience, working as it did, even within the
   limits of humanity, knows not only when the storm is about to burst
   upon Him, but knows who it is that has raised the tempest. And so He
   says, The Prince of this world cometh.'

   But note, as yet more important, that tremendous and unique
   consciousness of absolute invulnerability against the assaults. He hath
   nothing in Me.' He is the Prince of the world,' but His dominion stops
   outside My breast. He has no rule or authority there. His writs do not
   run, nor is His dominion recognised, within that sacred realm.

   Was there ever a man who could say that? Are there any of us, the
   purest and the noblest, who, standing single-handed in front of the
   antagonistic power of evil, and believing it to be consolidated and
   consecrated in a person, dare to profess that there is not a thing in
   us on which he can lay his black claw and say--That is mine?' Is there
   nothing inflammable within us which the fiery darts of the wicked' can
   kindle? Are there any of us who bar our doors so tightly as that we can
   say that none of his seductions will find their way therein, and that
   nothing there will respond to them? Christ sets Himself here against
   the whole embattled and embodied power of evil, and puts Himself in
   contrast to the universal human experience, when He calmly declares He
   hath nothing in Me.' It is an assertion of His absolute freedom from
   sinfulness, and it involves, as I take it, the other assertion--that as
   He is free from sin, so He is not subject to that consequence of sin,
   which is death, as we know it. Another part of Scripture speaks to us
   in strange language, which yet has in it a deep truth, of him that had
   the power of death, that is, the devil.' Men fall under the rightful
   dominion of the king of evil when they sin, and part of the proof of
   his dominion is the fact of physical death, with its present
   accompaniments. Thus, in His calm anticipation, Jesus stands waiting
   for the enemy's charge, knowing that all its forces will be broken
   against the serried ranks of His immaculate purity, and that He will
   come from the dreadful close unwounded all, and triumphant for
   evermore.

   But do not let us suppose that because Christ, in His anticipation of
   suffering and death, knew Himself invulnerable, with not even a spot on
   His heel into which the arrow could go, therefore the conflict was an
   unreal or shadowy one. It was a true fight, and it was a real struggle
   that He was anticipating, thus calmly in these solemn words, as knowing
   Himself the Victor ere He entered on the dreadful field.

   II. So note, secondly, in these words, our Lord's unveiling of the
   motive and aim of His apparent defeat.

   But that the world might know that I love the Father, and, as the
   Father gave Me commandment, even so I do.' There may be some
   uncertainty about the exact grammatical relation of these clauses to
   one another, with which I need not trouble you, because it does not
   affect their substantial meaning. However we solve the mere grammatical
   questions, the fundamental significance of the whole remains
   unaffected, and it is this: that Christ's sufferings and death were, in
   one aspect, for the purpose that the world might know His love to the
   Father, and, in another aspect, were obedience to the Father's
   commandment. And if we consider these two aspects, I think we shall get
   some thoughts worth considering as to the way in which the Master
   Himself looks upon these sufferings and that death.

   The first point I note in this division of my discourse is that Christ
   would have us regard His sufferings and His death as His own act. Note
   that remarkable phrase, thus I do.' A strange word to be used in such a
   connection, but full of profound meaning. We speak, and rightly, of the
   solemn events of these coming days as the passion of our Lord, but they
   were His action quite as much as His passion. He was no mere passive
   sufferer. In them all He acted, or, as He says here, we may look upon
   them all, not as things inflicted upon Him from without by any power,
   however it might seem to have the absolute control of His fate, but as
   things which He did Himself.

   There is one Man who died, not of physical necessity, but because of
   free choice. There is one Man who chose to be born, and who chose to
   die; who, in His choosing to be born, chose humiliation, and who, in
   choosing to die, chose yet deeper humiliation. This sacrifice was a
   voluntary sacrifice, or, to speak more accurately, He was both Priest
   and Sacrifice, when through the Eternal Spirit He offered Himself
   without spot unto God.' The living Christ is the Lord of Life, and
   lives because He will; the dying Christ is the Lord of Death, and dies
   because He chose. He would have us learn that all His bitter
   sufferings, inflicted from without as they were, and traceable to a
   deeper source than merely human antagonism, were also self-inflicted
   and self-chosen, and further traceable to the Father's will in harmony
   with His own. Thus I do,' and thus He did when He died.

   Then, further, our Lord would have us regard these sufferings and that
   death as being His crowning act of obedience to His Father's will. That
   is in accordance with the whole tone of His self-consciousness,
   especially as set before us in this precious Gospel of John, which
   traces up everything to the submission of the divine Son to the divine
   Father, a submission which is no mere external act, but results from,
   and is the expression of, the absolute unity of will and the perfect
   oneness of mutual love. And so, because He loved the Father, therefore
   He came to do the Father's will, and the crowning act of His obedience
   was this, that He was obedient unto death, even the death of the
   Cross.' It was a voluntary sacrifice, but that voluntariness was not
   self-will. It was a sacrifice in obedience to the Father's will, but
   that obedience was not reluctant. Christ was the embodiment of the
   divine purpose, formed before the ages and realised in time, when He
   bowed His head and yielded up the ghost. The highest proof of His
   filial obedience was the Cross. And to it He points us, if we would
   know what it is to love and obey the Father.

   Now it is to be noticed that this motive of our Lord's death is not the
   usual one given in Scripture. And I can suppose the question being put,
   Why did not Jesus Christ say, in that supreme moment, that He went to
   the Cross because of His love to us rather than because of His love to
   the Father?' But I think the answer is not far to seek. There are
   several satisfactory ones which may be given. One is that this making
   prominent of His love to God rather than to us, as the motive for His
   death, is in accordance with that comparative reticence on the part of
   Jesus as to the atoning aspect of His death, which I have had frequent
   occasion to point out, and which does not carry in it the implication
   that that doctrine was a new thing in the Christian preaching after
   Pentecost. Another reason may be drawn from the whole strain and tone
   of this chapter, which, as I have already said, traces up everything to
   the loving relations of obedience between the Father and Son. And yet
   another reason may be given in that the very statement of Christ's love
   to God, and loving obedience to the Father's commandment as the motive
   of His death, includes in it necessarily the other thing--love to us.
   For what was the Father's commandment which Christ with all His heart
   accepted, and with His glad will obeyed unto death? It was that the Son
   should come as the Ransom for the world. The Son of man was sent, not
   to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a Ransom
   for many.' Or, as He Himself said, in one of His earliest discourses,
   God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that
   whosoever believeth in Him should not perish.' And for what He gave
   that Son is clearly stated in the context itself of that passage--As
   Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of
   Man be lifted up.'

   To speak of Christ's acceptance of the Father's commandment, then, is
   but another way of saying that Christ, in all the fullness of His
   self-surrender, entered into and took as His own the great, eternal
   divine purpose, that the world should be redeemed by His death upon the
   Cross. The heavenward side of His love to man is His love to the
   Father, God.

   Now there is another aspect still in which our Lord would here have us
   regard His sufferings and death, and that is that they are of worldwide
   significance.

   Think for a moment of the obscurity of the speaker, a Jewish peasant in
   an upper room, with a handful of poor men around Him, all of them ready
   to forsake Him, within a few hours of His ignominious death; and yet He
   says, I am about to die, that the echo of it may reverberate through
   the whole world.' He puts Himself forth as of worldwide significance,
   and His death as adapted to move mankind, and as one day to be known
   all over the world. There is nothing in history to approach to the
   gigantic arrogance of Jesus Christ, and it is only explicable on the
   ground of His divinity.

   This I do that the world may know.' And what did it matter to the
   world? Why should it be of any importance that the world should know?
   For one plain reason, because true knowledge of the true nature and
   motive of that death breaks the dominion of the Prince of this world,
   and sets men free from his tyranny. Emancipation, hope, victory,
   purity, the passing from the tyranny of the darkness into the blessed
   kingdom of the light--all depend on the world's knowing that Christ's
   death was His own voluntary act of submission to the infinite love and
   will of the Father, which will and love He made His own, and therefore
   died, the sacrifice for the world's sin.

   The enemy was approaching. He was to be hoist with his own petard. He
   digged a pit; he digged it deep,' and into the pit which he had digged
   he himself fell. Oh, death! I will be thy plague' by entering into thy
   realm. Oh, grave! I will be thy destruction' by dwelling for a moment
   within thy dark portals and rending them irreparably as I pass from
   them. The Prince of this world was defeated when he seemed to triumph,
   and Christ's mighty words came true: Now shall the Prince of this world
   be cast out.' He would have the world know--with the knowledge which is
   of the heart as well as the head, which is life as well as
   understanding, which is possession and appropriation--the mystery, the
   meaning, the motive of His death, because the world thereby ceases to
   be a world, and becomes the kingdom of Jesus Christ.

   III. Lastly, notice here the resolute advance to the conflict.

   Arise, let us go hence'--a word of swift alacrity. Evidently He rose to
   His feet whilst they lay round the table. He bids them rise with Him
   and follow Him on the path.

   But there is more in the words than the mere close of a conversation,
   and a summons to change of place. They indicate a kind of divine
   impatience to be in the fight, and to have it over. The same emotion is
   plainly revealed in the whole of the latter days of our Lord's life.
   You remember how His disciples followed amazed, as He strode up the
   road from Jericho, hastening to His Cross. You remember His deliberate
   purpose to draw upon Himself public notice during that dangerous and
   explosive week before the Passover, as shown in the publicity of His
   entry into Jerusalem, His sharp rebukes of the rulers in the Temple,
   and in every other incident of those days. You remember His words to
   the betrayer: That thou doest, do quickly.' These latter hours of the
   Lord were strongly marked by the emotion to which He gave utterance in
   His earlier words: I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I
   straitened till it be accomplished!' Perhaps that feeling indicated His
   human shrinking; for we all know how we sometimes are glad to
   precipitate an unwelcome thing, and how the more we dread it, the more
   we are anxious to get it over. But there is far more than that in it.
   There is the resolved determination to carry out the Father's purpose
   for the world's salvation, which was His own purpose, and was none the
   less His though He knew all the suffering which it involved.

   Let us adore the steadfast will, which never faltered, though the
   natural human weakness was there too, and which, as impelled by some
   strong spring, kept persistently pressing towards the Cross that on it
   He might die, the world's Redeemer.

   And do not let us forget that He summoned His lovers and disciples to
   follow Him on the road. Let us go hence.' It is ours to take up our
   cross daily and follow the Master, to do with persistent resolve our
   duty, whether it be welcome or unwelcome, and to see to it that we
   plant no faltering and reluctant foot in our Master's footsteps. For
   us, too, if we have learned to flee to the Cross for our redemption and
   salvation, the resolve of our Redeemer and the very passion of the
   Saviour itself become the pattern and law of our lives. We, too, have
   to cast ourselves into the fight, and to take up our cross, that the
   world may know that we love the Father, and as the Father hath given us
   commandment.' And if we so live, then our death, too, in some humble
   measure, may be like His--the crowning act of obedience to the Father's
   will; in which we are neither passively nor resistingly dragged under
   by a force that we cannot effectually resist, but in which we go down
   willingly into the dark valley where death makes our sacrifice
   complete.'
     __________________________________________________________________
     __________________________________________________________________

                                    Indexes
     __________________________________________________________________

Index of Scripture References

   Numbers

   [1]9:1-23

   Psalms

   [2]32:1-2   [3]118:1-29

   John

   [4]1:1   [5]1:1   [6]1:1   [7]1:1   [8]1:1   [9]1:1   [10]1:1
   [11]1:1   [12]1:1-14   [13]1:1-14   [14]1:2   [15]1:4   [16]1:5
   [17]1:5   [18]1:6-13   [19]1:8   [20]1:8   [21]1:9   [22]1:9
   [23]1:9   [24]1:10   [25]1:10   [26]1:10   [27]1:11   [28]1:11
   [29]1:11   [30]1:14   [31]1:14   [32]1:14   [33]1:14   [34]1:16
   [35]1:16   [36]1:17   [37]1:17   [38]1:29   [39]1:29   [40]1:37-39
   [41]1:37-39   [42]1:40-42   [43]1:40-42   [44]1:43   [45]1:43
   [46]1:45-49   [47]1:45-49   [48]1:50   [49]1:50   [50]1:50   [51]1:51
   [52]1:51   [53]2:1   [54]2:1-11   [55]2:1-11   [56]2:11   [57]2:11
   [58]2:16   [59]2:16   [60]2:19   [61]2:19   [62]2:23-25   [63]3:2
   [64]3:2   [65]3:8   [66]3:8   [67]3:14   [68]3:14   [69]3:14
   [70]3:14   [71]3:16   [72]3:16   [73]4:6   [74]4:6   [75]4:7
   [76]4:7   [77]4:10   [78]4:10   [79]4:14   [80]4:14   [81]4:26
   [82]4:26   [83]4:32   [84]4:32   [85]4:54   [86]4:54   [87]5:8
   [88]5:17-27   [89]5:17-27   [90]5:19   [91]5:20   [92]5:20   [93]5:20
   [94]5:21-23   [95]5:24   [96]5:24-27   [97]5:25   [98]5:35   [99]5:35
   [100]6:11   [101]6:11   [102]6:12   [103]6:12   [104]6:19   [105]6:19
   [106]6:20   [107]6:20   [108]6:28   [109]6:28   [110]6:29   [111]6:29
   [112]6:48-50   [113]6:48-50   [114]7   [115]7:33   [116]7:33
   [117]7:34   [118]7:34   [119]7:37   [120]7:37   [121]7:37   [122]7:38
   [123]7:38   [124]8:12   [125]8:12   [126]8:30   [127]8:30   [128]8:31
   [129]8:31   [130]8:33   [131]8:33   [132]9:4   [133]9:4   [134]9:6
   [135]9:6   [136]9:7   [137]9:7   [138]10:9   [139]10:9   [140]10:14
   [141]10:14   [142]10:15   [143]10:15   [144]10:16   [145]10:16
   [146]11:5   [147]11:5   [148]11:6   [149]11:6   [150]11:25-27
   [151]11:26   [152]11:26   [153]11:27   [154]11:27   [155]11:30-45
   [156]11:30-45   [157]11:33   [158]11:40   [159]11:43   [160]11:43
   [161]11:44   [162]11:44   [163]11:49   [164]11:49   [165]11:50
   [166]11:50   [167]11:57   [168]12:1   [169]12:1-1   [170]12:1-11
   [171]12:2   [172]12:12   [173]12:12-26   [174]12:12-26   [175]12:26
   [176]12:26   [177]12:32   [178]12:32   [179]12:34   [180]12:34
   [181]12:35   [182]12:35   [183]12:36   [184]12:36   [185]13:1
   [186]13:1   [187]13:3-5   [188]13:3-5   [189]13:27   [190]13:27
   [191]13:31   [192]13:31   [193]13:32   [194]13:32   [195]13:33
   [196]13:33   [197]13:33   [198]13:33   [199]13:33   [200]13:33
   [201]13:34   [202]13:34   [203]13:35   [204]13:35   [205]13:37
   [206]13:37   [207]13:38   [208]13:38   [209]13:38   [210]13:38
   [211]14:1   [212]14:1   [213]14:2   [214]14:2   [215]14:2   [216]14:2
   [217]14:3   [218]14:3   [219]14:4-7   [220]14:4-7   [221]14:8-11
   [222]14:8-11   [223]14:12-14   [224]14:12-14   [225]14:15
   [226]14:15   [227]14:16   [228]14:16   [229]14:17   [230]14:17
   [231]14:18   [232]14:18   [233]14:19   [234]14:19   [235]14:20
   [236]14:20   [237]14:21   [238]14:21   [239]14:22-24   [240]14:22-24
   [241]14:25   [242]14:25   [243]14:26   [244]14:26   [245]14:27
   [246]14:27   [247]14:28   [248]14:28   [249]14:29   [250]14:29
   [251]14:30   [252]14:30   [253]14:31   [254]14:31   [255]50

   Romans

   [256]13:12

   Revelation

   [257]7:15   [258]7:15   [259]21:3   [260]21:3
     __________________________________________________________________

Index of Scripture Commentary

   John

   [261]1:1-14   [262]1:8   [263]1:14   [264]1:16   [265]1:17
   [266]1:29   [267]1:37-39   [268]1:40-42   [269]1:43   [270]1:45-49
   [271]1:50   [272]1:51   [273]2:1-11   [274]2:11   [275]2:16
   [276]2:19   [277]3:2   [278]3:8   [279]3:14   [280]3:14   [281]3:16
   [282]4:6   [283]4:7   [284]4:10   [285]4:14   [286]4:26   [287]4:32
   [288]4:54   [289]5:17-27   [290]5:35   [291]6:11   [292]6:12
   [293]6:19   [294]6:20   [295]6:28   [296]6:29   [297]6:48-50
   [298]7:33   [299]7:34   [300]7:37   [301]7:38   [302]8:12   [303]8:30
   [304]8:31   [305]8:33   [306]9:4   [307]9:6   [308]9:7   [309]10:9
   [310]10:14   [311]10:15   [312]10:16   [313]11:5   [314]11:6
   [315]11:26   [316]11:27   [317]11:30-45   [318]11:43   [319]11:44
   [320]11:49   [321]11:50   [322]12:1-1   [323]12:12-26   [324]12:26
   [325]12:32   [326]12:34   [327]12:35   [328]12:36   [329]13:1
   [330]13:3-5   [331]13:27   [332]13:31   [333]13:32   [334]13:33
   [335]13:33   [336]13:33   [337]13:34   [338]13:35   [339]13:37
   [340]13:38   [341]13:38   [342]14:1   [343]14:2   [344]14:2
   [345]14:3   [346]14:4-7   [347]14:8-11   [348]14:12-14   [349]14:15
   [350]14:16   [351]14:17   [352]14:18   [353]14:19   [354]14:20
   [355]14:21   [356]14:22-24   [357]14:25   [358]14:26   [359]14:27
   [360]14:28   [361]14:29   [362]14:30   [363]14:31   [364]50

   Revelation

   [365]7:15   [366]21:3
     __________________________________________________________________

            This document is from the Christian Classics Ethereal
               Library at Calvin College, http://www.ccel.org,
                   generated on demand from ThML source.

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